Dungeons & Dragons (2024): Trying to Make a Big Tent Bigger

Dungeons & Dragons is a weird game. I don’t mean that as some kind of poetic statement about role-playing games in general, I mean that specifically within the world of tabletop RPGs, D&D is weird. It’s weird for a lot of reasons, including, but not limited to:

1. It’s the only TTRPG with with actual “real world” name recognition or any sort of cross-over brand awareness.
2. For most of its existence, it hasn’t been a very good game.

And then for bonus points, it’s not even one game! Depending on how you count it’s at least six different related but totally incompatible games.

The usual example for a brand name getting turned into a generic noun is “kleenex”, but the thing where “Dungeons and Dragons” has become a generic noun for all RPGs is so strange.

It’s so much more well known that everything else it’s like if all TV shows were called MASH, as in “hey, that new MASH with the dragons is pretty good, ” or “I stayed in and rewatched that MASH with the time-traveller with the police box,” etc.

There was a joke in the mid-90s that all computer games got pitched as “it’s like DOOM, but…” and then just pitched the game regardless of how much it was actually like Doom; “It’s like DOOM except it’s not in first person, it’s not in real time, you don’t have a gun, you’re a pirate, you’re not in space, and instead you solve puzzles”. D&D is like that but for real.

Which is a testament to the power of a great name and the first mover advantage, because mechanically, the first 30-or-so years of the game were a total mess. In a lot of ways, RPGs became an industry because everyone who spent more than about 90 seconds with D&D in the 70s, 80, or 90s immediately thought of ten ways to improve the game, and were right about at least eight of them. (One of the best running bits in Shannon Applecline’s seminial Designers & Dungeons is how many successful RPG companies literally started like this.)

And this mechanical weirdness isn’t just because it was first, but because of things like Gary Gygax’s desire to turn it into a competitive sport played at conventions, but also make sure that Dave Arneson didn’t get paid any royalties, and also show off how many different names of polearms he knew. As much as RPGs are sold as “do anything, the only limit is your imagination!” D&D has always been defined by it’s weird and seemingly arbitrary limits. So there’s a certain semi-effable “D&D-ness” you need for a game to be “Dungeons & Dragons” and not just another heroic fantasy game, not all of which make for a great system. It’s a game where its flaws have become part of the charm; the magic system is objectively terrible, but is also a fundamental part of it’s D&D-ness.

The upshot of all that is that for most of its life, D&D had a very clear job within the broader TTRPG world: it was the game that onboarded new players to the hobby, who then immediately graduated to other, better games. The old Red Box was one of the great New Customer Acquisition products of all time, but most people proceeded to bounce right off Advanced D&D, and then moved on to Ninja Turtles, or Traveller, or Vampire, or GURPS, or Shadowrun, or Paranoia, or Star Wars, or any number of other systems that were both better games and were more tailored to a specific vibe or genre, but all assumed you already knew how to play. It wasn’t a game you stuck with. You hear stories about people who have been playing the same AD&D 2nd Edition game for years, and then you ask a couple of follow-up questions and realize that their home rules make the Ship of Theseus look under-remodeled.

Now, for the hobby at large that’s fairly healthy, but if your salary depends on people buying “Dungeons & Dragons” books specifically, I can see how that would be fairly maddening. The game, and the people who make it, have been in an ongoing negotiation with the player base to find a flavor of the game that people are actually willing to stick around for. This results in the game’s deeply weird approach to “Editons”, where each numbered edition is effectively a whole new game, always sold with a fairly explicit “Look! We finally fixed it!”

This has obviously been something of a mixed bag. I think a big part of the reason the d20 boom happened at the turn of the century was that for the first time, 3rd edition D&D was actually a good game. Not perfect, but finally worth playing. 4e, meanwhile, was the best-designed game that no one wanted to play, and it blew up the hobby so much that it created both Pathfinder and served as one of the sparks to light off the twenty-teens narrative RPG boom.

Another result of this ongoing negotiation is that D&D also has a long tradition of “stealth” updates, where new books come out that aren’t a formal revision, but if you pull the content in it dramatically changes the game. AD&D 1 had Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, AD&D 2 had those Player’s Option books (non-weapon proficiencies!), Basic had at least three versions (the original B/X, the BECMI sets, and then the Rules Cyclopedia). 3rd had the rare Formal Update in the form of the 3.5 release, but it also had things like the Miniatures Handbook (which, if you combine that with the SAGA Edition of Star Wars, makes the path from 3 to 4 more obvious.) 4e had Essentials.

2024 is a radically different time for tabletop games than 2014 was. As the twenty-teens dawned, there was growing sense that maybe there just wasn’t going to be a commercial TTRPG industry anymore. Sales were down, the remaining publishers were pivoting to PDF-only releases, companies were either folding or moving towards other fields. TTRPGs were just going to be a hobbyist niche thing from here on out, and maybe that was going to be okay. I mean, text-based Interactive Fiction Adventure games hadn’t been commercially viable since the late 80s, but the Spring Thing was always full of new submissions. I remember an article on EN World or some such in 2012 or 2013 that described the previous year’s sales as “an extinction level event for the industry.”

Designers & Dungeons perfectly preserves the mood from the time. I have the expanded 2014 4-volume edition, although the vast majority of the content is still from the 2011 original, which officially covers the industry up to 2009 and then peeks around the corner just a bit. The sense of “history being over” pervades the entire work, theres a real sense that the heyday is over, and so now is the time to get the first draft of history right.

As such, the Dungeons & Dragons (2014) books had a certain “last party of summer vacation” quality to them. The time where D&D would have multiple teams with cool codenames working on different parts of the game was long past, this was done by a small group in a short amount of time, and somewhat infamously wasn’t really finished, which is why so many parts of the book seem to run out of steam and end with a shrug emoji and “let the DM sort it out.” The bones are pretty good, but huge chunks of it read like one of those book reports where you’re trying to hide the fact you only read the first and last chapters.

That’s attracted a lot of criticism over the years, but in their (mild) defense, I don’t think it occurred to them that anyone new was going to be playing Fifth. “We’re gonna go out on a high note, then turn the lights out after us.” Most of the non-core book product line was outsourced for the first year or so, it was all just sorta spinning down.

Obviously, that’s not how things went. Everyone has their own theory about why 5th Edition caught fire the way no previous edition had, and here’s mine: The game went back to a non-miniatures, low-math design right as the key enabling technology for onboarding new players arrived: Live Play Podcasts. By hook or by crook, the ruleset for 5E is almost perfect for an audio-only medium, and moves fast, in a way that none of the previous 21st century variants had been.

And so we find outselves in a future where D&D, as a brand, is one of Hasbro’s biggest moneymakers.

Part of what drove that success is that Hasbro has been very conservative about changes to the game, which has clearly let the game flourish like never before, but the same issues are still there. Occasionally one of the original team would pop up on twitter and say something like “yeah, it’s obvious now what we should have done instead of bonus actions,” but nothing ever shipped as a product.

5th edition has already had its stealth update in the form the Tasha/Xanathar/Mordenkainen triptych, but now we’ve got something that D&D really hasn’t had before: the 2024 books are essentially 5th Edition, 2nd Edition. Leading the charge of a strangely spaced-out release schedule is the new Player’s Handbook (2024).

Let’s start with the best part: The first thirty pages are a wonder. It opens with the best “what is an RPG” intro I have ever read, and works its way up though the basics, and by page 28 has fully explained the entire ruleset. To be clear: there aren’t later chapters with names like “Using Skills” or “Combat”, or “Advanced Rules”, this is it.

The “examples of play” are a real thing of art. The page is split into two columns: the left side of the page is a running script-like dialogue of play, and the right side is a series of annotations and explanations describing exactly what rule was in play, why they rolled what they rolled, what the outcome was. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

This is followed by an incredibly clear set of instructions on how to create a character, and then… the rest of the book is reference material. Chapters on the classes, character origins, feats, equipment, spells, a map of the Planes, stat blocks for creatures to use as familiars or morph targets.

Finally, the book ends with its other best idea: the Rules Glossary. It’s 18 pages of The Rules, alphabetical by Formal Name, clearly written. Theres no flipping around in the book looking for how to Grapple or something, it’s in the glossary. Generally, the book will refer the reader to the glossary instead of stating a rule in place.

It’s really easy to imagine how to repackage this layout into a couple of Red Box–style booklets covering the first few levels. You can basically pop the first 30 pages out as-is and slap a cover on it that says “Read This First!”

Back when I wrote about Tales of the Valiant, I made a crack that maybe there just wasn’t a best order for this material. I stand corrected. It’s outstanding.

Design-wise the book is very similar to it’s predecessor: same fonts, same pseudo-parchment look to the paper, same basic page layout. My favorite change is that the fonts are all larger, which my rapidly aging eyes appreciates.

It’s about 70 pages longer than the 2014 book, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that both books have the same number of words and that the extra space is taken up with the larger text and more art. The book is gorgeous, and is absolutely chock full of illustrations. Each class gets a full-page piece, and then each subclass gets a half-page piece showing an example of that build. It’s probably the first version of this game where you can flip through the classes chapter, and then stop at a cool picture and go “hang on, I want to play one of THOSE”. The art style feels fresh and modern in a way that’s guaranteed to make everyone say “that is so twenties” years from now; the same way that the art for the original 3rd edition books looked all clean and modern at the time, but now screams “late 90s” in a way I don’t have the critical vocabulary to describe. (Remember how everything cool had to be asymmetrical for a while there? Good times!)

Some of the early art previewed included a piece with the cast from 80s D&D cartoon drawn in the modern style of the book. At the time, I thought that was a weird piece of nostalgia bait: really? Now’s the time to do a callback to a 40-year old cartoon? Whose the audience for that?

But I was wrong about the intent, because this book is absolutely full of all manner of callbacks and cameos. The DragonLance twins are in the first couple of pages, everyone’s favorite Drow shows up not long after, there’s a guy from Baldur’s Gate 3, the examples of play are set in Castle Ravenloft, there’s Eberron airships, characters from the 80s action figure line, the idol from the old DMG cover, a cityscape of Sigil with the Lady floating down the street. It’s not a nostalgia play so much as it is a “big tent” play: the message, over and over again, is that everything fits. You remember some weird piece of D&D stuff from ages ago? Yeah, that’s in here too. Previous versions of this game have tended to start with a posture of “here’s the default way to play now”, with other “weirder” stuff floating in later. This takes the exact opposite approach, this is full-throated “yes, and” to everything D&D. So not only does Spelljammer get a shoutout in the 2 page appendix about the planes, but rules for guns are in the main equipment chapter, the psionic subclasses are in the main book, airships are in the travel costs table. Heck, the para-elemental planes are in the inner planes diagram, and I thought I was the only person who remembered those existed.

And this doesn’t just mean obscure lore pulls, the art is a case study in how to do “actual diversity”. There’s an explosion of body types, genders, skin tones, styles, and everyone looks cool.

Theres a constant, pervasive sense of trying to make the tent as big and as welcoming as possible. Turns out “One D&D” was the right codename for this; it wasn’t a version number, it was a goal.

Beyond just the art, 2024 book has a different vibe. There’s a whimsicalness from the 2014 version that’s gone: the humorous disclaimer on the title page isn’t there, there isn’t a joke entry for THAC0 in the index. If the 2014 book was an end-of-summer party, this is a start of the year syllabus.

The whole thing has been adjusted to be easier to use. The 2014 book had a very distinct yellowed-parchment pattern behind the text, the 2024 book has a similar pattern, but it’s much less busy and paler, so the text stands out better against the background. All the text is shorter, more to the point. The 2014 book had a lot of fluff that just kinda clogged up the rules when you were trying to look something up in a hurry, the 2024 book has been through an intense editing pass.

As an example: in the section for each class, each class ability has a subheading with the name of the power, and then a description, like this:

Invert the Polarity Starting at 7th level, your growing knowledge of power systems allows you to invert the polarity of control circuits, such as in teleport control panels or force fields. As a bonus action, you can add a d4 to attempts to control electrical systems. After using this power, you must take a short or long rest before using it again.

Now, it’s like this:

Level 7: Invert the Polarity Add 1d4 to checks made with the Sonic Screwdriver Tool. You regain this feature after a short or long rest.

For better or worse, it’s still 5th edition D&D. All the mechanical warts of the system are still there; the weird economy around Bonus Actions, too many classes have weird pools of bonus dice, the strange way that some classes get a whole set of “spell-like” powers to choose from, and other classes “just get spells.” There still isn’t a caster that just uses spell points. Warlocks still look like they were designed on the bus on the way to school the morning the homework was due. Inspiration is still an anemic version of better ideas from other systems. Bounded accuracy still feels weird if you’re not used to it. It’s still allergic to putting math in the text. It still tries to sweep more complex mechanics under the rug by having a very simple general rule, and then a whole host of seemingly one-off exceptions that feel like could have just been one equation or table. The text is still full of tangled sentences about powers recharging after short and long rests instead of just saying powers can used used so many times per day or encounter. There’s still no mechanic for “partial success” or “success with consequences.” You still can’t build any character from The Princess Bride. If 5th wasn’t your jam, there’s nothing here that’ll change your mind.

On the other hand, the good stuff is largely left unchanged: The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic is still brilliant. The universal proficiency bonus is still a great approach. Bounded Accuracy enables the game to stay fun long past the point where other editions crash into a ditch filled with endless +2 modifiers. It’s the same goofball combat-focused fantasy-themed superhero game it’s been for a long time. I’ve said many times, 5e felt like the first version of D&D that wasn’t actively fighting against the way I like to run games, and the 2024 version stays that way.

All that said, it feels finished in a way the 2014 book didn’t. It’s a significantly smaller mechanical change that 3 to 3.5 was, but the revisions are where it counts.

Hasbro has helpfully published a comprehensive list of the mechanics changes as Updates in the Player’s Handbook (2024) | Dungeons & Dragons, so rather than drain the list, here are the highlights that stood out to me:

The big one is that Races are now Species, and Backgrounds have been reworked and made more important, and the pair are treated as “Origins”. This is massive improvement, gone is the weird racial determinism, and where you grew up is now way more important than where your ancestors came from. There’s some really solid rules for porting an older race or background into the new rules. The half-races are gone, replaced by “real Orcs” and the Aaisimar and Goliaths being called up to the big leagues. Backgrounds in 2014 were kinda just there, a way to pick up a bonus skill proficiency, here they’re the source of the attribute bonus and an actual Feat. Choosing a pair feels like making actual choices about a specific character in a different way that how previous editions would sort of devolve that choice into “choose your favorite Fellowship member”.

Multi-classing and Feats are flushed out and no longer relegated to an “optional because we ran out of time” sidebar. Feats specifically are much closer to where they were in 3e—interesting choices to dial in your character. The they split the difference with the choice you had to make in 5e to either get a stat boost or a feat, you still make that choice, but the stat boost bumps up two stats, and every general feat inclues a single stat boost.

The rules around skills vs tools make sense. At first glance, there don’t seem to be weird overlaps anymore. Tools were one of those undercooked features in 2014, they were kinda like skills, but not? When did you use a tool vs a plain skill check? How do you know what attribute bonus to use? Now, every attribute and skill has a broad description and examples of what you can use them from. Each tool has a full description, including the linked attribute, at least one action you can use it for, and at least one thing you can craft with it. And, each background comes with at least one tool proficiency. You don’t have to guess or make something up on the fly, or worse, remember what you made up last time. It’s not a huge change, but feels done.

Every class has four subclasses in the main book now, which cover a pretty wide spread of options, and sanity has prevailed and all subclasses start at level 3. (In a lot of ways, level 3 is clearly the first “real” level, with the first two as essentially the tutorial, which syncs well with that if you follow the recommended progression, you’ll hit 3rd level at the end of the second session.)

The subclasses are a mix of ones from the 2014 book, various expansions, and new material, but each has gotten a tune up top focus on what the actual fantasy is. To use Monk for example, the subclasses are “Hong Kong movie martial artist”, “ninja assassin”, “airbender”, and, basically, Jet Li from Kiss of the Dragon? The Fighter subclasses have a pretty clear sliding scale of “how complicated do you want to make this for yourself,” spanning “Basic Fighter”, “3rd Edition Fighter”, “Elf from Basic D&D”, and “Psionics Bullshit (Complementary)”.

Weapons now have “Weapon Mastery Properties” that, if you have the right class power or feat, allow you do do additional actions or effects with certain weapons, which does a lot to distinguish A-track fighters from everyone else without just making their attack bonus higher.

The anemic Ideals/Flaws/Bonds thing from 2014 is gone, but in it’s place there’s a really neat set of tables with descriptive words for both high and low attributes and alignment that you can roll against to rough in a personality.

On the other hand, lets talk about whats not here. The last page of the book is not the OGL, and there’s no hint of what any future 3rd party licensing might be. The OGL kerfluffle may have put the 2014 SRD under a CC license, but there’s no indication that there will even be a 2024 SRD.

There’s basically nothing in the way of explicit roleplaying/social hooks; and nothing at all in the way of inter-party hooks. PbtA is a thing, you know? But more to the point, so was Vampire. So was Planescape. There’s a whole stack of 30-year old innovations that just aren’t here.

