Only the Finest Baby Frogs

I would guess that I was somewhere between 8 and 10 when I first saw Monty Python.

I was at my grandmother’s house.  Back in those days, most people had color TVs, but only the “big” TV in the family room.  If there were any other TVs throughout the house (and, in many houses, there weren’t), they were still black-and-white.  They all had real, honest-to-god antennae, because no one had invented cable yet (and wouldn’t for another decade or so).  We had two “bands” on the TV just like we had two on the radio, except instead of FM and AM, it was VHF and UHF.¹  The “normal” channels—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were on VHF and came in crystal clear, barring gale-force weather conditions.  In our small-ish town, we could get 2 channels on UHF, both hopelessly staticy unless the sky was completely cloudless and you managed to tweak the antenna just so.  One played religious programming like The 700 Club during the night, black-and-white comedies like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best during the day, and, weirdly, cool anime cartoons like Star Blazers and G-Force in the afternoons after school.  The other was the local PBS station, and its daytime and afternoons were filled with the typical fare: Sesame Street and The Electric Company and the occasional Romper Room rerun.  At a certain point gool ol’ channel 15² started playing boring crap like news and I would tune it out.  But, for some reason—undoubtedly desperation, meaning there must have been absolute shit on all the other channels—this one night, I decided to see what channel 15 had on at 8 or 9 at night.

And, what it was, was ... well, honestly, I had no idea what it was.  In those days, proper comedies had laugh tracks, so I knew they were funny.  This didn’t have that.  So maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny?  But it certainly wasn’t meant to be taken seriously either.  Most of the sophisticated wordplay was over my head, none of the English class humor was landing, obviously,³ and surrealist comdey wasn’t something I’d ever been exposed to.  For that matter, was there surrealist comedy before Python?  I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  The point is, I was utterly unprepared to process what I saw that night.  I remember not “getting” it, not particularly liking it, and thinking I would probably never watch that crap again.  But of course I was wrong.

Throughout my life, there have been many comedies that I couldn’t appreciate upon first viewing, but which have since become central to my concept of humor: Beavis and Butthead springs to mind, as does The Mighy Boosh.  Oh, sure, sometimes it clicks right way: South Park, or the Young Ones, or Arrested Development ... all odd, but I felt right at home with them immediately.  But Ren & Stimpy took a few tries before I could fully appreciate it, and The State was certainly more confusing than amusing until I started to feel the rhythm of it.  Monty Python was my first, though, and they say you never forget your first.  It was the first time that my first viewing produced “this is crap” and my second produced “well, there a couple of good parts” and the third was perhaps “you know, it’s not half-bad” and by the time I hit four or five I was finding it utterly hilarious.⁴

The pinnacle, though, was my senior year in high school.  I distinctly remember getting together with my friends in the late summer before the school year: we had a picnic in one of the public parks in my hometown.  I had been an outcast all throughout my school career, until I switched schools in the middle of the 10th grade and had the good fortune to fall in with a fairly hip crowd.  But I still remembered what it was like to be on the other side of the Great High School Divide, and I was bemoaning all the cliques and all that.  “I wish there were parties where just anyone could come, and it didn’t matter who you were or who you hung out with or any of that,” I said.⁵  And someone said, why don’t you just throw a party like that?  And at first this didn’t make any sense to me, because, you know, I was hanging with the cool kids, but I wasn’t necessarily a cool kid myself—certainly not in my own mind, anyway.  So I was thinking, who would want to come to a party at my house, and also why the hell would my parents let me have a party at my house, also how would I pay for party supplies and whatnot ... it didn’t really seem rational.  But we started fleshing out a plan: they would be movie parties, so people would come because they wanted to check out the movies, and we had one of those fancy new “VCR” thingies so we could actually show the movies, and most other people didn’t have one of those so they’d have to come to my house because they couldn’t just sit at home and watch movies themselves, and we’d collect money at the door as contributions and that would pay for soda and popcorn and the actual movie rental and all that, and my parents ... well, honestly I can’t even remember how the hell I talked them into this, but I did.  And we came up with a manifesto, about how everyone was welcome and no one would ever be turned away (unless you didn’t bring your money for the cover charge) and, if you didn’t like it that you might bump into literally anyone from high school there, you just shouldn’t come.  And there were never invitations, just ... word of mouth.  Everyone knew that everyone could come, and most of ’em did, at least once.  We ended up doing this movie party thing maybe 3 times? maybe 4?  I can’t recall.  But I can absolutely tell you, for sure, what the movies were for the absolute first everyone-is-welcome movie-party at my house: we closed with Poltergeist, and we opened with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now, I wish I could take credit for having the idea to show this, Monty Python’s first “proper” movie,⁶ but I honestly think it was my best friend Mackey who suggested it.  If you are not familiar with it, the credits are all at the beginning of the movie—and interspersed with classic goofs in the middle of them, such as “A Møøse once bit my sister” and “The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.”—and, at the end of the movie, there is nothing.  Just a song which repeats ad infinitum over a blank screen.  I mean, it was a videotape, so it couldn’t have literally gone on forever, but I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you how long we let it sit there and play before someone finally said, “shit! the credits were all at the beginning, rememeber!” and we all laughed at ourselves and initiated the bathroom break while we rewound the tape and set up for the next movie.

