Journey into the imagination

I’m currently staring at three 1^st Edition AD&D books: the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual. These three tomes contain the keys to limitless world of adventure, magic, dungeons deep and caverns mysterious. Got some swashes that need buckling or derring that needs doing? It’s all here.

I’vetalked about D&D a little in this blog before, but the mood struck me just now to explore the reasons why I prefer the first edition AD&D game (1E) over its more recent descendents, the Second Edition (2E), which came out about 1989 and the Third Edition (3E), a major revamping that popped up about 2000 or so.

Ilearned to play on 1E, which probably explains my prejudices and if you’ve read anything else in these, my random thoughts, you can’t help but figure out that I’m a big believer in Tradition and Ancient Custom. (Not that certain of those shouldn’t be chucked, where circumstances warrant, but there’s a lot to learned from the past).

Anyway, 1E AD&D is a hideously complicated, contradictory set of rules, that make little sense in many spots and require the hell of amount of study to make any sense at all. For example: a 13^th level monk can fall any distance if he’s within 8’ of a wall. Even given that an experienced martial artist-type character should be able to perform some pretty amazing feats, this is a little ridiculous. Finding a rationale sure is fun though.

The writing in these books doesn’t help matters any. E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of D&D and Grand Old Man of role-playing has a wordy, overly-complex style of writing that can render the simplest concept well-nigh incomprehensible.

Oddly enough, the adventure modules published for 1E don’t share this complexity. Newer adventures tend to have a developed plot and reasons for the players to get into whatever pickle the adventure wants to drop them. Each element of the adventure contributes to the overall resolution of the story. Many of them can be extremely entertaining reading and lots of fun to play through.

The older adventures, though, tend to be very simple settings, with monster and bad guys gathered in some sort of location, whether it be an underground stronghold, a wildneress area, or the big city. They hang about, having acquired a pile of treasure and wait behind locked doors and fiendish traps for the players to come along, kill them and take the treasure. They were basically Arnold Schwarzenegger movies with fewer bullets.

One of these early adventures was the Tomb of Horrors, an underground crypt designed by an evil wizard who waited in undeath for adventurers foolish enough to come along and attempt to plunder what he’d rightfully stolen. It was basically a character-killer; push that instead of pulling it, miss a die roll, take one step too far and you and everyone in a 15’ radius was irrevocably condemned to a hideously painful and excruciatingly embarrassing death.
Nothing like a challenge.

Other adventures existed on a grander scale. The Temple of Elemental Evil is 128 pages of multi-level dungeons and monsters and gobs of treasure, all strung together with the thinnest of plots to take over the world. What fun!

as the primary villains. They had largeThen there came the Dragonlance saga, a series of 13 adventures with a focus on dragons amounts of monster-smacking and were held together by the primary plot of a massive invasion by the evil Dragonarmy. Eventually, of course, the heroes get to penetrate to the heart of the evil and lop its ugly head off. In the meantime, they’ve been dragged all over a continent, explored ruined cities and ice castles, defended dwarven kingdoms and knightly towers, swum to the bottom of the sea and commanded whole armies. All in a day’s work.

In short, the old D&D rules demanded that you spend hours making them work and then rewarded you with that most basic of thrills – bashing nasties over the head and taking their stuff. Nice stuff too. Sparkly.

I collect these things too. More about that particular disease later.

The important stuff

I was in a car accident today, rear-ended by a pick-up truck in a snowstorm. The impact swung me through ninety degrees and gave me the hell of a jolt. I'm sitting at home now, with my feet up after a hot bath. I don't think I'm hurt too badly – I'll be going to the doctor once the storm stops.

I drove the car home, and Katherine and Vicky both gave me hugs, sat me down, made sure I was okay and plied me with various things designed to help make me feel better. They worked. Just the fact that I walked away from it was good enough for me.

Every so often, you get a reminder that your health and the welfare and love of your family are what really count. While I could've done with a gentler reminder, it's there nonetheless.