Similarly there’s no recognition of “the party” as a mechanical construct.

There’s nothing on safety tools or the like; there is a callout box about Session Zero, but not much else. I’m withholding judgement on that one, since it looks like there’s something on that front in the DMG.

There’s very little mechanics for things other than combat; although once again, D&D tends to treat that as a DMG concern.

The other best idea that 4e had was recognizing that “an encounter” was a mechanical construct, but didn’t always have to mean “a fight.” This wasn’t new there, using games I can see from where I’m sitting as an example, Feng Shui was organized around “scenes” in the early 90s. Once you admit an encounter is A Thing, you can just say “this works once an encounter” without having to put on a big show about short rests or whatever, when everyone knows what you mean.

Speaking for myself, as someone who DMs more than he plays, I can’t say as I noticed anything that would change the way I run. The ergonomics and presentation of the book, yes, more different and better player options, yes, but from the other side of the table, they’re pretty much the same game.

Dungeons & Dragons is in a strage spot in the conceptual space. It’s not an explicit generic system like GURPS or Cypher, but it wants to make the Heroic Fantasy tent big enough that it can support pretty much any paperback you find in the fantasy section of the used book store. There’s always been a core of fantasy that D&D was “pretty good at” that got steadily weedier the further you got from it. This incarnation seems to have done a decent job of widening out that center while keeping the weed growth the a minimum.

It seems safe to call this the best version of Dungeons & Dragons to date, and perfectly positioned to do the thing D&D is best at: bring new players into the hobby, get them excited, and then let them move on.

But, of course, it’s double volcano summer, so this is the second revised Fifth Edition this year, after Kobold’s Tales of the Valiant. Alert readers will note that both games made almost the exact same list of changes, but this is less “two asteroid movies” and more “these were the obvious things to go fix.” It’s fascinating how similar they both are, I was expecting to have a whole compare and contrast section here, but not so much! I’m not as tapped into “the scene” as I used to be, so I don’t know how common these ideas were out in the wild, but both books feel like the stable versions of two very similar sets of house rules. It kinda feels like there are going to be a lot of games running a hacked combo of the the two.

(To scratch the compare-and-contrast itch: At first glance, I like the ToV Lineage-Heritage-Background set more than the D&D(2024) Species-Background pair, but the D&D(2024) weapon properties and feats look better than their ToV equivalents. Oh, to be 20 and unemployed again!)

The major difference is that ToV is trying to be a complete game, whereas the 2024 D&D still wants to treat the rest of the post-2014 product line as valid.

As of this writing, both games still have their respective DM books pending, which I suspect is where they’ll really diverge.

More than anything, this reminds me of that 2002-2003 period where people kept knocking out alternate versions of 3e (Arcana Unearthed, Conan, Spycraft, d20 Star Wars, etc, etc) capped off with 3.5. A whole explosion of takes on the same basic frame.

This feels like the point where I should make some kind of recommendation. Should you get it?That feels like one of those “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Maybe?

To put it mildly, it hasn’t been a bump-free decade for ‘ol Hasbro; recently the D&D group has made a series of what we might politely call “unforced errors,” or if we were less polite “a disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking.”

Most of those didn’t look malevolent, but the sort of profound screwups you get when too many people in the room are middle-aged white guys with MBAs, and not enough literally anyone else. Credit where credit is due, and uncharacteristically for a public-traded American corporation, they seemed to actually be humbled by some of these, and seemed to be making a genuine attempt to fix the systems that got them into a place where they published a book where they updated an existing race of space apes by giving them the exciting new backstory of “they’re escaped slaves!” Or blowing up the entire 3rd party licensing model for no obvious reason. Or sending the literal Pinkertons to someone’s house.

There seems to be an attempt to use the 2024 books to reset. There seems to be a genuine attempt here to get better at diversity and inclusion, to actually move forward. On the other hand, there’s still no sign of what’s going to happen next with the licensing situation.

And this is all slightly fatuous, because I clearly bought it, and money you spend while holding your nose is still legal tender. Your milage may vary.

My honest answer is that if you’re only looking to get one new 5e-compatible PHB this year, I’d recommend you get Tales of the Valiant instead, they’re a small company and could use the sales. If you’re in the market for a second, pick this one up. If you’ve bought in to the 5e ecosystem, the new PHB is probably worth the cover price for the improved ergonomics alone.

Going all the way back to where we started, the last way that D&D is weird is that whether we play it or not, all of us who care about this hobby have a vested interest in Dungeons & Dragons doing well. As D&D goes, so goes the industry: if you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, when D&D does well the rising tide lifts all boats, but when it does poorly D&D is the Fisher King looking out across a blasted landscape.

If nothing else, I want to live in a world where as many people’s jobs are “RPG” as possible.

D&D is healthier than it’s ever been, and that should give us all a sigh of relief. They didn’t burn the house down and start over, they tried to make a good game better. They’re trying to make it more welcoming, more open, trying to make a big tent bigger. Here in the ongoing Disaster of the Twenties, and as the omni-crisis of 2024 shrieks towards its uncertain conclusion, I’ll welcome anyone trying to make things better.

Tales of the Valiant

In order for this game to make sense, you have to remember why it exists at all. Tales of the Valiant is Kobold Press’ “lawyer-proof” variant of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, created as a response to the absolute trash fire Hasbro caused around the Open Game License and the 5th Edition System Reference Document early last year.

Recall that Hasbro, current owners of Dungeons & Dragons, started making some extremely hinky moves around the future of the OGL—the license under which 3rd party companies can make content compatible with D&D. Coupled with the rumors about the changes being planned for the 2024 update to the game, there was suddenly a strong interest in a version of 5th Edition D&D that was unencumbered by either the OGL or the legal team of the company that makes Monopoly. As such, Kobold Press stepped up to the plate.

Because history happens twice, the first as tragedy, the second as farce, this is actually our second runaround with D&D licensing term shenanigans spawning a new game.

For some context, when 3rd Edition D&D came out back in 2000, in addition to the actual physical books, the core rules were also published in a web document called the System Reference Document, or SRD, which was released under an open source–inspired license called the Open Gaming License, OGL. This was for a couple of reasons, but mostly to provide some legal clarity—and a promise of safe harbor—around the rules and terms and things, many of which were either taken from mythology or had become sort of “common property” of the TTRPG industry as a whole. The upshot was if you followed the license terms, you could use any material from the rules as you saw fit without needing to ask permission or pay anybody, and a whole industry sprung up around making material compatible with or built on top of the game.

When the 4th Edition came out in 2008, the licensing changed such that 3rd party publishers essentially had to choose whether to support 3 or 4, and the rules around 4 were significantly more restrictive. The economy that had grown up under the shade of 3rd edition and the OGL started, rightly, to panic a little bit. Finally, Paizo, who had been the company publishing Dungeon and Dragon magazines under license from Hasbro until just about the same time, stepped up, and essentially republished the 3.5 edition of D&D under the name “Pathfinder.”

There’s a probably apocryphal line from Paizo’s Erik Mona that they chose to create Pathfinder instead of just reprinting 3.5 because “if we’re going to go to the trouble of reprinting the core books we’re going to fix the problems”. (Which has always stuck in my mind because my initial reaction to flipping through the core Pathfinder book the first time was to mutter “wow, we had really different ideas about what the problems were”.) Because Pathfinder wasn’t just a reprint, it was also a collected of tweaks, cleanups, and revisions based on the collected experience of playing the game. There was a joke at the time that it was version “3.75”, but really is was more like “3rd Edition, 2.0”.

When 5th edition came out in 2014, it came with a return to more congenial 3rd edition–style licensing, which reinvigorated the 3rd party publisher world, and also led to an explosion of twitch stream–fueled popularity, and unexpectedly resulted in the most successful period of the game’s history, and now a decade later here we are again, with a different 3rd party publisher producing a new incarnation of a Hasbro game so that the existing ecosystem can continue to operate without lawyers fueled by Monopoly Money coming after them (and yes, pun intended.)

(This isn’t the only project spawned by last January’s OGL mess either; Paizo’s Pathfinder 2 “remaster” was explicitly started to remove any remaining OGL-ed text from the books, it’s not a coincidence that this is when Tweet & Heinsoo chose to kickstart a second edition of 13th Age, the A5E folks are doing their own version of a “lawyer-proof 5th edition.”)

However, Tales of the Valiant had to deal with a couple of challenge that Pathfinder didn’t—primarily, vast chunks of 5E just aren’t in the SRD.

The 3rd Edition SRD had, essentially, the entire game, minus a few minor details and trademarked names, including quite a bit a material published after the core books. For Pathfinder, Paizo could have taken the SRD, bound it as-is, and had a ready-to-play game.

The 5E SRD, on the other hand, has significantly less. Looking at that SRD, vast sections of the game are missing—every Class only has a single Subclass, there’s only a single example Background, there’s only a single Feat, the 5E rules for personality traits & roleplaying hooks—ideals, bonds, flaws, and so on—aren’t present, various monsters aren’t present, the Alchemist class isn’t there, nothing from any book other than the three original core books is there, only the “core” races are there and the races with subraces only have a single example, and so on and so on. All of these gaps needed filling with new material on top of the other mechanical tweaks and cleanup.

The result is that Tales of the Valiant ends up in a sort of “neither fish nor fowl” situation; it’s not just a cleaned up 5E because it literally can’t be, but on the other hand it’s not different enough to give it a clear hook or independent identity.

But with that out of the way, it’s pretty great.

The initial release for ToV is two books—a Players Guide and Monster Vault. (Supposedly, Hasbro has also been getting stropy about other companies using the name “Player’s Handbook” which is why both Kobold and Paizo have moved to other titles.)

The writing in both books is outstanding. This is all, broadly speaking, the same material as the 5E Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, but every section is better written, clearer, generally shorter and more concise. It reads like someone took the original 5E books and ran them past a really, really good editor. All of the language has been made much clearer—for example, spell “levels” are now “circles” to avoid confusion with character levels.

Most of the changes are excellent. The whole thing reads like a set of well-presented house rules by a group of really good DMs who have been running this game for a decade, which I’m pretty sure is what it is.

However, for better or worse, it’s still 5E. All the weird edges of that game are still here—the strange economy around bonus actions, there’s still too many weird custom per-class mechanics around pools of dice, Bards are still mostly just junior wizards, the “other two” arcane spellcasters are still underbaked, there still isn’t a caster that just uses spellpoints.

There’s still just too much—too much complexity without getting anything for it. The core book is 370+ pages, which seems increasingly absurd.

It’s not a secret that 5E was game made by a small team on a short deadline, the game was barely finished, and as a result on a pretty regular basis the rules throw up their hands and depend on the DM to sort things out. As such, many of the changes feel like the result of a decade of people having figured things out— for example, the rules around tools vs skills are clearer, the list of tools is shorter, there are actual rules for hiding, the rules are all reorganized.

Other changes are more structural, but still in the “obvious fixes” category—every class gets subclasses starting at level 3 now, and at the same levels thereafter, although the many of the new subclasses have a certain “golden arcs” to 5E’s “golden arches” quality. For example, Mage Blades are now Spell Blades, and can mix cantrips with physical attacks when using multiattack, which is… pretty great, actually? And a couple of the classes, like Warlock, have been pretty extensively overhauled, with just regular-ass spell slots.

The big ticket changes are all improvements:

“Race” has been replaced with a dual system of “Lineage” and “Heritage”. Lineage is, essentially, your species, and Heritage is where you grew up. This immediately lets you easily cook up some unusual combo—urban Orcs, nomadic Halflings. Backgrounds work similarly to 5E, but the list is new and grant some actually useful bonuses. “Inspiration” has been replaced with the much more flexible and interesting “Luck”. Spell lists have been reorganized around 4E-style “power sources” instead of being unique per class. 5E’s optional Feats have been replaced with Talents, which are, effectively, 3E’s Feats. Like 3E, those Talents are everywhere; your background gives you one, you can pick them on a pretty regular basis as an upgrade option. This is one of several changes that brings back something from 3E. As another, magic items—and magic item upgrades— have prices again. And the revised text around using attributes and skills make them feel a lot more like how the 3E skills worked. I’ve often said my personal ideal version of D&D would be a 3E-5E hybrid, and ToV very much has that feeling.

And, thank goodness, alignment is gone.

(For the full list of changes, see: Tales of the Valiant: Conversion Guide )

The books themselves, like all of Kobold’s books, are very nice. For a small press, they’re outstanding. The usual full-size hardcovers, full color, nice layout, good art. As a nice touch, the covers of the two books represent the same scene, but a few minutes apart.

Uncharacteristically, my favorite of the two volumes was the Monster Vault. This is where the aspect of “collected house rules from a good DM” really shines. The layout is not that different from the 5E Monster Manual, but very cleverly rethought to be useful during play. Each monster gets at least a one whole page, with a nice piece of art and a really thoughtful layout of stats. For example, the book doesn’t waste space with the monster’s stats, it just lists their stat modifiers, which are also their saving throw modifiers. The monster name is always—and only—the first thing in the top left corner of the page, which makes the book so much easier to navigate than either 3rd or 5th edition’s “YOLO!” approach to page layouts.

Every creature gets at least half a column of description, and this is where removing alignment becomes an asset to design. Without alignment as a shorthand, they give each monster an actual personality. To wit: Red Dragons are still bad guys, but instead of just being “chaotic evil”, now they’re assholes. Continuing with the dragons as the example, the metallic ones are still mostly “good”, and the chromatic ones are “bad”, but each kind gets a distinct set of ticks and behaviors. Green dragons are now something like Nazi scientists, Copper dragons are friendly but love a fight, and so on. It’s a really solid set of role-play hooks and ways to deploy them in a game.

This also really shines as a way to distinguish things like oozes or creatures acting on instinct from monsters you’re going to fight because they thought about it and want to take your stuff.

And then there’s the section on encounter design. Encounter design in 5E is notoriously tricky, mainly because the “challenge rating” system in the core rules is blatantly untested and unfinished. The 5E books barely cover it, one more subsystem that ends with a shrug and “you can figure it out?” The ToV Monster Vault has pages and pages on how to design encounters, how to use the existing challenge ratings to compare opponents to the party’s level, notes on adjusting difficulty, you name it. It’s clearly the work of a group that’s played this game a lot, and have really figured out how to make this part sing.

It’s probably the best D&D-style “monster book” I’ve ever read.

The Player’s Guide is a little more of a mixed bag. Again, the layout is clear and well-thought, each class has an icon representing it when it comes up in the rules. Character creation is presented in a different order, which isn’t really better or worse, so much as it shows there just isn’t a best way to present 5E’s overly-complex material.

It also pulls in a bunch of material that 5E leaves in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Magic items, for example. It really is the only book you need to play the game, which makes me intensely curious about the ToV Gamemaster’s Guide which is coming out later this year.

But while the organization is different from the 5E Player’s Handbook, I’s be hard pressed to say it was better.

It’s also remarkable what isn’t here.

The section on “what is an RPG” is perfunctory to the point of being vestigial. There’s actually less material on role-playing and the like here than in the 5E books. There’s essentially nothing on how to actually play; there’s nothing here on how the authors intend this game to work in practice, I guess that’s left up to youtube?

There’s fewer mechanics for role play hooks than even 5E had. The thin-but-workable Ideals/Bonds/Flaws system wasn’t in the SRD, but hasn’t been replaced with anything. The section on using Charisma skills is basically the same content as the 5E book, and that was thin at time. (Meanwhile the 4E non-combat skill challenge system is just sitting there, waiting for someone to rediscover it.) (Edited to add: I went back and checked, and in fairness skill challenges were a DMG item in 4e, not in the PHB.)

There’s a section on Safety Tools, but it’s less than a page. The phrase “session zero” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, which seems insane for a 300+ page RPG book published in the 2020s.

All of that would be acceptable in a small game, but this this book is 60 pages longer than the 5E book, which was already too big. And this isn’t the early teens anymore, where we were having serious conversations about if the TTRPG industry was going to keep existing. This is the twenties, and whatever else that means, TTRPGs are a huge business now, and narrative and character–focused play is in. It’s a strange set of oversights for an otherwise well-designed game.

Finally, Tales of the Valiant is… not a great name? It’s not terrible, but it’s a surprisingly hard name to use in a sentence. And that’s a lot of syllables. And something I’ve learned about myself over the last couple thousand words is that I can’t spell “Valiant” right the first time. (You know what’s a great RPG name? Mörk Borg. That’s the new bar, guys.)

But in case this hasn’t come through clearly, I like it. A lot. As it stands, it’s the best version of 5E out there. Well, at least for the moment, because the shadow of the incoming 5th edition update is looming on the horizon.

It’s not clear to me where this game sits in the broader hobby. Is there room for another D&D-alike? I’m not sure this makes a compelling case why you should play this instead of Pathfinder or 13th Age or the new 5E itself. I don’t understand who the target audience is supposed to be.

The folks that want to play Dungeons & Dragons are going to play that. The whole OGL trashfire/5th edition update ended up going a different direction than any of us expected a year ago; I think the ’24 update is going to be a lot better than we expected, the license terms actually got better, not worse, and I’m sure sure what the sales pitch is for “it’s like D&D, except slightly different.” There’s no hook, no “here’s why this is cooler.”