And that only goes to cover the very beginning and very end of this classic movie, which has since become one of my favorites.  In fact, I’m pretty cagey about picking an absolute favorite out of my top 10 or 20 favorite movies,⁷ but, realistically, Holy Grail is almost certainly at the top of that list.  It is, above all else, inifinitely quotable, and practically every line in it is classic: “I got better ...” and “your father smelt of elderberries!” and “what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” and “strange women lyin’ in ponds is no basis for a system of government” and “three, sir” and “let me go back in there and face the peril” and “I’ll just stay here, then, shall I?” and “brave Sir Robin bravely ran away” and “I think I’ll go for a walk” and “help! help! I’m being repressed!” and “of course it’s a good idea!” and “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” and “go away or I shall taunt you a second time!” and “get on with it!”  This paragraph could easily have been twice as long and I still would not have exhausted all the great lines in this movie.

When my eldest child was young we watched the entirety of the original series, including a couple of episodes I had somehow missed, and we watched Holy Grail often enough that we could recite the Black Knight scene by heart.  We would act it out with toy swords upon occasion: “It’s just a flesh wound”  “You’re a loony.”

Throughout all my life I have hated musicals.  With a great and unabiding passion.  And yet I know all the words to “The Lumberjack Song” and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and “Every Sperm is Sacred”:

Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I am a connoisseur of the Ministry of Silly Walks, and Teddy Salad, CIA man, and the music of Johann Gambolputty &c of Ulm, and The Bishop, and the Spanish Inquisition, and pet ants, and how not to be seen, and Norwegian Blue parrots, and argument clinics, and mouse organs, and sharp, pointy sticks, and Confuse-a-Cat Limited, and the Piranha Brothers, and most especially that time of the evening when it’s just gone eight o’clock and time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode.  I have watched, several times, A Fish Called Wanda and Time Bandits and Brazil and The Fisher King and, at least once, Clockwise and The Rutles and Yellowbeard and Fierce Creatures and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Jabberwocky.  It’s certainly possible that there is a group of six to ten people unrelated to me who have had a bigger influence on my cultural development than the members and contributors of Monty Python, but, if so, I can’t imagine who they are.

Graham Chapman died in late 1989, as I was preparing to make a major move in my life: from the small town where I had lived all but a single year of my life to the environs of my nation’s capital, where I would, after a 3-year absence, finally return to college.  I was too caught up in my own life to notice his passing, I fear, and I only mourned later, but not too much: so many of the members remained.  When Ian MacNaughton, director of all but 4 of the episodes of the Flying Circus and one of the several people to be referred to as “the seventh Python,” died in 2002, it wasn’t major news, sadly, and I never even noticed at all.  But, in the past month, we’ve lost two more: Neil Innes, who sang about brave, brave Sir Robin in Holy Grail and “I Must Be in Love” for the Rutles, and who was perhaps most credited with being the “seventh Python,” died only 3 days shy of seeing in the new decade, and Terry Jones—the Bishop, Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Sir Bedevere, Mr. Creosote (he of the “wafer-thin” mint fame), last surviving undertaker, purveyor of strange stains and mysterious smells, and Cardinal Biggles, poker of innocent women with soft cushions—has, as I write this, been gone for less than a week.  I myself am now at that age where I’m really starting to notice the deaths of my heroes, and even moreso at that age where such deaths start to happen with somewhat depressing regularity.