Vicky, I'm so glad you love me. Thank you for marrying me. You're my best friend and I love you bunches and bunches.
Katherine, thank you for snuggling Panda Bear onto my lap. He's a big help.

Things with sharp edges

I have a fascination with knives. No, it's not as scary as it sounds. I just think they're nifty, that's all. They're among the most ancient of tools, and their design really hasn't changed all that much since they were first invented – a handle and a sharp bit. The materials have gotten a tad more sophistocated, but if you stuck a modern knife into the hand of a Cro-Magnon man, he'd figure it out pretty quickly. He'd probably pull it out and try to kill you with it. Moral of the story – offer it to him hilt-first.

It's the sense of tradition surrounding knives that draws me to them, I think. They're durable, versatile tools and tend to develop their own individual histories. If used often, they can enter that class of artifacts which carry an abundance of memories and stories for their owners.

Take the knife pictured below.

This was given to me by my father when I was around twelve. Dad had used it as a boy when he was in Scouts and passed it on when I started going on overnight backpacking trips with the same organisation.

This is a serious knife. The blade is about seven inches long, holds an incredibly sharp edge and has been used for opening tin cans and splitting kindling wood. Dad broke the tip off trying to pry the lid off something. The hilt is bone of some sort and is so solidly affixed to the tang that it's never offered to loosen, no matter the abuse to which it's been put. It sits nicely in the hand and never slips.

Dad taught me how to sharpen and care for a knife when he gave it to me. My grandfather, a shoemaker and leather-worker extraordinaire, made the sheath for it.

Dad had used it as a boy when he was in the Scouts and passed it on to me when I, in the same organisation, began going on overnight backpacking trips. My grandfather, a shoemaker and leatherworker, made the sheath. I've put it through so much that I needed to add the tape as a bit of reinforcement. I packed along this knife on every camping trip I went on in Scouts and it holds for me many hours of memories tracking about Newfoundland's charted and uncharted (at least by me) wilderness. I used it to make my first (and only) home-made bow and arrows, as well as hiking staves for Dad and I and later, one for Vicky. More about the uses of a hiking staff later.

That knife is pushing fifty years old now, and I've been a little reluctant to take it along backpacking recently, simply because I'm that attached to it. Silly, maybe, but that's the way it is.

I have a wonderful wife, as I may have mentioned. This Christmas, totally out of the blue, she gave me the knife below, made by Don Ash, a local knife-maker.

The blade is about four inches long, with an antler handle. He made the sheath too. This little beauty sits in the hand snugly and has a solid, durable feeling to it. It's amazingly sharp. I've taken it along on a few dayhikes this winter and it sits very comfortably on my hip. I've yet to actually use it for anything, as it's not quite hiking season yet, but I have a feeling that it'll be as indispensible and important as my father's knife.

Thanks, both of you.

Bringing Middle-earth home

As if my life wasn’t complicated enough.  I’ve spent the last four hours romping all over Flickr.com, visiting here, there and somewhere else and it occurs to me for no good reason at all:  if Peter Jackson can spend bajillions transforming New Zealand into Middle-earth, surely I can do the same in my spare time, with a Sony Cybershot DSC60.

Part of the whole point of having a camera is learning to see the world in a slightly different way, so I’m setting a quest for myself; to find locations in Newfoundland that should belong in Middle-earth.  Big places, little places, from Moria to Michel Delving, we’ll blog ‘em all!
Contributions welcome!  Send me your URLs!

I must be nuts.  Middle-earth’s a big place.

From iron wrought

From iron wrought

Originally uploaded by John_TH.

A sampling of my photographic genius and unparallelled modesty.