My overall response is that I wish Kobold had used Hasbro’s total surrender over the licensing to pivot, and to build up a more-different game. Pathfinder succeeded because 3rd edition went away and 4th edition, whatever its strengths, was a very different game. That not what happened this time, and a flavor of 5E is going to stick around for a while yet.

To be fair, I’m not really in the center of this particular crosshairs anymore either. I mean, the game I’m running now is a “cozy witchcore” modern fantasy game using the Cypher system, where we’ve never even bothered to fill in the player character’s attack bonuses on their character sheets. (Off topic but: it’s really fun to see what Modern Fantasy looks like once it has both “Lovecraft” and “90s goth vampires” washed completely out of its hair.) Thats miles away from D&D’s home turf of “fantasy-flavored superheros”. That said, we’ve got a D&D game we’re talking about kicking off, and if we do I’ll advocate heavily for using this instead.

And that’s the review in a nutshell: next time I want to run a game with Magic Missle in it, this is the one I’m going to run.

It’s a cool game by a cool company, making something good out of a stupid situation. Check it out.

Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)

There are multiple interlocking tradegies of Douglas Adams’ death—not the least of which is the fact that he died at all. But also he passed at what appeared to be the end of a decade-long career slump—well, not slump exactly, but a decade where he seemed to spend his time being very, very irritated at the career he’d accidentally found.

After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt. It’s a weird book—a book that only could have happened under the exact circumstances that it did, scrambled out to take advantage of the situation, part collection, part funeral.

Douglas Adams is, by far, the writer whose had the biggest influence on my own work, and it’s not even close. I’m not even sure who would be number two? Ursula LeGuin, probably? But that’s a pretty distant second place—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first “grown-up” book I ever read on my own, which is sort of my secret origin story.

As such I gulped Salmon down the instant it came out in 2002, and hadn’t read it since. There was a bit I vaguely remembered that I wanted to quote in something else I was working on, so I’ve recently bought a new copy, as my original one has disappeared over the years. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened to it, but it’s a minor footnote in a larger, more depressing story, so lets draw a veil across it and pretend that it was pilfered by elves.)

Re-reading the book decades later, two things are very obvious:

First, Adams would never have let a book like this happen while he was alive. It’s self-indulgent in exactly the way he never was, badly organized, clearly rushed. I mean, the three main sections are “Life”, “The Universe”, and “And Everything”, which in addition to being obvious to the point of being tacky, is an absolutely terrible table of contents because there’s no rhyme or reason why one item is in one section versus another.

Second, a book like this should have happened years before. There was so much stuff Adams wrote—magazine articles, newspaper columns, bits and bobs on the internet—that a non-fiction essay collection–style book was long overdue.

This book is weird for other reasons, including that a bunch of other people show up and try to be funny. It’s been remarked more than once that no other generally good writer has inspired more bad writing that Douglas Adams, and other contributions to this book are a perfect example. The copy I have now is the US paperback, with a “new introduction” by Terry Jones—yes, of Monty Python—which might be the least funny thing I’ve ever read, not just unfunny but actively anti-funny, the humor equivalent of anti-matter. The other introductions are less abrasive, but badly misjudge the audience’s tolerance for a low-skill pastiche at the start of what amounts to a memorial service.

The main selling point here is the unfinished 3rd Dirk Gently novel, which may or may not have actually been the unfinished 6th Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. However, that only takes about about 80 pages of a 290 page book; by my math thats a hair over a quarter, which is a little underwhelming. It’s clear the goal was to take whatever the raw material looked like and edit it into something reasonably coherent and readable, which it is. But even at the time, it felt like heavily-edited “grit-out-of-the-spigot” early drafts rather than an actual unfinished book, I’d be willing to bet a fiver that if Adams had lived to finish whatever that book turned into, none of the text here would have been in it. As more unfinished pieces have leaked out over the years, such as the excerpts in 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, it’s clear that there was a lot more than made it into Salmon, and while less “complete”, that other stuff was a lot more interesting. As an example, the excerpts from Salmon in 42 include some passages from one of the magazine articles collected here, except in the context of the novel instead of Adams himself on a trip? What’s the story there? Which came first? Which way did that recycling go? Both volumes are frustratingly silent.

It’s those non-novel parts that are actually good, though. That magazine article is casually one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read, there’s some really insightful bits about computers and technology, a couple of jokes that I’ve been quoting for years having forgotten they weren’t in Hitchhiker proper. The organization, and the rushed nature of the compilation, make these frustrating, because there will be an absolutely killer paragraph on its own, with no context for where did this come from? Under what circumstances was this written? Similarly for the magazine articles, newspaper columns, excerpts from (I assume) his website; there’s no context or dates or backstory, the kinds of things you’d hope for in a collection like this. Most of them seem to date to “the 90s” from context clues, but it’s hard to say where exactly all these things fit in.

But mopst of what really makes the book so weird is how fundamentally weird Adams’ career itself was in the last decade of his life.

In a classic example of working for years to become an overnight success, Adams had a remarkably busy period from 1978–1984, which included (deep breath) two series of the Hitchhiker radio show, a revised script for the album version of the first series, a Doctor Who episode, a stint as Doctor Who’s script editor during which he wrote two more episodes—one of which was the single best episode of the old show—and heavily rewrote several others, the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker which was similar but not identical to the first radio series, the third Hitchhiker novel based (loosely) on a rejected pitch for yet another Doctor Who, and ending in 1984 with the near simultaneous release of the fourth Hitchhiker novel and the Infocom text adventure based on the first.

(In a lot of ways, HHGG makes more sense if you remember that it happened in the shadow of his work for Doctor Who, more than anything it functions as a satire of the older program, the Galaxy Quest to Who’s Star Trek, if you will. Ford is the Doctor if he just wanted to go to a party, Arthur is a Doctor Who companion who doesn’t want to be there and argues back, in the radio show at least, The Heart of Gold operates almost exactly like the Tardis. If you’ll forgive the reference, I’ve always found it improbable, that Hitchhiker found its greatest success in America at a time where Who was barely known.)

After all that, to steal a line from his own work, “he went into a bit of a decline.”

Somewhere in there he also became immensely rich, and it’s worth remembering for the rest of this story that somewhere in the very early 80s Adams crossed the line of “never needs to work again.”

Those last two projects in 1984 are worth spending an extra beat on. It’s not exactly a secret that Adams actually had very little to do with the Hitchhiker game other than the initial kickoff, and that the vast majority of the writing and the puzzles were Steve Meretzky doing an impeccable Adams impression. (See The Digital Antiquarian’s Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style for more on how all that happened.)

Meanwhile, the novel So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of his middle period. It’s not really a SF comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It wasn’t super well received. It’s also my personal favorite? You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his growth as an author. It also ties up the Hitchhiker series with a perfect ending.

Then a couple of more things happen. Infocom had a contract for up to six Hitchhiker games, and they really, really wanted to make at least a second. Adams, however, had a different idea for a game, which resulted in Infocom’s loved-by-nobody Bureaucracy, which again, Adams largely had nothing to do with beyond the concept, with a different set of folks stepping in to finish the project. (Again, see Bureaucracy at The Digital Antiquarian for the gory details.)

Meanwhile, he had landed a two book deal for two “non-Hitchhiker books”, which resulted in the pair of Dirk Gently novels, of which exactly one of them is good.

The first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is probably his best novel. It reworks a couple of ideas from those late 70s Doctor Whos but remixed in interesting ways. The writing is just better, better characters, funnier, subtler jokes, a time-travel murder-mystery plot that clicks together like a swiss watch around a Samuel Coleridge poem and a sofa. It’s incredible.

The second Dirk Gently book, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, is a terrible book, full stop, and I would describe it as one of the most angry, bitter, nihilistic books I’ve ever read, except I’ve also read Mostly Harmless, the final Hitchhiker book. Both of those books drip with the voice of an author that clearly really, really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing.

(I’m convinced Gaiman’s American Gods is a direct riposte to the bleak and depressing Teatime.)

The two Dirk books came out in ’87 and ’88, the only time he turned a book around that fast. (Pin that.) After wrapping up the Dirk contract, he went and wrote Last Chance to See, his best book period, out in 1990.

Which brings us back around to the book nominally at hand—Salmon of Doubt. The unfinished work published here claims to be a potential third Dirk novel, and frankly, it’s hard to believe that was ever seriously under consideration. Because, look, the Gently contract was for two books, neither of which did all that well. According to the intro of this compilation, the first files for Salmon date to ’93, and he clearly noodled on and around that for a decade. That book was never actually going to be finished. If there was desire for a 3rd Gently novel, they would have sat him down and forced him to finish it in ’94. Instead, they locked him in a room and got Mostly Harmless.

There’s a longstanding rumor that Mostly Harmless was largely ghostwritten, and it’s hard to argue. It’s very different from his other works, mean, bad-tempered, vicious towards its characters in a way his other works aren’t. Except it has a lot in common with Bureaucracy which was largely finished by someone else. And, it has to be said, both of those have a very similar voice to the equally mean and bad-tempered Teatime. This gets extra suspicious when you consider the unprecedented-for-him turnaround time on Teatime. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into that rumor mill, since Adams didn’t write anything after that we can compare them to—except Last Chance which is in a completely different mood and in the same style as his earlier, better work. Late period style or ghostwriter? The only person alive who still knows hasn’t piped up on the subject.

Personally? I’m inclined to believe that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the last novel he wrote on his own, and that his contributions to both Teatime and Mostly Harmless were a sketch of an outline and some jokes. Which all, frankly, makes his work—or approximation thereof—over the course of the 90s even stranger.

In one of the great moments of synchronicity, while I was working on this, the Digital Antiquarian published a piece on Adams’ late period, and specifically the absolute mess of the Starship Titanic computer game, so rather than me covering the same ground, you should pause here and go read The Later Years of Douglas Adams. But the upshot is he spent a lot of time doing not very much of anything, and spawning at least two projects pawned off on others to finish.

After the garbage fire of Starship Titanic and then the strangely prescient h2g2—which mostly failed when it choked out on the the reams of unreadable prose that resulted from a horde of fans trying and failing to write wikipedia in the style of Adams’ guide entries—there was a distinct vibe shift. Whereas interviews with him in the mid 90s tended to have him say things like “I accidentally wrote a best-selling novel” and indicate a general dislike of novel writing as a profession, there seemed to be a thaw, a sense that maybe after a decade-plus resenting his found career, maybe he was ready to accept it and lean back in.

And then he died in the gym at 49.

One of the many maddening things about his death is that we never got to see what his late style would have looked like. His last two good books provide a hint of where he was heading.

And that’s the real value of Salmon of Doubt—the theoretical novel contained within would never have been finished in that form, the rest of the content is largely comprised of articles or blog posts or other trivialities, but it’s the only glimpse of what “Late Adams” would have looked like that we’ll ever get.

As a point of comparison, let continue getting side-tracked and talk about the guy who succeeded Adams as “the satirical genre writer beloved by nerds,” Terry Pratchett. Pratchett started writing novels about the same time Adams did, but as the saying goes, put the amount of energy into writing books that Adams spent avoiding writing them. He also, you know, lived longer, despite also dying younger than he should have. Even if we just scope down to Discworld, Pratchett wrote 40 novels, 28 of which were while Adams was also alive and working. Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, which is Discworld-adjacent at least, came out in 1990, and serves as a useful piece of temporal geography; that book is solidly still operating in “inspired by Douglas Adams” territory, and Pratchett wasn’t yet Terry Pratchett, beloved icon. But somewhere around there at the turn of the decade is where he stops writing comedy fantasy and starts writing satirical masterpieces. “What’s the first truly great Discworld novel?” is the sort of unanswerable question the old web thrived on, despite the fact that the answer is clearly Guards! Guards! from ’89. But the point here is that was book 8 after a decade of constant writing. And thats still a long way away from Going Postal or The Wee Free Men. We never got to see what a “Douglas Adams 8th Novel” looked like, much less a 33rd.

What got me thinking about this was I saw a discussion recently about whom of Adams or Pratchett were the better writer. And again, this is a weird comparison, because Pratchett had a late period that Adams never had. Personally, I think there’s very little Pratchett that’s as good as Adams at his peak, but Pratchett wrote ten times the number of novels Adams did and lived twenty years longer. Yes, Pratchett’s 21st century late period books are probably better than Adam’s early 80s work, but we never got to see what Adams would have done at the same age.

(Of course the real answer is: they’re both great, but PG Wodehouse was better than both of them.)

And this is the underlying frustration of Salmon and the Late Adams that never happened. There’s these little glimpses of what could have been, career paths he didn’t take. It not that hard to imagine a version of Hitchhiker that worked liked Discworld did, picking up new characters and side-series but always just rolling along, a way for the author to knock out a book every year where Arthur Dent encountered whatever Adams was thinking about, where Adams didn’t try to tie it off twice. Or where Adams went the Asimov route and left fiction behind to write thoughtful explanatory non-fiction in the style of Last Chance.

Instead all we have is this. It’s scraps. but scraps I’m grateful for.

---

This is where I put a horizontal line and shift gears dramatically. Something I’ve wondered with increasing frequency over the last decade is who Adams would have turned into. I wonder this, because it’s hard to miss that nearly everybody in Adams’ orbit has turned into a giant asshole. The living non-Eric Ide Pythons, Dawkins and the whole New Atheist movement, the broader 90s Skeptic/Humanist/“Bright” folks all went mask-off the last few years. Even the guy who took over the math puzzles column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner now has a podcast where he rails against “wokeists” and vomits out transphobia. Hell, as I write this, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the definitive biography of Adams and whose first novel was a blatant Adams pastiche, has turned out to be “problematic” at best.

There’s something of a meme in the broader fanbase that it’s a strange relief that Adams died before we found out if he was going to go full racist TERF like all of his friends. I want to believe he wouldn’t, but then I think about the casual viscousness with which Adams slaughtered off Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless—the beloved character who made him famous and rich—and remember why I hope those rumors about ghostwriters are true.

The New Atheists always kind of bugged me for reasons it took me a long time to articulate; I was going to put a longer bit on that theme here, but this piece continues to be proof that if you let something sit in your drafts folder long enough someone else will knock out an article covering the parts you haven’t written yet, and as such The Defector had an absolutely dead-on piece on that whole movement a month or so ago: The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us. Adams goes (mercifully) unmentioned, but recall Dawkins met his wife—Doctor Who’s Romana II herself, Lalla Ward!—after Adams introduced the two of them at a party Adams was hosting, and Adams was a huge sloppy fan of Dawkins and his work.

I bring all this up here and now because one of the pieces in Salmon of Doubt is an interview of Adams by the “American Atheist”, credited to The American Atheist 37, No. 1 which in keeping with Salmon’s poor organization isn’t dated, but a little digging on the web reveals to be the Winter 1998–1999 issue.

It’s incredible, because the questions the person interviewing ask him just don’t compute with Adams. Adams can’t even engage on the world-view the American Atheists have. I’m going to quote the best exchange here:

AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?

DNA: Not even remotely. It's an inconceivable idea.

One can easily imagine, and by “imagine” I mean “remember”, other figures from that movement going on and on about how poorly society treats atheists, and instead here Adams just responds with blank incomprehension. Elsewhere in the interview he dismissed their disconnect as a difference between the US and the UK, which is both blatantly a lie but also demonstrates the sort of kindness and empathy one doesn’t expect from the New Atheists. Every response Adams gives has the air of him thinking “what in the world is wrong with you?”

And, here in the twenties, that was my takeaway from reading Salmon again. It’s a book bursting with empathy, kindness, and a fundamentally optimistic take on the absurd world we find ourselves in. A guy too excited about how great things could be to rant about how stupid they are (or, indeed, to put the work into getting there.) A book full of things written by, fundamentally, one of the good guys.

If Adams had lived, I’m pretty sure three things would be true. First, there’d be a rumor every year this this was the year he was finally going to finish a script for the new Doctor Who show despite the fact that this never actually ends up happening. Second, that we never would have been able to buy a completed Salmon of Doubt. Third, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be on twitter asking people to define “a woman.”

In other words: Don't Panic.

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)

I’ve been Extremely Online pretty much since that was a thing you could be. Being Online is a condition that’s not well described or represented Offline. Most books or movies about scenes I was a part of, either directly or tangentially, tend not to be very accurate, not get the vibe right. I read books about computer games, say, and tend to leave with a sense of “huh, that’s not how it was for me at all.” Online is even worse; this is probably because Online is always describing itself to itself, and there’s no room for a slow, non-networked, Offline description.

Patricia Lockwood, who apparently dodged a thousand years of jail, used to be fairly active on the outer edges of what used to be called “weird twitter.” It turns out, poets were really good at twitter’s strange limitations, go figure. She wrote a book a few years ago called No One is Talking About This, which I had been looking forward to very much, but only just now finally had a chance to sit down and read.

This book is the single best description I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be Extremely Online. Specifically, it’s simply the best description of what it was like to read twitter too much in the late twenty-teens. The timing is accidentally perfect, it’s the perfect eulogy for that phase of the internet that existed between the recession and the pandemic; the five websites full of screenshots of the other four era, before the Disaster of the Twenties really got rolling.