At 76, Michael Palin is the youngest of the survivors, and the mighty John Cleese is already 80.  Eric Idle is just a few months older than Palin; Terry Gilliam just a year younger than Cleese; Carol Cleveland (wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!) is right in the center of them at 78.  So I suspect that I’ll be receiving 5 more of these little missives of obituarial melancholia, unless one or more of them manages to outlive me, which would not really be better, if I may be so selfish.  Still, I hope I may be forgiven my whinging just a bit.  These are the people who had the profoundest impact on shaping my concept of what “funny” means, who initiated my Anglophilia, thus leading me to Fry & Laurie and the Young Ones and French and Saunders and Blackadder and Red Dwarf and The IT Crowd.  These are the people who, in a small but significant way, made me who I am today.  I’ll miss them one by one as they move on, and I’ll especially miss them once they’re all gone for good.  The Pythons themselves seem prone to making jokes upon the occasion of each other’s deaths—Cleese supposedly said of Jones’ passing “two down and four to go”—and that’s appropriate.  I’m sure that once you’ve spent that many decades trying to make people laugh, you’ve got to be a bit irked if people can’t laugh after you’re gone.  But, still ... my laughter this month is tinged with a patina of sorrow.  These were giants to me ... if nothing else, a giant foot which squashed my boredom and had a policeman’s head on top of it saying “wot’s all this then?”

Or perhaps just ... “Dinsdale!”

__________

1 The highly-underrated “Weird Al” movie of the same name immortalizes those times.
2 The VHF channels went from 2 to 13 (there was no channel 1, although I never really knew why); anything 14 or up was UHF.  Those channels went up to some large-ish number—78, maybe?—but the reception got crappier the higher they went, so mostly the channels would stay at the lower end of the band as much as possible.
3 As I was a stupid American who doesn’t “get” that sort of thing.
4 And perhaps we shouldn’t limit ourselves to television: the aforementioned “Weird Al” Yankovic was an acquired taste for me, as was This Is Spinal Tap.
5 Or, you know, words to that effect.  It was 35 years ago; don’t take “I distinctly remember” as meaning that I’m offering you a verbatim account of that day.
6 Python’s technically first movie is just a glorified clip show of the series, which I always found very disappointing, as by that time I knew all those sketches.
7 I often refer to them as my “Top X Movies,” because the number only ever gets bigger.

Grandiloquence of Otiosity

This week I completed another week of laptop recovery (because the computer gods hate me), and I finally started on the Smaller Animal‘s solo adventure for the family campaign.  It was also my first week back at $work, which went pretty well, I released several CPAN updates for my Perl modules, and the smallies are easing back into their school routine.  Overall not too exciting a week, but I’m fairly happy with the progress.

Tune in next week for a (hopefully) longer post.

Perl blog post #59

After more than a year off, I finally return to my Other Blog for a Perl post.  You’ve certainly heard of the Y2K bug ... perhaps you’ve even heard of the Y2038 bug ... but have you heard of the Y2020 bug?  No, of course you haven’t, because I just made it up.  But go over and check it out, if you’re so inclined.

Another decade bites the dust

Well, the holidays are over, and it’s time to get back to work.  On the one hand, I haven’t been to the office at $work for about 17 days now, so it’ll be nice to get back, and I’m sure my family is just as sick of having me around as I am of being around.  On the other hand, there’s something to the sentiment that The Mother expressed a few days ago: “I want it to be the week between Christmas and New Year’s for the rest of forever.”

From the I’m-Getting-Too-Old-for-This-Shit department:  Today I broke my 5th or 6th dish in the past few months.  It completely exploded (because of course it did)—as Neil once said, it was smashed into 15 million pieces, and every single one of those pieces was smashed into 15 million pieces, and, although at that point I stopped counting, I wouldn’t be surprised if ...  Apparently they make special dishes for old people that are easier to grip, so I reckon I’m going to have buy some of those.  Or at least dishes that don’t shatter on impact.

This year I’m looking forward to more sessions in the Family Campaign, and possibly getting some interesting Perl work done, and hopefully marking a few things off my todo list.  It’s a new decade, after all, and I’m sure many folks look at that as a fresh start.  But, you know, I’m not going to complain about a little more of the same ol’ thing, because, for me, the same ol’ thing is pretty nice.

