Obsolete Your Idols

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite things is the Forgotten Realms setting for playing Dungeons and Dragons.  Since the first issue of Dragon magazine I picked up which had an Ed Greenwood article in it (#89, I think, a set of magical shields), I’ve been enamored by the complex creation, the places where layer upon layer of event and detail have built up across decades of play and publication, as well as the places which have been exposed only once or not at all.

The places which have been visited across editions (Waterdeep, Shadowdale, Daggerdale) and the ‘new’ places which we’ll be seeing for the first time in 4th Edition, they all hold a fascination for me.  To the point that I just spent two weeks indexing the collection of adventures I have which are set firmly in the world of Faerun.  This isn’t all of them ever, they’re just the ones I could get my hands on.  The list is in the form of Level of Party: Number of Adventures For It.

• 0:  1
• N:  5
• 1:  19
• 2:  23
• 3:  21
• 4:  20
• 5:  26
• 6:  37
• 7:  39
• 8:  29
• 9:  23
• 10:  21
• 11:  12
• 12:  11
• 13:  5
• 14:  4
• 15:  3
• 16:  3
• 17:  2
• 18:  4
• 19:  3
• 20:  3
• 21:  1
• 22:  1
• 23:  1
• 24:  1
• 25:  1
• 26:  1
• 27:  1
• 28:  1
• 29:  1
• 30:  1
• 31:  1
• 32:  1
• 33:  1
• 34:  1
• 35:  1
• 36:  1
• 37:  1
• 38:  1
• 39:  1
• 40:  1
• 41:  1
• 42:  1
• 43:  1
• 44:  1
• 45:  1
• 46:  1
• 47:  1
• 48:  1
• 49:  1
• 50:  1
• 51:  1
• 52:  1
• 53:  1
• 54:  1
• 55:  1
• 56:  1
• 57:  1
• 58:  1
• 59:  1
• 60:  1
• 61:  1
• 62:  1
• 63:  1
• 64:  1
• 65:  1
• 66:  1
• 67:  1
• 68:  1
• 69:  1
• 70:  1
• 71:  1
• 72:  1
• 73:  1
• 74:  1
• 75:  1
• 76:  1
• 77:  1
• 78:  1
• 79:  1
• 80:  1
• 81:  1
• 82:  1
• 83:  1
• 84:  1
• 85:  1
• 86:  1
• 87:  1
• 88:  1
• 89:  1
• 90:  1
• 91:  1
• 92:  1
• 93:  1
• 94:  1
• 95:  1
• 96:  1
• 97:  1
• 98:  1
• 99:  1
• 100:  1

Some fun things to observe:

• yes, there really is an adventure for 0-level characters; an outgrowth of what I remember being a Greyhawk-based idea
• 6th & 7th level seem to be the sweet spot for where many writers target adventure scenarios
• these data points are cross all editions of AD&D and I haven’t done any correction for power [in|de]flation
• that very long tail from 21-100 is, in fact, due to one adventure, H4 Throne of Bloodstone
• on my system, `sort -n` thinks that N is between 0 & 1; the N adventures are ones which insist that they can be played by any level of party and generally are resolved by talking (for weak parties) or killing everything (the normal way)

Island of the Sequined Love Nun is a novel I will confess to buying solely because of the name.  Names, actually.  One name was the title, which was titillating, and the other name was that of Christopher Moore.  I’d previously enjoyed his novel Lamb and so I was interested in reading others by him.  This is the first other one I’ve read and it did not disappoint.

It’s a small scale picaresque of a lovable loser who is driven from scene to scene by the actions of others until he has finally had enough and then his will drives him from scene to scene.  There’s quite a bit to like in this book, from a naked bitch goddess to a cautious and thoughtful tribe chief, from a cannibal to a fruitbat.  This is a fun, fast-paced romp which even has a couple sex scenes, neither one with much romance to it.

Things I liked about this book

• good pacing, chapters weren’t any longer than they needed to be
• a naked drunk petty goddess
• the presentation of an exotic location
• a Brooklyn descended post-mortal protector

Who might like this book

• people who think that Tim Powers is too serious when he writes about spooky cults
• people who’ve always wondered what happens to people who cross Texas matrons
• fans of pilots
• fans of cannibals

Who might not like this book

• men with castration anxiety
• sharks
• strict realists who are looking for a wholesome morally uplifting snore-fest

Sometimes I find myself typing something over and over in a bash window and even with tab-completion, it’s still boring and tedious, in a sort of first-world no-one-is-killing-me fashion. But it’s still more work than I want to be doing, as a terminally lazy softcase. So I wrote a little one-off script to do the work for me. Like so:

#!/bin/bash

echo Indexing $2 as level $1/$3
if [ ! -d by-start-level/$1 ];
then
mkdir by-start-level/$1
fi
cd by-start-level/$1
ln -s “../../$2″ ./$3
cd -

The effect I’m going for here is to end up with a symlink farm of files, indexed by minimum character level.  Pulling that out of the files themself is more work than I wanted to do, but it’s easy enough to open a file, eyeball grep out a number, and then call the script with the original name, character level and destination short name.  As a side-effect I can group otherwise unrelated files thematically.  So I can have a set of adventures designed for 5th level characters with a short handle of run_this_next-1, run_this_next-2 or use-these-maps-4 or whatever.

If there’s one writer whose writing I always get a kick out of reading, it’s my wife.  If there are two writers whose writing I always get a kick out of reading, it’s my wife, and Tim Powers.  I really groove on his blend of American culture and spooky metaphysical intrusions into that culture.  I’ve read nearly every novel he’s published and enjoyed the hell out of each one.

So I recently read Strange Itineraries, a collection of his short stories, including two collaborations with James Blaylock.

This collection is wonderful.  It’s a rising arc of strong writing, weird tales, drunken protagonists and unearthly encounters. Ghost stories galore, a nice time travel paradox story and California flavor.

Who might like this collection

• fans of Tim Powers novels
• fans of Americana ghost stories
• fans of Donnie Darko

Who might not like this collection

• people who enjoy the often long progression to the tipping point in a Tim Powers novel
• people who need every aspect of a story to make sense
• people who are sensitive to mentions of alcohol consumption

Once upon a time in an Iowa City far far away I used to go to No Shame and my favorite part of the experience was seeing this guy sing:

Pole-axed to discover he’s still playing.