But more generally, it perfectly encapsulates the Online Condition. The way The Online expands and consumes all your mental and emotional bandwidth, and the way Real Life sort of falls away, unable to match the dopamine flow. The way your head is full of all this stuff that no one else around you knows, or recognizes, or cares about. The Online doesn’t become more real than The Real, exactly, just more present, and faster, and louder.

But this book isn’t about any of that. This book is about what it’s like to be Online when Real Life suddenly becomes Extremely Real. And the result isn’t that suddenly Real Life becomes real again, it’s that neither seems real, and you float in this twilight realm between the two spaces, unable to engage with or believe either of them.

The way neither space can act as an escape valve for the other, and the realities continue to diverge past the point where you can hold both in your head, and you find yourself in both places, gasping out, for different reasons, No One is Talking About This.

I’m generally a fast reader. I don’t intend to humblebrag here, despite leaving this sentence in—I’ve always read fast, I tend to gulp books down. (I also walk fast and talk fast, and should probably do something about my caffeine intake.) This is a short book, but it took me a long time to read, because I couldn’t make it very far before I had to put it down and just sort of process the last couple of pages. It was very, very funny, but it got much further under my skin than I was expecting.

I enjoyed it very much. Strongly recommended.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2006)

This book has been on my list for ages, at least since it won the Hugo. Thanks to the dual prompting of the new show and some light peer pressure, I finally read it. Let’s get this out of the way up front: I liked it a lot. Great book! You should read it.

But my goodness, this is a book I wish I could have read in the original language. There’s a very distinctive style and rhythm to the language, especially the dialogue, that I can only describe as “artfully clunky”, lots of people shouting declarative statements past each other. I’d love to know what percentages of that are a) the author’s style b) an artifact of the translation c) that’s how Mandarain sounds. I suspect it’s 30:70 a and c, but I’d love to know.

For a 400+ page book, there are surprisingly few characters with major “speaking parts”.

My favorite was Shi Qiang, the grizzled police detective. Speaking of cultural and stylistic differences, that character is clearly supposed to be the hard-charging pragmatist, and as such, he felt the most in-line with the baseline of the way American technothriller/science fiction characters act. And so it kept making me laugh how constantly he would say or suggest something that seemed pretty straightforward to me, and then all the other characters would fall all over themselves about how rude and inhuman the detective was. I really enjoyed the cultural differences embedded in the fact that the other characters can barely comprehend how rude that guy is, and meanwhile I’m reading it thinking “the other guys in Miami Vice would make so much fun of this guy for being too polite”.

On the other hand, Wang Miao, the character we spend the most time with, has a certain blank “video game protagonist” quality. Mostly he’s there to be shocked at the detective, solve puzzles, and deliver exposition, in that order.

In a lesser book, the third character with the most time on page, Ye Wenjie, would be the antagonist, and while her actions are opposed to those of the first two characters, the book refuses to be that straightforward. She’s really the book’s main protagonist, as her actions are what cause the plot to start moving, in many ways she manages to have the most agency of anyone in the story, despite her not realizing it.

I really, really enjoyed how hard the author worked not to editorialize on the characters. There’s the group that in an American novel would absolutely be the “bad guys”, and here the author just describes them with a tone of “well, what do you think?” Maybe the best deployment f the “villain has a point” trope I have ever seen.

The overall structure of the book was a lot of fun. Roughly speaking, it was: 100 pages of warmup laps, making sure the reader knew who everyone was and where they were, 200 pages of post-cyberpunk techno-thriller modern-day science fiction, then 100 pages of absolute unchained insanity. A++.

It’s the sort of book where the author has had some fun ideas about how physics could work, and what that would mean, and would like to tell you about it. (The all time grand-champion for “let me tell you my ideas about physics” is Masamune Shirow’s Orion which is less of a graphic novel than it is an illustrated physics textbook for a cosmology worked outwards from “how can we power spaceships with spells?” It’s incredible, and I can’t believe they keep remaking Ghost in the Shell but still haven’t done Orion even once.)

There’s plot point that hinges on a common pop culture misunderstanding of “quantum entangling”, which isn’t a dealbreaker but does jump out if you read those kinds of ars technica articles. Which isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to have an exchange along the lines of a human saying “but the no messaging theorem!” and the aliens saying “haha, your puny earth science has much to unlearn!!” But this is mostly there to enable the real fun crazy ideas around computers, and higher dimensions, and particle physics, and ways civilizations can (or can’t) cope with their surroundings. One of the things I genuinely like about the book is that is spends ~300 pages being a real-world hard science fiction book, and then in the last 100 or so starts doing things that would make Star Trek blush, but since you’re bought in it all works, and the end can get away with a lot.

“Hard science fiction” in the classic mid-century sense of “square-jawed Science Men think through a math word problem for 8000 words” has fallen out of vogue, and this book isn’t a throwback so much as it is a revival. Rehabilitating the (sub)genre while keeping the post-seventies innovations of the broader science fiction literary community. From the discussions on the web, I notice this seems to be a lot of younger people’s first “hard” SF, and to be clear, I think that’s great. I’m kind of a reverse-hipster on this one; I have a strong “if you like that, buckle up, there’s a whole section of the library you are going to flip over” reaction. (Wait’ll these kids discover that Clarke book that’s essentially a set of full engineering plans for a space elevator in novel form.)

The key factor in making all that work is grounding the story in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Having the story take place in the shadow of the real-world horrors, and the plot spin out as a serious of consequences of that disaster give it a sense of social realism that glues together all the VR games and nanomaterials and sophons.

Finally, it doesn’t technically end on a cliffhanger, but I adore the double-punchline the book ends on. Incredible last scene.

Books That Need Updates

You even read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks? It’s one of those classics for a reason, and it’s one of those books—like PeopleWare that I end up re-reading every could of years. For everyone playing the home game , Man-Month is a collection of essay’s Fred Brooks wrote about software engineering, mostly based on his experiences leading the OS/360 project at IBM in the 50s and 60s. The book is probably best known for “Brooks’ Law”—“Adding more people to a late project makes it later,” and he’s probably the origin of the example of how you can’t use 9 women to have a baby in one month. But he’s all over the software world: he’s also the guy who coined the term “software architecture”, and he’s almost certainly the reason your computer uses 8 bit bytes instead of 6.

He’s also got an real gift at digging out the root cause of problems, so while the symptoms he describes are very 1950s (the secretaries can only type so fast!) what makes the book stay relevant is his ability to call out the underlying needs (everyone on a large project needs up-to-date information.)

However! The version you can buy today is the anniversary edition from the mid-90s, with a couple of new chapters at the end. And these are incredible because it’s Brooks with a couple of extra decades of experience under his belt in dialoge with his younger self. And he mostly walks through the challenges and problems the earlier parts of the book outlined, and then gives his updated thoughts on where we stood in the mid-90s. (A remarkable number of logistical challenges went away just due to, literally, Microsoft Office.)

But this afterward mostly lets him sharpen the messages from earlier—these really are the real problems, all the social and communication challenges are the same no matter how fancy the technology, there really isn’t a silver bullet, here’s how we can go make great software.

It’s phenomenal, go read it if you haven’t.

Sometimes I think, what other books really need an anniversary edition with an extra chapter?

As I somewhat frequently mention, the all time champion is Postcards From The Edge, which really needs an extra page at the end to mention that Debbie Reynolds died the day after Carrie Fisher, so Carrie couldn’t even have her own funeral.

Which all brings me around to—probably for the last time—Humane. (Bare with me for a sec.) After the total disaster of the “AI” “Pin” launch, the company seems to be up for sale, the founders want out, looks like it was time to fold the con.

One of the main people at Humane was Ken Kocienda, aka “the guy who wrote the first iPhone keyboard". After leaving Apple he wrote a book called Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. It’s a great book, and probably the best book that’s ever been written about how the early 2000s Apple did what it did. But a big part of the tone is that Apple has lost its way without Jobs there, and this book was a record of how the “good” Apple worked.

A big part of Humane’s whole thing was that it was a bunch of ex-Apple people re-creating the old Apple, and they literally had the guy who wrote the book on staff. But maybe, it turns out, the deranged dictator CEO with impeccable taste was a key element in making the Apple way work? Humane struck me as a place that didn’t have someone who would drop the prototype in a fishtank to see if bubbles came out. And not that you need that to be successful? But you don’t not need that? Humane stands as a really interesting data point about how the Apple Way works, or doesn’t, outside of the confines of Apple itself.

But back to Kocienda’s book. Like I said, it’s a great book. And I mean this completely sincerely, without any implied snark: I’d pay real money to read the extra couple of chapters Kocienda would add now.

Book Lists Wednesday

Speaking of best of lists, doing the rounds this week we have:

The Great American Novels

We give the Atlantic a hard time in these parts, and usually for good reasons, but it’s a pretty good list! I think there’s some things missing, and there’s a certain set of obvious biases in play, but it’s hard to begrudge a “best american fiction” list that remembers Blume, LeGuin, and Jemisin, you know? Also, Miette’s mother is on there!

I think I’ve read 20 of these? I say think, because there are a few I own a copy of but don’t remember a single thing about (I’m looking at YOU, Absalom, Absalom!)

And, as long as we’re posting links to lists of books, I’ve had this open in a tab for the last month:

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction - Wikipedia

I forget now why I ended up there, but I thought this was a pretty funny list, because I considers myself a pretty literate, well-read person, and I hadn’t even heard of most of these, must less read them. That said, the four on there I actually have read—Guns of August, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, Soul of a New Machine, and Into Thin Air—are four of the best books I’ve ever read, so maybe I should read a couple more of these?

Since the start of the Disaster of the Twenties I’ve pretty exclusively read trash, because I needed the distraction, and I didn’t have the spare mental bandwidth for anything complicated or thought provoking. I can tell the disaster is an a low ebb at the moment, because I found myself looking at both of these lists thinking, maybe I’m in the mood for something a little chunkier.

Nausicaä at 40

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came out forty years ago this week!

Miyazaki is one of the rare artists where you could name any of his works as your favorite and not get any real pushback. It’s a corpus of work where “best” is meaningless, but “favorite” can sometimes be revealing. My kid’s favorite is Ponyo, so that’s the one I’ve now seen the most. When I retire, I want to go live on the island from Porco Rosso. * Totoro* might be the most delighted I’ve ever been while watching a movie for the first time. But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the only one I bought on blu-ray.

Nausicaä is the weird one, the one folks tend not to remember. It has all the key elements of a Miyazaki film—a strong woman protagonist, environmentalism, flying, villains that aren’t really villains, good-looking food—but it also has a character empty the gunpowder out of a shotgun shell to blow a hole in a giant dead insect exoskeleton. He never puts all those elements together quite like this again.

I can’t now remember when I saw it for the first time. It must have been late 80s or early 90s, which implies I saw the Warriors of the Wind cut, or maybe a subbed Japanese import? (Was there a subbed Japanese import?) I read the book—as much of it as existed—around the same time. I finally bought a copy of the whole thing my last year of college, in one of those great “I’m an adult now, and I can just go buy things” moments. And speaking of the book, this is one of the rare adaptations where it feels less like an “adaptation” than a “companion piece.” It’s the same author, using similar pieces, configured differently, providing a different take on the same material with the same conclusions.

So what is it about this move that appeals to me so much? The book is one of my favorite books of all times, but that’s a borderline tautology. If I’m honest, it’s a tick more “action-adventure” that most other Ghibli movies, which is my jam, but more importantly, it’s action-adventure where fighting is always the wrong choice, which is extremely my jam (see also: Doctor Who.)

I love the way everything looks, the way most of the tech you can’t tell if it was built or grown. I love the way it’s a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks pretty comfortable to live in, actually. I love sound her glider makes when the jet fires, I love the way Teto hides in the folds of her shirt. I love the way the prophecy turns out to be correct, but was garbled by the biases of the people who wrote it down. I love everything about the Sea of Corruption (sorry, “Toxic Jungle”,) the poisonous fungus forest as a setting, the insects, the way the spores float in the air, the caves underneath, and then, finally, what it turns out the forest really is and why it’s there.

Bluntly, I love the way the movie isn’t as angry or depressing as the book, and it has something approaching a happy ending. I love how fun it all is, while still being extremely sincere. I love that it’s an action adventure story where the resolution centers around the fact that the main character isn’t willing to not help a hurt kid, even though that kid is a weird bug.

Sometimes a piece of art hits you at just the right time or place. You can do a bunch of hand waving and talk about characters or themes or whatever, but the actual answer to “why do you love that so much?” is “because there was a hole in my heart the exact shape of that thing, that I didn’t know was there until this clicked into place.”

Cyber-Curriculum

I very much enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s riff today on why people keep building torment nexii: Pluralistic: The Coprophagic AI crisis (14 Mar 2024).

He hits on an interesting point, namely that for a long time the fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between “science fiction thought experiments” and “futuristic predictions” didn’t matter. But now we have a bunch of aging gen-X tech billionaires waving dog-eared copies of Neuromancer or Moon is a Harsh Mistress or something, and, well…

I was about to make a crack that it sorta feels like high school should spend some time asking students “so, what’s do you think is going on with those robots in Blade Runner?” or the like, but you couldn’t actually show Blade Runner in a high school. Too much topless murder. (Whether or not that should be the case is besides the point.)

I do think we should spend some of that literary analysis time in high school english talking about how science fiction with computers works, but what book do you go with? Is there a cyberpunk novel without weird sex stuff in it? I mean, weird by high school curriculum standards. Off the top of my head, thinking about books and movies, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days all have content that wouldn’t get passed the school board. The Matrix is probably borderline, but that’s got a whole different set of philosophical and technological concerns.

Goes and looks at his shelves for a minute

You could make Hitchhiker work. Something from later Gibson? I’m sure there’s a Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker novel I’m not thinking of. There’s a whole stack or Ursula LeGuin everyone should read in their teens, but I’m not sure those cover the same things I’m talking about here. I’m starting to see why this hasn’t happened.

(Also, Happy π day to everyone who uses American-style dates!)

The Sky Above The Headset Was The Color Of Cyberpunk’s Dead Hand

Occasionally I poke my head into the burned-out wasteland where twitter used to be, and whilw doing so stumbled over this thread by Neil Stephenson from a couple years ago:

Neal Stephenson: "The assumption that the Metaverse is primarily an AR/VR thing isn't crazy. In my book it's all VR. And I worked for an AR company--one of several that are putting billions of dollars into building headsets. But..."

Neal Stephenson: "...I didn't see video games coming when I wrote Snow Crash. I thought that the killer app for computer graphics would be something more akin to TV. But then along came DOOM and generations of games in its wake. That's what made 3D graphics cheap enough to reach a mass audience."

Neal Stephenson: "Thanks to games, billions of people are now comfortable navigating 3D environments on flat 2D screens. The UIs that they've mastered (e.g. WASD + mouse) are not what most science fiction writers would have predicted. But that's how path dependency in tech works."

I had to go back and look it up, and yep: Snow Crash came out the year before Doom did. I’d absolutely have stuck this fact in Playthings For The Alone if I’d had remembered, so instead I’m gonna “yes, and” my own post from last month.

One of the oft-remarked on aspects of the 80s cyberpunk movement was that the majority of the authors weren’t “computer guys” before-hand; they were coming at computers from a literary/artist/musician worldview which is part of why cyberpunk hit the way it did; it wasn’t the way computer people thought about computers—it was the street finding it’s own use for things, to quote Gibson. But a less remarked-on aspect was that they also weren’t gamers. Not just not computer games, but any sort of board games, tabletop RPGs.

Snow Crash is still an amazing book, but it was written at the last possible second where you could imagine a multi-user digital world and not treat “pretending to be an elf” as a primary use-case. Instead the Metaverse is sort of a mall? And what “games” there are aren’t really baked in, they’re things a bored kid would do at a mall in the 80s. It’s a wild piece of context drift from the world in which it was written.

In many ways, Neuromancer has aged better than Snow Crash, if for no other reason that it’s clear that the part of The Matrix that Case is interested in is a tiny slice, and it’s easy to imagine Wintermute running several online game competitions off camera, whereas in Snow Crash it sure seems like The Metaverse is all there is; a stack of other big on-line systems next to it doesn’t jive with the rest of the book.

But, all that makes Snow Crash a really useful as a point of reference, because depending on who you talk to it’s either “the last cyberpunk novel”, or “the first post-cyberpunk novel”. Genre boundaries are tricky, especially when you’re talking about artistic movements within a genre, but there’s clearly a set of work that includes Neuromancer, Mirrorshades, Islands in the Net, and Snow Crash, that does not include Pattern Recognition, Shaping Things, or Cryptonomicon; the central aspect probably being “books about computers written by people who do not themselves use computers every day”. Once the authors in question all started writing their novels in Word and looking things up on the web, the whole tenor changed. As such, Snow Crash unexpectedly found itself as the final statement for a set of ideas, a particular mix of how near-future computers, commerce, and the economy might all work together—a vision with strong social predictive power, but unencumbered by the lived experience of actually using computers.

(As the old joke goes, if you’re under 50, you weren’t promised flying cars, you were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and well, here we are, pick up your complementary torment nexus at the front desk.)