Photo Hunting

I have a wonderful wife. She bought herself a digital camera back in September and has been going mad ever since.  When we go out picture-hunting, she’d wander off snapping things and I’d Katherine-wrangle.  That was just fine by me, but one of the things we’d really enjoyed in the years BC (Before Child) was photohunting together.  We each had, and still have, good-quality SLR cameras, but the price of film and development rather got in the way of our enjoyment of using them.
Vicky just gave me a digital camera like hers (got it on sale too), so now it’s my turn.

Stay tuned!

Let’s pretend

I just finished watching X-men 2 and as is usual with superhero movies, it put me in a philosophical mood.  I’m funny like that.  Why is it, I wonder, that we enjoy so much these fantastic stories of the adventures of people who possess extraordinary and in some cases, ridiculous powers?  Anyone remember Ant-man?

The simple answer, I suppose is simple escapism.  You leave your mundane cares behind and venture for awhile into a place where there are no mortgages, traffic jams or spilling-coffee-on-your-last-white-shirt-just-before-court incidents and where anything is possible.

Where anything is possible.  I think that’s the key to superhero worlds.  Anything can happen, probably has, probably will, and if not right here, then definitely in a dimension just around the block.  There’s a marvellous freedom in imagining yourself into a place where not only will the unexpected happen, there doesn’t need to be a reason or an explanation for it.  We’re culturally obsessed with finding reasons for everything, the cause of this, that and the other thing.  I blame Aristotle.  I might as well; he can’t exactly object.

In a superhero universe, it doesn’t matter why or how Superman can fly or why (I don’t want to know how) Kryptonite gives him gas.  He just can and it just does.  They’re wonderfully accepting places – The Incredible Hulk can take on Count Dracula and nobody blinks.  The most ludicrous coincidences, that in any other genre, would have you rolling your eyes, make utter sense.  Of course, just when Batman needs to get past sensors of some sort, we find out that the lining of his cape is made of some superconductive mircrowave-reflective material that normally acts as the antenna for the Bat-radio, but happily doubles as a cloaking device for this story.  Perfectly reasonable.
In the kingdom of your imagination, “Why not?” is the only reason you need.

Ten random things I liked about university

1.  Nethack.

2.  Meeting strange new people every day.

3.  Meeting strange new ideas every day.

4.  Reading books pulled from the library shelves at random.

5.  Opening a book printed in 1829, finding that the pages hadn’t been cut apart and realising that I was the first person to ever read it.

6.  Starting karate.

 7.  Meeting my wife.

 8.  Being able to solve a whole week’s worth of problems with the Dictionary of National Biography.

9.  Discovering e-mail and the Internet.

10.  The view from the Arts Caf.

 

Dogs who jump

We have three dogs.  The eldest, although not the wisest is Fergusson, a female black Lab/pointer cross.  Number 2 is Wikket, a black-and-white border collie and possibly the smartest critter in the house besides Vicky.

Then there’s Moss. A male, tricolour (black, white, red) border collie, just over a year old, with boundless energy, limitless enthusiasm and very bright, although he never lets that bother him.

He’s also springy.  He doesn’t actually jump; he flows effortlessly into the air, alighting wheresoever he pleases, regardless of any purported barriers.  Katherine calls him “a bouncy boy.”  She’s righter than she knows.

We have a five-foot high wire fence enclosing a bit of a run for the dogs so we can let them out the back door and not have them, particularly Moss, go haring after the snowmobiles zipping past.

Yes, I’ve tried explaining to Moss that (a) he’s got no chance in hell of catching a snowmobile and (b) he’d have no use for one if he caught it, but do you think he listens?

It snowed this week.  My unscientific guess is around 110 cm, give or take.  That’s over three feet and with the wind around here (last Saturday, February 25, it hit 130 km/h) there developed a charming six-foot drift all around one end of the run, on both sides of the fence.

So after shovelling out the driveway, I found myself shovelling the dog run.  Actually, excavating is a better term.  Cleared it right to the fence and down to the ground.  Left the drift on the other side, because after all, it’s an intimidating solid block of hard-packed snow and there’s no way Moss could jump the fence.  Right?