The accidental predictive power of cyberpunk is a whole media thesis on it’s own, but it’s grimly amusing that all the places where cyberpunk gets the future wrong, it’s usually because the author wasn’t being pessimistic enough. The Bridge Trilogy is pretty pessimistic, but there’s no indication that a couple million people died of a preventable disease because the immediate ROI on saving them wasn’t high enough. (And there’s at least two diseases I could be talking about there.)

But for our purposes here, one of the places the genre overshot was this idea that you’d need a 3d display—like a headset—to interact with a 3d world. And this is where I think Stephenson’s thread above is interesting, because it turns out it really didn’t occur to him that 3d on a flat screen would be a thing, and assumed that any sort of 3d interface would require a head-mounted display. As he says, that got stomped the moment Doom came out. I first read Snow Crash in ’98 or so, and even then I was thinking none of this really needs a headset, this would all work find on a decently-sized monitor.

And so we have two takes on the “future of 3d computing”: the literary tradition from the cyberpunk novels of the 80s, and then actual lived experience from people building software since then.

What I think is interesting about the Apple Cyber Goggles, in part, is if feels like that earlier, literary take on how futuristic computers would work re-emerging and directly competing with the last four decades of actual computing that have happened since Neuromancer came out.

In a lot of ways, Meta is doing the funniest and most interesting work here, as the former Oculus headsets are pretty much the cutting edge of “what actually works well with a headset”, while at the same time, Zuck’s “Metaverse” is blatantly an older millennial pointing at a dog-eared copy of Snow Crash saying “no, just build this” to a team of engineers desperately hoping the boss never searches the web for “second life”. They didn’t even change the name! And this makes a sort of sense, there are parts of Snow Crash that read less like fiction and more like Stephenson is writing a pitch deck.

I think this is the fundamental tension behind the reactions to Apple Vision Pro: we can now build the thing we were all imagining in 1984. The headset is designed by cyberpunk’s dead hand; after four decades of lived experience, is it still a good idea?

Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends

The Story So Far

Planescape was…

Hang on, let me back up a bit. Okay, maybe a little further.

Dungeons & Dragons has this concept called Alignment. On the surface it’s a simplified way to describe how a character acts, filtered through a very Gygax-style overly-complex solution. You have two spectrums: Good vs Evil, and Lawful vs Chaotic, with a Neutral step in between for each, making a 9-space 3-by-3 grid. So you get things like Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Good, Neutral Evil. Like a lot of concepts from the original flavors of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s both overly-complex and overly-limiting. You’re supposed to pick one for your character that informs and limits how they act. Everyone picks “Chaotic Good”, the adventurer alignment: “I’m helpful but don’t tell me what to do”. But it sort of seeps into the cracks of the rest of the game. Monsters have alignments. Spells work with them. There used to be secret languages for each alignment.

And then, at the back of the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, there’s two absolutely madcap pages labeled “Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence.” In this, Gygax outlines the cosmology out beyond where the game world normally takes place. The “real world” exists on something called the “Prime Material Plane”, which is surrounded by both the Outer and Inner Planes.

A Plane is something like the nine realms from norse myth, or an alternate dimension, but governed by different rules. The Inner Planes are primal forces: positive and negative energy, the elements. The Outer Planes, however, build outward from the alignment chart. 15 “Planes” extend outward from the Prime Material, one for each of the alignments (other than Neutral-Neutral), with a half-step between each. These are the outer dimensions where supernatural and god-like beings live, each tied to an Alignment. You can squint and see what real world mythology they’re each tied to—there’s Valhalla, there’s Dante’s Inferno, Limbo, Olympus, Christian Heaven, Hades, and so on. It’s a perfect distillation of the D&D ethos—all mythologies are included and equal, there’s a complicated chart, and you can fight them.

To round out the cosmology, the Inner Planes were connected to the Prime Material by the Etherial Plane, and the Outer Planes were connected by the Astral Plane. There’s an implication that there are more than one Material Plane, representing… parallel universes? All this was illustrated with a diagram out of an alchemist’s rantings, or a two-dimensional version of that orrery from The Dark Crystal.

Then, a couple of years later Jeff Grubb turned this into an entire book called The Manual of the Planes. This blew those two pages out into something approaching an actual setting. Each plane, outer and inner, got a full description, and there were monsters, encounters, rules for how spells worked. As a key detail for later, this book added a 16th “true neutral” plane, the Plane of Concordant Opposition, which acted as the center of The Great Wheel of the planes, with the other planes extending out from it, which also had an impossibly tall unclimbable spire at the center. (The axel of the wheel?)

What was all this for? The Planes solved, basically, three problems in D&D:

1. Mostly, this described where the deities that clerics got their spells from physically lived. It was a universal explanation for where supernatural or paranormal entities came from. Gods, Demons, angels, elementals, ghosts: they come from a plane. And, it did this in a way that didn’t elevate one particular mythology or religion over the others. All real-world religions and supernatural creatures had a place to go, which you could use or ignore as you liked.
2. It was where high level characters went when they needed a new challenge. Too powerful to clear out yet one more keep on a borderland? Travel to the Outer Planes and treat Dante’s political satire as an endgame dungeon.
3. It provided a way to move between campaign settings. Want to use your Grayhawk characters in a Mystara game? Lemme tell you the good news about astral portals.

Maybe most critically, this was also the blanket answer for where demons (chaotic evil) and devils (lawful evil), came from. (The Abyss and The Nine Hells, respectively). Because of course, this was the height of the Satanic Panic in the mid-80s, and having a place in the game that was specifically where Satan lived was a bad look. When the 2nd edition of AD&D arrived in 1989, all this got swept under the rug.

While this kept all the weird mythology stuff out of the sight of the Mrs. Lovejoys of the world, this left the game without a place for high-powered characters to loot, or a way to travel between settings. The solution to this was the original Spelljammer. Spelljammer replaced the mythological outer realms with a science-fantasy “boats in space” approach. The different campaign settings were now planets, each in their own solar systems. Each solar system was enclosed in a “Crystal Sphere”, each of which in turn was floating in an infinite sea of “Phlogiston”. “Spelljammers” were magic-powered ships that could travel between the spheres. Implicitly, this was all taking place inside the old Prime Material Plane, leaving the old cosmology unmentioned but still usable.

By the mid-90s, the “satanic panic” was down to more of an “impish concern”, and Spelljammer hadn’t sold super-well. There was a desire to “bring back” the old planes cosmology. Rather than do this as a standalone esoteric sourcebook, the decision was made to promote the planes to a “real” campaign setting.

But also, AD&D’s simulationist, rules-heavy, combat oriented approach had fallen out of style. It wasn’t “The Game” anymore, not the way it had been a decade earlier, and there were a mounting number of games that weren’t just looting castles one ten-foot square at a time. There was a cambrian-style explosion of new games at the start of the decade—Over the Edge, Ars Magica, Feng Shui, to name some examples—built around figuring out the minimum viable number of rules for a game like this, and refocusing on the “role playing” part of RPG.

But the big one was Vampire: The Masquerade. Less rules, more roleplaying, dark urban fantasy. And, relevant to our current purposes, each character chose a “clan”, each of which was based on a Vampiric archetype (the dracula ones, the nosferatu ones, the anne rice ones, the lost boys, and so on). The clan wasn’t a character class so much as a set of hooks for roleplaying, an archetype for what your character acted like, not what they could do. It was that alignment chart, all grown up.

And this all dovetailed with everything else that was going on in nerd subcultures in the 90s, by which I really mean the goth scene was on the rise and The Sandman was huge.

And so, the mission: put D&D back at the forefront of RPG design, reboot the Planes as a gameplay location, with characters joining Vampire-style thematic groups while journeying across landscapes that looked like Sandman cover art.

The result: Planescape.

It immediately had a distinct feel as soon as you looked at it. The art was unlike anything on any other RPG product, a sketchy near-cartoony surrealist look that was immediately evocative; something between a goth Dr Seuss and Brian Froud’s concept art for Labyrinth. The logo had a weird spiky lady in it that looked like a mythological character from a mythos you’d never heard of. Even the fonts and page layouts were distinctive. The message was clear—this wasn’t a D&D book, this was a Planescape book.

The distinctivness continued once you flipped it open. (Or rather, slid open the box set). One of the signature features inside was “The Chant”, a set of slang and dialect that planar natives used; it only sounded strange to you on account your being a clueless berk, but don’t worry, you’ll be a savvy cutter no time. Unlike the house standard voice in other products, Planescape was written in a casual tone, the voice of an experienced adventurer welcoming you out of the prime and into the big leagues of the planes.

All the Planes got new names. These were their real names, you understand, the names back in the old Appendix IV were what the uneducated primes called them. As such, the “Plane of Concordant Opposition” became “The Outlands”, and the top of the infinite spire we now find Sigil, the City of Doors, a city built on the inside of a giant stone torus; which was also called the Cage because the only way in or out is via a planar portal or gateway. Sigil acts as the player’s home base, the place you bang around between adventures.

The city is ruled? controlled? by the enigmatic Lady of Pain—the spiky face in the logo. But she’s more of an absentee landlord than micromanager, so the city is run by The Factions. There are fifteen of them, roughly corresponding to the fifteen Outer Planes. But, they also all have a distinct philosophy. Like the vampire clans, it doesn’t take a lot of work to map the factions to their real-world counterparts—there’s the socialists, the fascists, the atheists, the libertarians, the discordians. (It was the 90s. Vampire had those guys too.)

Like in Vampire, every player had to pick a faction, and like vampire they were written so that everyone reading immediately had a favorite, but everyone had a different favorite. There weren’t “good ones” or “bad ones”, just a spectrum of stuff different people thought was cool. (Vampire is always cited as the direct inspiration, but I suspect the Factions also owed as much to the Houses and Clans from Battletech.)

This foregrounding of philosophy extended outward through the game: the rules posited that while the Prime Material Plane was governed by physics, the “physics” of the Outer Planes was philosophy, that belief and ideas were what underpinned those realities. The lead developer, David "Zeb" Cook, described the setting as “Philosophers with Clubs”.

It was fun, and different, and expansive without being overwhelming. While a lot of D&D specifically can feel like a copy of a copy of a copy of either Tolkien or Howard, this was something else, something absolutely unique, something D&D had that nothing else did.

The usual complaint from people that didn’t like it was that it was a better read than it was a game; which was occasionally fair: there are NPCs who communicate entirely through rebuses, which is great to read about but really, really hard to roleplay. (“It, uhhhh, puts up a rebus that, ah, can you roll, okay it means ‘you need to keep moving, citizen.’”). But if it was your jam, it was your jam.

It also served as the setting for one of the best-regarded D&D computer games, Planescape:Torment. Torment tended to be a lot of people’s first encounter with the setting, especially after the setting went out of print but the game stayed around in places like Steam or GoG. (That’s a gun I just hung over the mantle, by the way.)

It was glorious. In case this isn’t coming though from the fact that I’m over seventeen-hundred words in and haven’t talked about the new book yet, the Planes are my absolute favorite thing in D&D, and I think Planescape is the single best thing the old TSR ever published.

When 3rd edition came along at the turn of the century, Planescape, along with all the other boxed-set campaign settings got put in the attic. Both 3rd and 4th edition did anemic Manuals of the Planes that gestured at planar adventuring, but mostly left Sigil and Planesape as an easter egg or sidebar. The 5th Edition PHB has four pages at the back labeled “Appendix C: The Planes of Existence”, which is a surprisingly comprehensive summary of the built up material to date, but like the old original Appendix IV, was more teaser than gameplay resource.

As the fifth edition game trundled on, “new Planescape” was a persistant rumor. Which bring us to today, one the last new products released for “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2014)” before “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2024)” is released: the long rumored New Planescape.

Planescape 5e

The new Planescape follows the same format as last year’s Spelljammer: a slipcased set of three books: a setting overview, a monster manual, and an adventure. It solves one of new Spelljammer’s biggest shortcomings, in that the adventure and setting book are now 96 pages instead of 64, so the combined page count is the same as one of 5e’s larger standalone books, meaning it’s not cramped the way Spelljammer was. Also, they make the very savvy call to focus entirely on Sigil and the Outlands, leaving the rest of the planes alone.

So here we are! 45 pages detailing the insides of Sigil! Write-ups on the factions! A two-page spread for each gate down in the Outlands! A two-sided poster map! Modrons on the cover art! Finally, right?

I’ve got really mixed feelings about it.

Let’s start with this: The berks put the chant in the dead book. The “pirate talk / thieves cant” slang was one of the signature features of the original, solidly establishing that this took place somewhere else. There was always a vocal minority of people that didn’t like it, but those people didn’t like anything else about it either. And it’s just… not here. The text of the books is written in the same neutral house style as all the other 5e books. There’s no glossary of “planar slang” at the end. In the adventure, the first NPC you meet on the streets of Sigil uses essentially the entire slang dictionary in one sentence, and then someone else shoos them away with with an apology for the crazy person, and from that point on everyone else sounds just like every other D&D NPC, which is to say, just like Jack Kirby’s Thor. Reading it, there’s an immediate chill, as you realize that the setting whose signature feature was being different from everything else has been brought back, but lost something along the way..

The same thing applies to the art. Planescape used to have a distinct, stylized art style—there was no mistaking a Planescape book for something else. And here, everything is done in the same house style as the rest of 5e. It’s good art. It’s really good art. But there’s the Lady of Pain on the cover, looking like every other piece of 5th edition cover art. Seeing characters or locations from the old game rendered in the modern, standard art style was strange, like seeing someone you went to high school with after years and years and discovering they’d had some ill-advised plastic surgery. “They looked fine before, why did they do that to themselves?”

The distinctive fonts are gone, the text and layouts looking just like every other 5th edition book. Even the old logo is gone, replaced by an unadorned “PLANESCAPE” in big capital letters in the same brand font.

But okay, so the detailing is gone, what about the core content?

Let’s talk about the Factions. There’s only twelve of them now, some old ones, some revised, weirdly decoupling them from the outer planes. And they’re optional. There’s one new Character Background which is basically “belongs to a Faction” with a list of what skill gets a bonus based on what Faction you pick. There’s even a sidebar on how to make your own faction, which is cool, I guess, but broadly misses the point. The faction writeups clearly think of them as groups the players will interact with, but not join. Some of them are clearly bad guys now. You’re not really expected to pick a favorite. (And my old favorite isn’t there anymore, which is the real lemon juice squeezed into this papercut.)

And then there’s the included adventure, “Turn of Fortune’s Wheel.” There’s a mystery that takes the players on a tour of the Gate Towns along the edge of the Outlands, which is a great structure to get a buffet-style sampler plate of the planes without having to leave the Outlands. There’s a multi-planar casino! The central mystery is actually interesting. It even serves as a stealth sequel to the 1997 module The Great Modron March.

But yeah, this is where I start a paragraph with the word “but.”

Because the title of the box set is not “Planescape”, it’s “Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse”, and “multiverse” means a different thing in 2023 than it did in 1997. So for the adventure you roll up three versions of your characters—the versions played by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, if you will—and your character “glitches” between them. It’s not a terrible mechanic, and kind of a cool premise, but that’s not the kind of multiverse we were talking about?

And, this is where I sort of chuckle and shake my head, the adventure has the exact same beginning as Torment. And I mean, exactly the same: you wake up on a slab in The Mortuary with amnesia, and there’s Morte the talking skull giving you a hard time. The central spine of the plot is to find out who you were, and why you keep coming back to life when you die. It’s the same set of ideas as Torment, just less interesting.

And I get it. I get it. Here in the twenties, if someone under 40 has played Planescape, they played Torment. And more importantly, they played the first 20 minutes of Torment, because a slightly buggy crunchy AD&D CRPG from the late 90s is basically unplayable today. Not technically, DosBox has you covered, but too much time has passed for those mechanics. So all most people know about Planescape is that there’s a weird morgue with a talking skull in it. So, yeah, you put that in. Sure you do.

So we end up with the “go anywhere do anything” setting going the same places doing—literally—the same things. It’s got that big franchise relaunch style where it spends a bunch of time covering old ground, gesturing at things going “hey, remember this?” Even when it drops the occasional deep cut, like an oblique reference to the original Planescape finale, Dead Gods, it manages to feel more patronizing than anything. The title of the second chapter of the adventure is “Philosophers with Clubs”, although the content of that chapter contains neither, but hey, ‘member when Zeb Cook said that?

And I haven’t even mentioned the walking castle thats blatantly just “Howl’s Moving Castle.”

Its’s high quality, well done. I found it all genuinely upsetting.

To be clear, theres nothing in here that's actually bad. It is, to coin a phrase, "perfectly cromulent", a solid-if-uninspiring update of an out-of-print setting to current corporate standards. The game my kid is in at jr high dropped everything they were doing and moved to this the second it came out. Walking though portals to fight new kinds of monsters is still cool when you're twelve, no matter what the art looks like. And, believe me, I understand there's a difference between "biggest release of the year for the most successful product line from a multi-billion dollar company" and "crazy swing for the fences from a nitche company that's going out of business."

But, I don’t understand the point of doing a new Planescape if you’re going to make it the same house style as everything else. Why not just do a new Manual of the Planes? The mechanics were never the point, what little of them there were. It was all about style and vibes, and all the style and vibes are gone.

And you know what? That’s my whole review. They took the most distinct, unique setting they ever had and sandblasted it until it was the same as everything else. Why bother? Why bring it back if this is what you were going to do?

Maybe this is just old guy grousing, and kids who find this for the first time in their teens will spend the next two decades dreaming about Sigil like I did. I hope so?

(This is where I casually mention inside some parentheses that DriveThroughPRG will do you a print-on-demand copy of the original for thirty bucks.)

However, Hasbro’s new Planescape isn’t the only game in town for extra-planar adventures in D&D…

Path of the Planebreaker by Bruce R. Cordell, Monte Cook, Sean K. Reynolds

Monte Cook was on the original Planescape team, then was one of the co-designers for D&D 3rd edition. He’s been running his own company for most of the 21st century, these days mostly knocking out new games based on the system he designed for his signature game, Numenera.

However, he also has an almost supernatural ability to release a product for D&D right before Hasbro does a version of the same thing, so last year just before the new Planescape was announced he did his own “Planescape for 5e”: Path of the Planebreaker.

A cursed moon—The Planebreaker—crashes from plane to plane, traversing the whole of the multiverse. The trail it leaves behind can be used as a road to travel the planes, assuming you have the right key.

The book outlines dozens of planes that the Planebreaker has crashed through, and in keeping with Monte Cook’s style, they’re all weird as hell. The Planebreaker itself, and the city of Timeborne on it, is a very cool “home base” location. It’s a very Monte Cook product: weird places? Check. Mysterious plot hooks-a-plenty? Check? Cool magic? Check. More than anything, this really fills the niche the planes used to have of “weird places high level characters can go and loot”. It’s the ideal sort of product to click into an existing game to blow out the horizons. The Planebreaker appears in the sky, shenanigans ensue.

You can tell everyone working on this knows how the D&D Great Wheel cosmology works, and while this doesn’t interact with it, it doesn’t contradict it either. These are the weirder planes further out from the ones near Sigil.

Great stuff, I really enjoyed it.

The Book of Ebon Tides by Wolfgang Baur & Celeste Conowitch

Meanwhile, Wolfgang Baur, who was also on the original Planescape team, also started his own company, Kobold Press (after writing the single best book for 3rd edition D&D, The Book of Roguish Luck, for Monte Cook’s old company). Legend has it that he pitched a Plane of Shadow book for the original Planescape back in the 90s which went nowhere. Two decades on, he finally wrote it: Book of Ebon Tides. And look, that’s pretty much the whole review: “Wolfgang Baur finally wrote his Shadow book.”

It’s pretty amazing. Here, the Plane of Shadow is reimagined as a dark counterpart of the real world filled with fay courts and shadow creatures; it’s Midsummer Nights Dream set in the dark world from A Link to the Past. Weird forests. Shadow goblins. Shadow magic. And you can play an anthropomorphic bear. This is the kind of book where every single page has something on it where you go “wow, that’s cool.” There’s a whole flock of character options, new races, new spells, every characer class gets a new shadow-themed subclass. The Book of Roguish Luck had this very cool “shadow thief” class for 3rd edition, and I was really hoping this would have an updated version. Oh yeah, that’s in here. And then some.

It’s full of hooks for Kobold’s home setting of “Midgard”, but that stuff is easy to strip out or sand down, and this also could click incredibly easy into any other campaign. I tend to buy books like this so I can loot them for other games, and I am going to be looting this one for years. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to scrap the game you’re currently running, drop it on the table, and tell your players, “so, we’re doing this now.”

Young Adventurer’s Collection: Places & Portals

The Young Adventurer’s Collection is a series of books Hasbro has been putting out aimed at younger readers that introduce the concepts of D&D without any of those pesky rules getting in the way. They’re perfect if you’re say, a mid-40s RPG nerd with a tween-aged kid whose really into this whole D&D thing but needs a softer onramp than the PHB. Places & Portals is the latest, covering, like it says, other places you can go. It hits the high points of the planes as a concept, but mostly I bring this up because it also has a chapter on Spelljammer. When the Spelljammer box came out last year, there was some debate about whether the “Doomspace” in the included adventures was really supposed to be Dark Sun in disguise? Well, Places & Portals came out first, and has has the same map of the Astral Plane as the Spelljammer box, except the solar system labeled “Doomspace” in Spelljammer is called “Athasspace” here. As a long time fan of that setting, I love that they collapsed the dark sun and dropped Athas into a black hole. Perfect ending, no notes.

Journeys through the Radiant Citadel

But lets loop back around. Before the new Planescape, before the new Spelljammer, Hasbro put out a book called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. This was one of the adventure anthologies they do every other year or so, and has thirteen short adventures, most of which could work as a one shot. The signature feature of this book, though, was that it was entirely done by people of color.

The Radiant Citadel is an ancient magical city floating out in the Etherial plane (positioning this as both an anti-Spelljammer and anti-Planescape), and each adventure takes place in one of the locations the Citadel has a portal to. Are these locations other planes, other worlds in the prime material, somewhere else? The book is ambiguous about this, to its benefit. There’s no overarching cosmology here beyond “the universe is vast and wondrous.”

These locations and adventures all draw from world mythologies and traditions other than the warmed over Tolkien/Howard we were talking about. But they’re not just “the asian one” or “the indian one”, they’re all riffs and combinations of ideas, pulling from a far wider pool than D&D traditionally has. They all feel new. Each adventure is a tiny gem, sketching out a world outside the confines of the few pages they have. And these aren’t just dungeon crawls with a different skin, there are puzzles, negotiations, diplomacy. Most of the adventures center around arriving in a new place, figuring out how that world works, and then using that knowlede to solve a problem or help somebody. It’s probably the best book Hasbro put out for 5th edition. Yes, it's better than the new Ravenloft.

Forget the editorial failures of the new Spelljammer or the sandblasted new Planescape: this is what D&D should look like in the twenties. This. This is what I wanted from Planescape, this is what attracted me to the old Planescape as a teenager. A glorious mashup of world cultures and mythologies, evocative art, neat ideas, adventurers going to weird places and doing cool stuff.

In conclusion, the new Planescape is fantastic: it’s called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Strongest possible recommendation.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 4—RPGs

Paranoia (2023)

Everyone knows (at least) one of those people that are not themselves funny, but love something funny a little too much, which they can–and do—quote at length. In my age cohort, this was always Monty Python, or The Princess Bride, or Ghostbusters. People who’ve replaced having an actual sense of humor with memorizing the Dead Parrot Sketch or something, and as you listen to them shouting “Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam” for the umpteenth time, you think to yourself, wait, was this ever funny? Because they don’t really know what made it funny, and so they can’t themselves replicate it, and drained of the performance, there’s nothing really there.

The new edition of Paranoia is like that. The authors love Paranoia—LOVE IT—but can’t seem to actually convey whats so great about it. It’s page after page of the authors directly saying “this is the funniest thing ever wowee” without actually getting to anything, you know, funny?

Making this worse, they seem vaguely aware that “satire” is a thing, but don’t know what that means or how to do it. Mostly this is because they don’t have a take, they aren’t satirizing anything specific, just sort of vaguely gesturing that dystopias are bad? The back cover blurb ends with: “And here it is, a brand-new edition for the modern world. Surely there is nothing happening these days worthy of satire, right?” But… there’s nothing in here that does that? There’s plenty of targets from the current era, but the game sticks to enervated versions of the stuff that was there back in the early 80s. Even the core joke, that Friend Computer was so determined to fend off Communism that it built a perfect communist society, seems to have blown past them.

The result is a zombie, Paranoia-shaped game that just leans into the slapstick, “it’s funny when the players kill each other” parts. And yes it is, but that’s not the whole game, guys.

Of course, the memory cheats, so I dug out my copy of the original first edition Paranoia, and yep, that still slaps. That’s written by people with a Take, a solidly anti-Reagan/Thatcher satire with things to say. Friend Computer says to keep playing the original, citizen. Maybe it’s okay for some art to stay in its time, and not get a “brand-new edition”.

Kitty Noir

My kids aged out of Magical Kitties Save the Day basically the exact moment it was released, which was a bummer, because it’s a really neat younger-kids focused RPG. I happily backed the kickstarter for Kitty Noir, their film noir/golden age science fiction setting, hoping it would give me a way to age up the material a little. Spoiler: not so much.

Like all Magical Kitties books, it has the format of a kid’s picture book, with gorgeous art and great layout and design. The contents are a fun pastiche of film noir tropes while keeping them safe for an under-ten crowd. My one complaint is that its a little thin content-wise, there isn’t much here that you couldn’t freestyle after binging Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, just to pick two random movies I can see from where I’m sitting.

Still, it’s a fun expansion to a fun game.

If I Were A Litch, Man by Lucian Kahn

It’s a box with three Jewish-themed RPGs. In the first—“If I Were A Litch, Man—you play a group of litches arguing about best way to defend the community from rampaging paladins. The second—“Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzva“—takes place at a Bat Mitzva party where one of the guests is turning into a vampire. The third—“Grandma’s Drinking Song”—is a singing game about a family of bootleggers during prohibition. They’re all amazing.

That said, there’s this new generation of extremely rules-light narrative/improv-heavy games that I really, really like, but do not know how to play. I don’t mean that in some kind of facetious “needs moar maths!” way, I mean I read the book and go “wow, that’s the coolest damn thing, but I genuinely don’t know what to do here.” Not a bad thing, to be clear! I’m glad the drama kids found our hobby and rescued us from the applied maths dorks, I just have a lot to unlearn. Back when I was in junior high, the cutting edge of RPG design was THAC0. I’m riven with jealousy that the kids today instead get things like this.

I Have The High Ground by Jess Levine

Few things have made me feel more old than the fact that this game is called “I have the high ground”, and not “I am not left-handed.”

It describes itself as “a collaborative two-player dueling game of banter, posturing, and capes” and so it is. But it’s not a fencing game—this covers the banter and drama before things get physical. Each match ends with weapons being drawn and the “real fight” starting. While the title obviously invokes Episode III, the Star War it most closely matches is the duel at the end of Return of the Jedi; if you’re playing this game right, every session ends with two lightsabers igniting and slamming into each other while the Emperor cackles.

The mechanics are, well, they’re rock-paper-scissors, but they’re used to shape the insults, baits, goads, and reparte as the two players score, basically, “making the other player mad” points. It’s only barely a “game” from a classic TTRPG sense, but it’s an absolutely amazing improv drama set of prompts. You probably couldn’t convince the other kids in the jr high Magic: the Gathering club to play this, but you probably could get the drama club to play this every week. Really fun.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 3

Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas by John Scalzi

Redshirts caused quite a stir when it came out originally, and rightly so! It’s brilliant. The premise is straightforward: the junior officers of the Universal Union starship Intrepid start to notice that whoever goes down to the planet with the captain and other senior officers always dies while those senior officers always live, and they decide to do something about it. It was, and probably still is, Scalzi’s best book. The extended riffs on Trek tropes are fun, and then manages to move into a place thats both more meta and more interesting. I recall the length of the codas getting some criticism at the time, but like the Scouring of the Shire, they’re the whole point.

I could have sworn I read this back when it came out, but my copy has vanished over the years, so I impulse bought a new one. I remembered the front half very clearly, but the back half not so much, which implies a variety of funny things.

I have to admit, though, this plays very different in a world with Lower Decks. When this came out in ’13, Star Trek was pretty much dead as an ongoing concern, so metafictional deconstructions had a lot of space to breathe. Now, in a world where the two best Trek shows of all time are currently in production (LD and SNW, for the record,) one of which is covering much of the same ground of digging into the long-running tropes of the franchise, Redshirts stops feeling quite so cutting edge and starts feeling a little behind.vvI’ve not seen Redshirts cited as a specific inspiration for Lower Decks, but I’d be stunned if it wasn’t in the mix. As it is, I spent a lot of time (re?)reading this book thinking, “Boimler and Mariner landed this joke better.”

Still! Great read, and the codas are what make it work. Great, great ending. (When the time comes, I hope LD has one as satisfying.)

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Scalzi’s latest operates much in the same zippy, light-weight “beach read” gear as last year’s Kaiju Preservation Society. The main character unexpectedly inherits his estranged uncle’s super-villain business, hijinks ensue. It’s not his best work, but still a thoroughly entertaining potboiler.

As he’s been very open about, he was clobbered by COVID halfway though the book, and as he put it got “brain scrambled” afterwards, and as such he turned the manuscript in very, very late. It’s dangerous to try and map too much of an author’s private life onto their work, but I feel like you can spot the exact page where he shakes off the Long Covid stupor and says “shit, I have to finish this.” I do not believe for one second that the resolution at the end of the book is what he had in mind while writing the first half, it’s sloppy in a “genius in a panic” sort of way, but it’s still fun.

(And man, I could have sworn I wrote this review already, but damned if I could find it.)

Midnight pals vols 1-3 by Bitter Karella

The print form of the @midnight_pals twitter feed, we find a collection of horror authors (King, Lovecraft, Barker, Poe, Koontz) sitting around a campfire telling stories, with guest appearances by… basically every other author you’ve ever heard of? It’s hilarious when you know who the guest authors are, and utterly inscrutable when you don’t. I loved it. As an aside, more people from the old twitter should just sell a print copy of their tweets?

Complete Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Inspired by the next entry, I started reading Calvin & Hobbes with the kids. Turns out: just as good as you remember.

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson

Oh wait, I already wrote about this: The Mysteries

Dracula Daily by Bram Stoker and the internet

Hang on, I already wrote about this one too: Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 by Elizabeth Sandifer

I am a huge, huge fan of Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum, “An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who”. Essentially, a history of British culture told through the format of “in-depth literary analysis of all of Doctor Who”. Primarily a blog, she’s been updating and repackaging the material into book form. This is a format I wish more bloggers would use; there’s quite a few bloggers I wouldn’t mind picking up a print essay collection from every few years.

This is Volume 8, which covers the period from the disastrous TV movie in ’96 to the first season of the revived show in ’05, with all the deeply weird spin-off material from between those. There’s two threads to this one: what had to happen for the show to finally come back, and why didn’t any of the various previous swings work? (Spoiler: an actually good writer finally got ahold of it.) She’s much kinder to most of this material than I am; none of this stuff was very good, but there’s a lot to talk about, and she always has an interesting take. Due to the scale of the undertaking, there are very few critical works that cover all of Doctor Who. Of those, the Eruditorum is my favorite.

As an aside, she’s just kicked off her coverage of the Whittaker years on the website, having gotten a preview on the patreon, it’s gonna be a banger.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 2

House of X/Powers of X By Johnathan Hickman and others

The X-Men are a weird superhero book, even by american super hero standards. One of the strange things about them is their inability to be mediocre—the X-men are either “as good as superheroes get” or “unreadable trash” with no ground in-between. Compare that to, say, Spider-man, whose spent most of the last 60 years being “yeah, that was pretty good I guess,” with occasional outbreaks of brilliance or clones. This doesn't just apply to the books either: the movies, shows, what-have-you are all either one side of the scale or the other. To put that another way: no one has ever left an X-Men movie without having a strong opinion about what they just saw.

There’s a couple reasons for this, I think? There’s a weird mix of elements: they’re teachers, but also a commando team? In a world full of “regular” super heros, no one likes them? Also, a soap opera? And they’re a metaphor for the dealer’s choice of minority groups. And, the X-Men suffer more than most from the “fighting for the status quo” problem most superheroes have. The upshot is that to make them work, you have to actually have a take, it can’t just be “well, I guess Magneto is up to something again”.

The result is that the’re on this roughly 20 year cycle of someone coming in, having a new take that works, and then Marvel spends the next 10–15 years bleeding out everything from that burst of ideas. Lee & Kirby in the early 60s, Claremont & Byrne in the late 70s, Morrison at the turn of the century.

We’re due for a new spin, and Hickman wipes the deck clear and delivers. He kicked his run off with two linked books, pronounced House of “Ex” and Powers of “Ten”. (All good X-Men runs seem to center around using X to mean 10 in unexpected places.) The core metaphor and premise is pretty straightforward: we’re doing the formation of the State of Israel, but for mutants. (And with the Shi’ar Empire standing in for the United States as the not-so-subtle equipment supplier). This is coupled with a take that basically boils down to: “you know, if all these guys would just work together they’d be unstoppable.”

It’s about as good as the X-Men have ever been, and finally shake off the whole “fighting to protect the ones that hate them” angle: they have their own island now, and you can enter as much anti-mutant legislation as you like. Hickman has a great time riffing on this: Mutants have diplomatic immunity, Magneto is the Ambassador to the US, there are trade agreements. Plus, continuing on the “formation of Israel” angle, the fact that the mutants keep getting genocided gets treated with more seriousness than it ever has.

The layout is also fascinating, mixing traditional comic layouts with infographics, with a design sense that manages to look cutting-edge and and mid-60s at the same time. (Swiss design, coming through.)