Wrong.  Where I saw an obstacle, Moss saw an opportunity.  More accurately, a landing pad.  He was no sooner out the door when he turned, took two long strides, sailed into the air and landed neatly on the drift outside the fence.

It’s a damn good thing he comes when he’s called.

So now I find myself digging a moat around my dog jail.  He’s not getting out that way again.

But I caught him today watching my copy of The Great Escape.  Maybe tunnelling’s next. . . .

Maps

Katherine loves maps.  One of her favourite movies is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, which is of course, all about maps.  When she was but two, she knew what “cartographer” meant.  Recently, she presented her latest artwork for admiration and when I asked her what it was, she delightedly pointed out: “Here are the mountains and here are the trees and here is the man who makes the map and here is how to get there!”

 What more do you need on a map?

 It seems like she’s inherited my love affair with cartography.  I have a large collection of topographical maps of Newfoundland and have tramped over a good chunk of them.  I’ve worn out three topos of the St. John’s area.  They’ve been folded, unfolded, refolded, rolled up, crumpled up, crammed into pockets, packs and pouches, sat upon, dropped in the ocean, generally abused and on one memorable occasion, set on fire.

 I’ve got old maps that show thriving communities where now there’s nothing but fields and forest, new maps that show the latest geographical features like the East Coast Trail, maps of places I’ve been hundreds of times and maps of places I’ll only see in dreams.

 I also have hundreds of maps of the kingdoms of the imagination.  Middle-Earth, the varied worlds of AD&D and Brother Cadfael’s Shrewsbury.  Castles both grand and sinister, dungeons deep and dangerous, vast wildernesses populated by all manner of nasty creatures of vicious intent and malice aforethought, they’re all there, displayed on the paper.

 Maps can display virtually any sort of geographic information – topography, population, economy, you name it, there’s a map for it.

 Maps are more than just information, though.  If you use just a little imagination, they can tell you the story of the land they portray.  Newfoundland’s topo maps are filled with the names of places that once were, but now are no longer.  Resettlement, a massive centralisation movement in the 1960s, accounts for many of our lost communities, but more evocative are those spots where a few lonely houses once stood huddled on an inhospitable bit of shore, where people lived and died and abandoned their homes so long ago that no trace remains of the buildings.

 Their presence can be seen on the maps.  Old names, remembered by the local people, recorded by the cartographers.  Clearings in the forest, where once gardens were tended.  Paths, now used by hikers, ATVs and snowmobiles that once were travelled by foot, cart and sled.  Hills which bear the names of the families who once hunted over them and used them as landmarks, now in the apparent middle of nowhere.  The maps will tell you their stories.

 Maps can tell personal stories too.  Hikes I’ve taken, places I’ve been, paths I’ve trodden, truly stupid things done that seemed so logical at the time. . . .like the climb up a steep ice-covered slope that turned way too vertical way too quickly.  Or the ten-foot cliff-jump.  Or. . . .

 Looking at the map of an imaginary place can often reveal deeper subtexts hidden below the main plot of a story.  These maps provide not merely a picture of an author’s world, but a glimpse into how the writer conceptualises the world, and indeed, the story.  Is the world just a place for the characters to stand, or is it more fully-formed, with aspects, features and places that may not enter the main tale, but have still been created and given a legitimacy of their own?  An excellent example of this is in the Lord of the Rings in the form of the ruin of Carn Dûm pictured in the northern wastes of Eriador.  The name “Carn Dûm” only appears once in the main text, in the context of the history of the Barrow-downs.  It is just a place from which originated one of the warring groups in Middle-Earth’s troubled past.  That’s it.  Nothing else.  Yet, if you look at the map, there it is.  Tolkien thought it important for his own purposes to know where Carn Dûm was and obviously thought that his readers would care too.  This one does.

 Maps are important.  They show you where you’ve been, where you are and where you can go, whether you walk or just close your eyes and dream.