The result is genuinely great, but great in the way that you know all the interesting material is going to be drained out of this over the next decade, and all the changes or new concepts are going to be retconned out and we’ll be back to the median-value room-temperature X-Men before too long; there’s a vague itch the whole time reading it thinking “there’s no way they’re going to actually keep any of this.” Which means that they’ve set themselves up for a “Destruction of Israel” story in a bit here, which I’m sure won’t delight all the wrong people.

But, you can’t grade a piece of art down based on what you know other people are going to do with it. As it stands, Hickman has knocked out 400-something pages of as good an X-Men story as there’s ever been. It’s worth enjoying in it’s own right, if for no other reason that he served up my favorite new idea in years: Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Wolverine are just a throuple now. Perfect. See you in another couple of decades, X-Men.

X-Men Epic Collections: Fate of the Phoenix & I, Magneto by Claremont, Byrne, and others

Speaking of those wacky mutants, my son is “exactly the right age to enjoy X-men” years old, so we’ve been picking up the reprints of the greatest hits here and there. And back when I was a kid, this was the Biggest Thing Ever: Dark Phoenix! Jean Grey Dies! Drama! Action! To quote the former galactic President: “Excitement, adventure, and really wild things!”

I hadn’t read any of this in probably 30 years, so I was pleased to see that it mostly holds up? It’s a superhero drama designed to be the most epic thing imaginable to tweens, and it still is.

One thing definitely stood out in hindsight, though. There was a fair amount of behind-the-scenes drama about killing off Jean Grey—the short, short version is that Claremont didn’t want to kill the character, but the editors insisted that she “pay for her actions.” Not to re-litigate 40-year old controversy, but in retrospect it’s so obvious that Jean “had to die” because she was a woman, and they didn’t want any of the female characters to be that powerful. What’s funny is reading this all later you can tell Claremont knows this, so he replaces Jean Grey with the nearly-powerless Kitty Pryde, and then makes sure Storm screws up or gets sucker-punched often enough to keep anyone from noticing how powerful she is too.

42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies

Kevin Jon Davies got started as part of the team doing the Guide animations for the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and turned that both into a friendship with Douglas Adams and a career making documentaries.

After Douglas Adams died, his collected papers ended up at Cambridge, where they mostly sat in file boxes. This book is a greatest hits collection of what Davies found when he went through them. Like a lot of posthumous collections, it’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating. As an example: there was a long standing rumor that Adams had written an entire first episode to the unmade second season of the Hitchhiker TV show, it turns out that’s true! And this book includes… only the first page. Then, the second half of the book is page after page of unrealized, unfinished projects. Fascinated, but frustrating. More than ever, this book makes me wish he’d had a business partner that could wrangle these projects over the finish line. Or, you know, make sure he got his heart checked out.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 1

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

The Late Bronze Age Collapse is one of those fascinating historical mysteries: about 3000 years ago, essentially every city in the near and middle east burned to the ground, most never to be repopulated. Greece entered the Greek Dark Ages, the New Kingdom period in Egypt ended entering one of their “intermediate periods”. It’s Mad Max, but with sandals and bronze spear heads. So, what happened? Famine, earthquakes, attacks by the mysterious “Sea Peoples?”

To orient this historically, this is after everything we think of as being “ancient Egypt”, but before “ancient Greece.” Whatever historical events inspired Exodus have already happened, and we’re roughly at the same time as whatever really happened at Troy. (And, of course, both “The Bronze Age” and “The Bronze Age Collapse” are both strictly Mediterranean-world concerns, the civilizations in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and indeed even north-western Europe would be surprised to hear there was a collapse.)

Cline does an amazing job sketching out the world of the Mediterranean at the end of the bronze age. Unlike some other places and times in history which can feel like transmissions from an alien planet, the ancient near east is familiar—cosmopolitan, connected, deeply interlinked trade, people have jobs, to the extent that there are art fads, and grecian artisans sail to all points on the Mediterranean shore because Greek-style frescoes are “so hot right now”. And then, it all burns to the ground, and no one really knows why.

After sketching out what the pre-collapse Mediterranean world was like, Cline starts to offer various suggestions about what might have happened, and right about the point you think to yourself, “oh, I get it, this was the cause,” Cline basically yells “you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you!” and whips out some new piece of evidence that disproves the theory.

Fascinating and entertaining, despite not having as clear an answer as anyone—including the author—would like. The ultimate conclusion is that it wasn’t any one thing, it was everything—a century or so filled with earthquakes, climate change–fueled famine, social unrest, attacks by displaced migrants and refugees, and, and, and… with the final result being that the entire sophisticated international order ceased to be. Chilling. In a lot of ways, it’s a real-world historical version of Gibon’s “Jackpot”. Makes me glad I don’t live in a time like that. Now, let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news…

The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again By M. John Harrison

A strange and unsettling book that’s hard to describe. I picked this up mostly because William Gibson was enthusing about it on the former twitter. I confess, it took me months to read the first half, and then I read the last third practically in one sitting.

The best description I can give is that it’s like a book starring the characters who live next door to a Stephen King novel. Strange and disturbing things are happening just out of sight, and the main characters are a little too wrapped up in themselves to notice. As it proceeds, the book moves into a space more akin to Lovecraft (but without the racism) where these things that are happening are too alien for the characters, or the reader, to perceive correctly.

The end was almost unspeakably unsettling. I’m glad I read it. Strongly recommended.

Fast Times In Comic Book Editing By Shelly Bond and a bunch of artists

Shelly Bond was the assistant editor for DC’s Vertigo line in the 90s, and was the last person out the door when DC finally turned the lights off a few decades later. She worked on—basically—everything, and was one of those under-recognized figures, instrumental in Vertigo being Vertigo.

She kickstarted a graphic novel memoir, telling stories about both being in her early 20s in manhattan while also being at the ground floor of an artistic movement. Not every kickstarter turns out to have been worth it, but this one absolutely was.

Snow Glass Apples By Colleen Doran And Neil Gaiman

Snow, Glass, Apples started life as a relatively minor Gaiman short story, later adapted to graphic novel form by Doran. The plot is slender, even by Gaiman standards: what if there was something we didn't know about the story of Snow White, and what if the so-called “Evil Queen” knew something we didn’t? What if the story we know is because the victor gets to write history? (Spoiler: Snow White is a vampire). The plot isn’t the attraction, if you’ve read more than about three other stories you can correctly guess exactly how things are going to go by the end of the first page. The attraction is Doran’s absolutely gorgeous art, turning a fun-if-simplistic “fractured fairytale” into a visual masterpiece. I really, really enjoyed it.

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

Hey, Wait!

Bea Wolf is a surprisingly-accurate retelling of the first third of Beowulf—for kids. Treeheart—the suburban treehouse that all the kids in the neighborhood hang out in is under attack by their nefarious neighbor, Mister Grindle, who can’t stand the sounds of merry-making. Fortunately, a group of kids from the suburb upriver ride their inner-tubes down the sliding-sea to help, led by the steadfast Bea Wolf.

The art is outstanding, but the standout here is the writing: Zack Weinersmith (mostly of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame) does an absolutely incredible job writing a modern, kid-friendly version of the story that keeps the rhythms, alliterations, digressions, and kennings all intact. This is, without question, the most fun I have ever had reading a book out loud to my kids.

Reader, if you’ve got kids in your life and haven’t picked this up yet, go order a copy right now, trust me.

Books I read in 2022, part 3

(That I have mostly nice things to say about)

Programming note: while clearning out the drafts folder as I wind the year down, I discovered that much to my amusement and surprise I wrote most of the third post on the books I read last year, but somehow never posted it? One editing & expansion pass later, and here it is.

Previously , Previously .

Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, adapted by Colleen Duran

A perfect jewel of a book. The story is slight, but sweet. Duran’s art, however, is gorgeous, perfectly sliding between the style of an illuminated manuscript and watercolor paintings. A minor work by two very capable artists, but clearly a labor of love, and tremendous fun.

The Murderbot Diaries 1&2: All Systems Red and Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

As twitter started trending towards it’s final end last summer, I decided I’b better stary buying some of the books I’d been seeing people enthuse about. There was a stretch there where it seemed like my entire timeline was praise for Murderbot.

For reasons due entirely to my apparent failures of reading comprehension, I was expecting a book starring, basically, HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. A robot clanking around, calling people meatbags, wanting to be left along, and so on.

The actual books are so much better than that. Instead, it’s a story about your new neurodivergent best friend, trying to figure themselves out and be left alone while they do it. It’s one of the very best uses of robots as a metaphor for something else I’ve ever seen, and probably the first new take on “what do we use robots for besides an Asimov riff” since Blade Runner. It was not what I expected at all, or really in the mood for at the time, and I still immediately bought the next book.

Some other MoonKnights not worth typing the whole titles of

All pumped after the Lumire/Smallwood stuff, I picked up a few other more recent MoonKnights. I just went downstairs and flipped through them again, and I don’t remember a single thing about them. They were fine, I guess?

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and others

Inspired by the Netflix show (capsule review: great casting, visually as dull as dishwater, got better the more it did it’s own thing and diverged from the books) I went back and read the original comic run for the first time since the turn of the century. When I was in college, there was a cohort of mostly gay, mostly goth kids for whom Sandman was everything. I was neither of those things, but hung out in the subcultures next door, as you will. I liked it fine, and probably liked it more that I would normally have because of how many good friends loved it.

Nearly three decades later, I had a very similar reaction. It always worked best when it moved towards more of an light-horror anthology, where a rotating batch of artists would illustrate stories where deeply weird things happened and then Morpheus would show up at the end and go “wow, that’s messed up.” There’s a couple of things that—woof—haven’t aged super well? Overall, though, still pretty good.

Mostly, though, it made me nostalgic for those people I used to know who loved it so much. I hope they’re all doing well!

Death, the Deluxe Edition

Everything I had to say about Sandman goes double for Death.

Sandman Overture by Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III

I never read this when it came out, but I figured as long as I was doing a clean sweep of the Sandman, it was time to finally read it. A lot of fun, but I don’t believe for a hot second this is what Gaiman had in mind when he wrote the opening scene of the first issue back in the late 80s.

The art, though! The art on the original series operated on a spread from “pretty good” to “great for the early 90s”. No insult to the artists, but what the DC production pipeline and tooling could do at the time was never quite up to what Sandman really seemed to call for. And, this is still well before “what if every issue had good art, tho” was the standard for American comics.

The art here is astounding. Page after page of amazing spreads. You can feel Gaiman nodding to himself, thinking “finally! This was how this was always supposed to look.”

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Oh heck yes, this is the stuff. A (very) loose retelling of the story of Wu Zeitan, the first and only female Chinese emperor, in a futuristic setting where animal-themed mechs have Dragonball Z fights. It’s the sort of book where you know exactly how it’s going to end, but the fun is seeing how the main character pulls it off. I read it in one sitting.

Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

Oh, what a disappointment.

Let’s back up for a sec. Spelljammer was an early-90s 2nd Edition D&D setting, which boiled down to essentially “magical sailing ships in space, using a Ptolemaic-style cosmology. It was a soft replacement for the Manual of the Planes, as a way to link campaign worlds together and provide “otherworldly“ adventures without having to get near the demons and other supernatural elements that had become a problem during the 80s “satanic panic.” (It would ultimately be replaced by Planescape, which brought all that back and then some.)

Tone-wise, Spelljammer was basically “70s van art”. It was never terribly successful, and thirty years on it was mostly a trivia answer, although fondly remembered by a small cadre of aging geeks. As should be entirely predictable, I loved it.

Initially, 5th edition wasn’t interested in past settings others that the deeply boring Forgotten Realms. But as the line continued, and other settings started popping back up, Spelljammer started coming up. What if? And then, there it was.

For the first time in the game’s history, 5th edition found a viable product strategy: 3 roughly 225 to 250-page hardcovers a year, two adventures, one some kind of rules expansion. The adventures occasionally contained a new setting, but the setting was always there to support the story, rather than the other way around.

Spelljammer was going to be different: a deluxe boxed set with a DM screen and three 64-page hardcovers, a setting and rules book, a monster book, and an adventure. (Roughly mirroring the PHB, DMG, MM core books.)

The immediate problem will be obvious to anyone good at mental arithmetic, which is that as a whole the product was 30 to 60 pages shorter than normal, and it felt like it. Worse, the structure of the three hardbacks meant that the monster book and adventure got way more space than they needed, crushing the actual setting material down even further.

As a result, there’s so much that just isn’t there. The setting is boiled down to the barest summary; all the chunky details are gone. As the most egregious example, in the original version The Spelljammer is a legendary ship akin to the flying dutchman, that ship makes up the background of the original logo. The Spelljammer herself isn’t even mentioned in the new version.

Even more frustrating, what is here is pretty good. They made some very savvy changes to better fit with everything else (Spelljammers now travel through the “regular” astral plane instead of “the phogiston” for example). But overall it feels like a sketch for what a 5E spelljammer could look line instead of a finished product.

This is exacerbated by the fact that this release also contains most of a 5E Dark Sun. One of the worst-kept secrets in the industry was that Hasbro had a 5E Dark Sun book under development that was scrapped before release. The races and creatures from that effort ended up here. Dark Sun also gets an amazing cameo: the adventure includes a stop in “Doomspace”, a solar system where the star has become a black hole, and the inhabited planet is just on the cusp of being sucked in. While the names are all slightly changed, this is blatantly supposed to be the final days of Athas. While I would have been first in line to pick up a 5E Dark Sun, having the setting finally collapse in on itself in another product entirely is a perfect end to the setting. I kind of loved it.

Finally, Spelljammer had some extremely racist garbage in it. To the extent that it’s hard to believe that these book had any editorial oversight at all. For a product that had the physical trappings (and price) of a premium product, the whole package came across as extremely half-assed. Nowhere more so that in the fact that they let some white supremacist shit sail through unnoticed.

Spelljammer, even more so than the OGL shitshow, caused me fundamentally reassess my relationship with the company that owns D&D. I still love the game, but I’m going to need to prove it to me before I buy anything else from them. Our support should be going elsewhere.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Back during the mid-00s webcomics boom, there were a lot of webcomics that were good for webcomics, but a much smaller set that were good for comics, full stop. Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant! stood head and shoulders above that second group.

Most of the people who made webcomics back then have moved on, using their webcomic to open doors to other—presumably better paying—work. Most of them have moved on from the styles from their web work. To use one obvious and slightly cheap example, Ryan North’s Squirrel Girl has different panels on each page, you know?

One of the many, many remarkable things about Ducks is that is’s recognizably the same style as Hark a Vagrant!, just deployed for different purpose. All her skills as a storyteller and and cartoonist are on display here, her ability to capture expressions with only a few lines, the sharp wit, the impeccable timing, but this book is not even remotely funny.

It chronicles the years she spent working on the Oil Sands in Alberta. A strange, remote place, full of people, mostly men, trying to make enough money to leave.

Other than a brief introduction, the book has no intrusions from the future, there’s no narration contextualizing the events. Instead, it plays out as a series of vignettes of her life there, and she trusts that the reader is smart enough to understand why she’s telling these stories in this order.

It’s not a spoiler, or much of one anyway, to say that a story about a young woman in a remote nearly all-male environment goes the way you hope it doesn’t. There’s an incredible tension to the first half of the book where you know something terrible is going to happen, it’s a horrible relief when it finally does.

As someone closer in age to her parents than her when this all happened, I found myself in a terrible rage at them as I read it—how could you let her do this? How could you let this happen? But they didn’t know. And there was nothing they could do.

It was, by far, the best book I read last year. It haunts my memory.

Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority by a bunch of hacks

I loved the original run on The Authority 20 years ago, and Jenny Sparks is one of my all-time favorite comic book characters, but I had never read Millar’s prequel miniseries about her. I picked up a copy in a used bookstore. I wish I hadn’t. It was awful.

She-Hulk omnibus 1 by Dan Slot et al

Inspired by the Disney+ show (which I loved) I picked up the first collection of the early-00s reboot of She-Hulk. I had never read these, but I remember what a great reception they got at the time. But… this wasn’t very good? It was far too precious, the 4th wall breaking way too self-conscious. A super-hero law firm with a basement full of every marvel comic as a caselaw library is a great one-off joke, but a terrible ongoing premise. The art was pretty good, though.

She-Hulk Epic Collection: Breaking the Fourth Wall by John Byrne, Steve Gerber, and Others

On the other hand, this is the stuff. Byrne makes the 4th wall breaks look easy, and there’s at joy and flow to the series that the later reboots lack. She-Hulk tearing out of the page and screaming in rage at the author is an absolutes delight. And then, when Byrne leaves, he’s replaced by Steve “Howard the Duck” Gerber, and it got even better,

Valuable Humans in Transit and other stories by qntm

This short story collection inclues the most upsetting horror story I’ve ever read, Lena, and the sequel, which manages to be even worse. Great writing, strongly recommended.

Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)

What makes a good book-to-movie adaptation?

Or to look at it the other way, what makes a bad one?

Books and movies are very different mediums and therefore—obviously—are good at very different things. Maybe the most obvious difference is that books are significantly more information-dense than movies are, so any adaptation has to pick and choose what material to keep.

The best adaptations, though, are the ones that keep the the themes and characters—what the book is about— and move around, eliminate, or combine the incidents of the plot to support them. The most successful, like Jaws or Jurassic Park for example, are arguably better than their source material, jettisoning extraneous sideplots to focus on the main concepts.

Conversely, the worst adaptations are the ones that drop the themes and change the point of the story. Stephen King somewhat famously hates the movie version of The Shining because he wrote a very personal book about his struggle with alcoholism disguised as a haunted hotel story, and Kubrick kept the ghosts but not the rest. The movie version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was made by people who thought the details of the plot were more important than the jokes, rather than the other way around, and didn’t understand why the Nutrimat was bad.

And really, it’s the themes, the concepts, the characters, that make stories appeal to us. It’s not the incidents of the plot we connect to, it’s what the story is about. That’s what we make the emotional connection with.

And this is part of what makes a bad adaptation so frustrating.

While the existence of a movie doesn’t erase the book it was based on, it’s a fact that movies have higher profiles, reach bigger audiences. So it’s terribly disheartening to have someone tell you they watched a movie based on that book you like that they didn’t read, when you know all the things that mattered to you didn’t make it into the movie.

And so we come to The Lord of the Rings! The third movie, Return of the King turned 20 this week, and those movies are unique in that you’ll think they’re either a fantastic or a terrible adaptation based on which character was your favorite.

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Broadly speaking, Lord of the Rings tells two stories in parallel. The first, is a big epic fantasy, with Dark Lords, and Rings of Power, and Wizards, and Kings in Exile. Strider is the main character of this story, with a supporting cast of Elves, Dwarves, and Horse Vikings. The second is a story about some regular guys who are drawn into a terrifying and overwhelming adventure, and return home, changed by the experience. Sam is the main character of the second story, supported by the other Hobbits.

(Frodo is an interestingly transgressive character, because he floats between the two stories, never committing to either. But that’s a whole different topic.)

And so the book switches modes based on which characters are around. The biggest difference between the modes is the treatment of the Ring. When Strider or Gandalf or any other character from the first story are around, the Ring is the most evil thing in existence—it has to be. So Gandalf refuses to take it, Galadriel recoils, it’s a source of unstoppable corruption.

But when it’s just the Hobbits, things are different. That second story is both smaller and larger at the the same time—constantly cutting the threat of the Ring off at the knees by showing that there are larger and older things than the Ring, and pointing out thats it’s the small things really matter. So Tom Bombadil is unaffected, Faramir gives it back without temptation, Sam sees the stars through the clouds in Mordor. There are greater beauties and greater powers than some artifact could ever be.

This is, to be clear, not a unique structure. To pull an obvious example, Star Wars does the same thing, paralleling Luke’s kid from the sticks leaving home and growing into his own person with the epic struggle for the future of the entire galaxy between the Evil Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. In keeping with that movie’s clockwork structure, Lucas manages to have the climax of both stories be literally the exact same moment—Luke firing the torpedoes into the exhaust port.

Tolkien is up to something different however, and climaxes his two stories fifty pages apart. The Big Fantasy Epic winds down, and then the cast reduces to the Hobbits again and they go home, where they have to use everything they’ve learned to solve their own problems instead of helping solve somebody else’s.

In my experience, everyone connects more strongly with one of the two stories. The tends to boil down to who your favorite character is—Strider or Sam. Just about everyone picks one of those two as their favorite. It’s like Elvis vs. The Beatles; most people like both, but everyone has a preference.

(And yeah, there’s always some wag that says Boromir/The Who.)

Just to put all my cards on the table, my favorite character is Sam. (And I prefer The Beatles.)

Based on how the beginning and end of the books work, it seems clear that Tolkien thought of that story—the regular guys being changed by the wide world story—as the “main one”, and the Big Epic was there to provide a backdrop.

There’s an entire cottage industry of people explaining what “Tolkien really meant” in the books, and so there’s not a lot of new ground to cover there, so I’ll just mention that the “regular dudes” story is clearly the one influenced—not “based on”, but influenced—by his own WWI experiences and move on.

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Which brings us back to the movies.

Even with three very long movies, there’s a lot more material in the books than could possibly fit. And, there’s an awful lot of things that are basically internal or delivered through narration that need dramatizing in a physical way to work as a film.

So the filmmakers made the decision to adapt only that first story, and jettison basically everything from the second.

This is somewhat understandable? That first story has all the battles and orcs and wargs and wizards and things. That second story, if you’re coming at it from the perspective of trying to make an action movie, is mostly Sam missing his garden? From a commercial point of view, it’s hard to fault the approach. And the box office clearly agreed.

And this perfectly explains all the otherwise bizarre changes. First, anything that undercuts the Ring has to go. So, we cut Bombadil and everything around him for time, yes, but also we can’t have a happy guy with a funny hat shake off the Ring in the first hour before Elrond has even had a chance to say any of the spooky lines from the trailer. Faramir has to be a completely different character with a different role. Sam and Frodo’s journey across the plains of Mordor has to play different, becase the whole movie has to align on how terrible the Ring is, and no stars can peek through the clouds to give hope, no pots can clatter into a crevasse to remind Sam of home. Most maddeningly, Frodo has to turn on Sam, because the Ring is all-powerful, and we can’t have an undercurrent showing that there are some things even the Ring can’t touch.

In the book, Sam is the “hero’s journey” characer. But, since that whole story is gone, he gets demoted to comedy sidekick, and Aragorn is reimagined into that role, and as such needs all the trappings of the Hero with a Thousand Faces retrofitted on to him. Far from the confident, legendary superhero of the books, he’s now full of doubt, and has to Refuse the Call, have a mentor, cross A Guarded Threshold, suffer ordeals, because he’s now got to shoulder a big chunk of the emotional storytelling, instead of being an inspirational icon for the real main characters.

While efficient, this all has the effect of pulling out the center of the story—what it’s about.

It’s also mostly crap, because the grafted-on hero’s journey stuff doesn’t fit well. Meanwhile, one of the definitive Campbell-style narratives is lying on the cutting room floor.

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One of the things that makes Sam such a great character is his stealth. He’s there from the very beginning, present at every major moment, an absolutely key element in every success, but the book keeps him just out of focus—not “off stage”, but mostly out of the spotlight.

It’s not until the last scene—the literal last line—of the book that you realize that he was actually the main character the whole time, you just didn’t notice.

The hero wasn’t the guy who became King, it was the guy who became mayor.

He’s why my laptop bag always has a coil of rope in the side pocket—because you’ll want if if you don’t have it.

(I also keep a towel in it, because it’s a rough universe.)

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And all this is what makes those movies so terribly frustrating—because they are an absolutely incredible adaptation of the Epic Fantasy parts. Everything looks great! The design is unbelievable! The acting, the costumes, the camera work. The battles are amazing. Helm’s Deep is one of those truly great cinematic achievements. My favorite shot in all three movies—and this is not a joke—is the shot of the orc with the torch running towards the piled up explsoves to breach the Deeping Wall like he’s about to light the olympic torch. And, in the department of good changes, the cut down speech Theoden gives in the movie as they ride out to meet the invaders—“Ride for ruin, Ride for Rohan!”—is an absolutely incredible piece of filmmaking. The Balrog! And, credit where credit is due, everything with Boromir is arguably better than in the book, mostly because Sean Bean makes the character into an actual character instead of a walking skepticism machine.

So if those parts were your jam, great! Best fantasy movies of all time! However, if the other half was your jam, all the parts that you connected to just weren’t there.

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I’m softer on the “breakdancing wizards” fight from the first movie than a lot of fellow book purists, but my goodness do I prefer Gandalf’s understated “I liked white better,” over Magneto yelling about trading reason for madness. I understand wanting to goose the emotion, but I think McKellen could have made that one sing.

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There’s a common complaint about the movie that it “has too many endings.” And yeah, the end of the movie version of Return of the King is very strange, playing out a whole series of what amount to head-fake endings and then continuing to play for another half an hour.

And the reason is obvious—the movie leaves the actual ending out! The actual ending is the Hobbits returning home and using everything they’ve learned to save the Shire; the movie cuts all that, and tries to cobble a resolution of out the intentionally anti-climactic falling action that’s supposed to lead into that.

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Lord of the Rings: the Movie, is a story about a D&D party who go on an exciting grueling journey to destroy an evil ring, and then one of them becomes the King. Lord of the Rings: the Book, is a story about four regular people who learn a bunch of skills they don’t want to learn while doing things they don’t want to do, and then come home and use those skills to save their family and friends.

I know which one I prefer.

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What makes a good adaptation? Or a bad one?

Does it matter if the filmmaker’s are on the same page as the author?

What happens when they’re only on the same page with half of the audience?

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The movies are phenomenally well made, incredibly successful films that took one of the great heros of fiction and sandblasted him down to the point where there’s a whole set of kids under thirty who think his signature moment was yelling “po-TAY-toes” at some computer animation.

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For the record: yes, I am gonna die mad about it.

Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition

A couple of newsletters I devoured over the last few years have book versions out. Let me recommend them to you!

50 Years of Text Games

Over 2021, Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games covered the history of text computer games every week, covering 1971 to 2020, one game per year. The central conceit of only covering one game per year let him slide past some of the more well known titles and concentrate on the most interesting or notable. It was great—well written, deeply researched. (If I’m totally honest, it was the kind of project a version of me from a past life would have liked to have written, but I never would have done this good a job, and now I get to enjoy it without the work). I thought I was pretty well educated about text games, but there were a startling number of titles that I had never heard of.

After the newsletter ended, they did a kickstarter to print a deluxe book version, which I backed instantly. The resulting print edition turned out better than I ever expected, an absolutely gorgeous book with all the content from the web version with additional content, illustrations, amazing layout. Despite having already read most of it in email form, I drank my copy the book down as soon as it arrived.

I clearly wasn’t the only one that thought so, because the kickstarter-funded print run sold out essentially instantly. As such, I’ve been hesitant to enthuse about it to people since there wasn’t a way to, you know, actually get the book.

However! There’s now a new print-on-demand version of the book in both paperback and hardback. Now that it’s permanently back in print, I can say without hesitation that if the subject if even remotely interesting to you, go get yourself a copy. It’s spectacular.

Dracula Daily

Then, one of the delights of 2022 was Dracula Daily. The premise here was delightfully simple: reformat the content of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into an email newsletter. The novel’s epistolary format meant that it was already composed of letters and diary entries with dates, so the newsletter sent out the entries for a given day from the novel on the day they “happened”, from May to November. The resulting newsletter recontextualized the novel in a fun new way; now we were all getting emails from our internet buddy Johnathan Harker as he got deeper into trouble in eastern europe.

This really popped over the course of the summer of ’22, and a whole chunk of the internet turned into a free-wheeling book club. The slow burn created by getting updates “as they happened” gave the internet plenty of space for reactions, art, commentary of all kinds.

As someone who had read the book years before, it was so much fun watching people who only knew about Dracula via various movie adaptations, or just through cultural osmosis, discover how fun and weird and textured the actual book is compared to the things it inspired. There are almost too many examples to list, but particular highlights for me were watching—Tumblr especially—discover the full-bodied love story between Johnathan Harker and Mina Murray (who, as one person put it, are borderline feral for each other,) as well as getting to watch everyone meet “the cowboy who kills Dracula”.

Those two especially were fun considering there’s an entire generation who learned about Dracula from the Gary Oldman version, which is mostly a great movie, but is interested in very different things than the book is. The cowboy is there, but not nearly as critical a role. I mean, the movie keeps the assortment of “handsome suitors”, and casting “the Dread Pirate Roberts”, “Withnail”, and “the Rocketeer” to play them is genius, but they mostly take a back seat to Silence of the Lambs, which is too bad.

My least favorite part of the movie, though, is that it drains all the color out John & Mina’s romance so that there’s room for Gary Oldman to hiss “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you,” which is a great line, but Harker should have been the one to say it.

As an aside, neither Winona Rider or Keanu Reeves do the best work of their careers in that movie, to say the least, which is funny, because if you made a Dracula movie starring them today, that would be the greatest movie ever made.

Continuing into the weeds here, there’s an entire media studies thesis to be written about movie adaptations using Dracula as the case study. My favorite personally is the original Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing version, because it takes a long an involved novel, and strips it down to an incredibly tight 80 minute thriller where Saruman and Grand Moff Tarkin spark off each other in the cheapest sets Hammer Films could build. It jettisons almost everything other than “professor vs vampire” and comes out aces. But it’s the complete opposite of a movie where Dracula is stabbed by a cowboy.

(And as long as I’m ranting about Dracula-inspired media with reduced cowboy content, because Quincy Morris is clearly my favorite character in the book, this was also my big problem with D&D’s Ravenloft. It kept the gothic horror props (and the racism,) but stripped out everything fun: the love story, the cowboy, the insane asylum, the boat trip. The last quarter of the book is one of the best “D&D Party goes on a rampage” books ever written, and Ravenloft doesn’t seem to have noticed, because it wanted to plop the castle down in the vaguely medieval default D&D setting, with some generic Victorian-esque angst, and Strahd is less Dracula than Lestat wearing a Dracula costume, because the nineties. I always wanted to run a version of that campaign where the vampire was the evil wanna-be supervillan of the book, and the player characters had revolvers, since it’s set during–and I’m using a technical historian term here—cowboy times. My take was more “PCs stealing candlesticks to melt them down and coat their bullets with silver”, and less “oh, isn’t the vampire handsome”.)

But! I digress. Getting back out of the ditch and on topic: It turns out that Dracula Daily has now also become a book! Snark about how it was already a book before Dracula Daily happened, the book edition keeps the strictly chronological order of the newsletter (as opposed to the novel’s slightly out-of-order structure), and includes some of the greatest hits from the internet as commentary in the margins.

The book is good, but not great. I was delighted to see many of the comments I remember from last summer in the book, but there just aren’t enough. The format of the book has extra wide pages, with the text of Dracula on the inner-most 2/3s of the page, and then an outer column of text and art from the internet commenting on that page. (A very Edward Tufte layout, which also appealed to me.)

But page after page is just empty, and then at the start of a new day there will be a single tweet, and then another several pages of nothing. he selections that made it in are all great, but Twitter and Tumblr were both brimming with Dracula content last summer, and it’s incredibly disappointing there isn’t more of it preserved here, especially as Twitter rots away.

So this is a partial recommendation. If nothing else I was happy to throw the price of the book at the people who did the work to make it happen for free last summer. (And it includes the joke describing Harker in Dracula’s castle as “taking a tour of the red flag factory”, which I’ve been quoting constantly for a year now.)

The Mysteries

As anticipated by literally no one on earth, Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes has made a surprise return from retirement with a new book: The Mysteries.

Its a small, strange, delightful little book about which you can say almost nothing without spoiling something beyond quoting the marketing copy:

From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.

Most of the press about the book has centered on the partnership between Watterson and Kascht to create the unique and striking art, presumably because of this fact where the actual contents are nearly impossible to talk about without giving something away. (The summary on amazon covers, roughly, the first page and a half only.)

An aside about the art: it is very cool, and very strange. It’s hard to tell exactly how it was made; some pages look like carefully photographed clay models using that “opening credits of Sherlock” filter to make them look smaller than they are, some look like detailed charcoal drawings. It’s the kind of book where the art does easily 2/3s of the storytelling, and the relationship between the words on the left side and the picture on the right are not always obvious at first glance. I feel like you could teach a high school literary analysis class using this book by asking “what does it mean that these two things were put together” and have every class come up with a different answer. It’s not so much that it defies an easy explanation as that an easy interpretation is besides the point. But now I’m getting to close to spoiling things so I’ll shift gears.

At first glance, it has very little in common with the comic strip about the boy and his tiger. The sense of humor is nearly absent, and the art is about as different as art can be.

But.

It shares something of the same outlook as Calvin & Hobbes did. The strip always had a slightly grouchy outlook—not pessimistic, or negative, but grouchy—where one of the major themes was “why can’t people just quit being jerks and enjoy all this?” That same sensibility is behind this new work.

Early on in Calvin & Hobbes’ run, there was a lot of speculation about which, if any, of the characters were autobiographical. Was Watterson like the active and hyper-imaginative Calvin as a kid, or more like the laid-back thoughtful Hobbes? Of course, as the reclusive Watterson gave more interviews, it seemed clear that the closest to an “author insert” character was actually Calvin’s Dad, which I have always found delightful.

With that context in mind, The Mysteries almost reads like a bedtime story Calvin’s Dad read Calvin to try and teach him a lesson that Calvin didn’t absorb. I almost expected the last page to snap out to Calvin in bed looking disgruntled.

To be clear, that is not how it ends. It ends with three words you have seen many times, but absolutely never deployed in this context. But again—argh—we dance up to the line of giving too much away.

Anyway. One of the major comic artists of the last century popped back up and delivered a new work. It’s excellent. Strongly recommended! Everyone needs to go read it so we can talk about it.

Friday night linkblog, classic talk show edition

I found this while looking for the Hitchhiker clip I linked in this morning’s piece: Douglas Adams on Letterman, 1985..

He’s promoting So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, and tells the story about the biscuits.

Adams is… not a great talk show guest, actually? And Letterman clearly doesn’t get it, for several values of ”it”, but is game to play along.

It’s pretty great! My whole adolescence, rolled into one clip.