Sickness behind, hope ahead

Well, another Christmas come and gone.  Mostly I was sick for it.  In fact, I didn’t eat anything at all for over 24 hours: no Christmas cookies, no Christmas chocolate, no ham biscuits.  And, when I did finally eat (right before bed on Christmas night), it was cinnamon toast and turmeric tea.  But enough whining.

The kids seemed to have a lovely day at least.  (They got over their respective bugs well before the big day.)  There was lots of playing with videogames and dolls, and the eldest one and I got to play D&D on Christmas night.^*  So it wasn’t all bad.

Still, hoping New Year’s will be disease-free.  Oh, and that you, dear reader, will have a lovely 2020.

__________

* This was the second of the “flashbackstories” that I mentioned previously.

A season's greeting musical update

Well, it’s nearly Christmas again, and so time to wish you a merry christmahannukwanzaakah.^*  As I apparently only do new Christmas mixes every 5 years, I guess it’s not time for volume III of my excellent collection of holiday classics Yuletidal Pools.  Which is a shame.  But I’ll offer you the next best thing: minor updates to volumes I & II.

One creates one’s mixes with the best of intentions, and the belief that they will last forever.  Alas, every now and again you find that something you were sure you were going to love always is starting to grate on your nerves a bit.  To that end, I’ve found that two of the tracks I picked for Yuletidal Pools (one on each volume, as it happens) aren’t really working for me any more.  So I’ve updated the tracklists with new replacement tunes.

For volume I, I’ve replaced “My First Xmas, as a Woman” with “Merry Christmas I Fucked Your Snowman” by Botson punks the Showcase Showdown.  A bit of a risky move, as, in a few more years, the latter may begin to annoy me as much as the former has begun to.  But it seemed an appropos swap, and it really is a fun little tune, if a bit over-the-top.

For volume II, I found that “Xmas at K-Mart” began to grate on my nerves as much as it always has my family’s.  So I replaced it with the much slicker “Santa’s Lost His Mojo,” by the Lost Fingers.^**  It’s less of a 1-for-1 swap, but I think it still flows pretty nicely in the same spot, and it’s certainly a much nicer tune to listen to.

So there’s a least a couple of new tracks for ya.  And, if you hadn’t yet discovered my Christmas mix, it’s two full sets that you can enjoy as an antidote to the typical holiday pablum that your ears are currently being assaulted with.  You can thank me later.

Wishing everyone the best, and wondering if I’ll actually manage a full post between Christmas and New Year’s ... happy holidays, you guys.  Take care.

__________

* As always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.
** And thanks to new co-worker Max for letting me know about those guys.

No Time Like the First Time

This past summer, while sitting in the hot tub with my youngest child (age 7), she announced that she had an idea for a D&D character.

Now, I am not a sports dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you for the first time to say they want to learn how to throw a football.  And I am not a musician dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you at a young age and tell you about the song they’re trying to write.  But I imagine that what I felt at that moment, in that hot tub, was comparable to those scenarios.

My two youngest spend a lot of time in the pool (mostly fighting, or playing, and sometimes doing both at once), and I like to sit out with them and work on my computer stuff and watch them.  Occasionally I get in, but, honestly, I’m not much for playing in the pool these days.  I still do laps sometimes—it’s really the only exercise I actually enjoy—but that’s not a thing you want to try to do while kids are playing (or fighting) in the water with you.  But, when they’re all tuckered out from playing and fighting and playfighting, they often get in the hot tub to cool down (figuratively, obviously).  My littlest one likes it way more than the middlest one: like her old man, she loves the heat.  The middle child will usually give up after a while, complaining “it’s too hot!” And then it’s just me and her.  Sometimes we play 20 Questions.  Sometimes we just talk about mostly nothing.  But, this time, she decided to tell me about her D&D character concept.

It’s perhaps important to establish that she’s never played before.  She’s watched us play many times, of course, and once I let her be a sort of pet character,¹ but she didn’t really do much.  Sometimes we listen to a D&D podcast in the car—specifically, the excellent Dames and Dragons, which is the one she really likes—but, overall, not any real prior experience.  And, yet, this was not a vague idea she was presenting to me.  This was a fully-fleshed out concept: this character had a name, a race, a class, hair color, eye color ... she even told me what type and color of armor she wore.  When she said, “now, her parents—well, she has kind of a dark backstory,” I almost squeed.  I’ve had thirty-year-olds who put less effort into their characters than this.  “Dark backstory”?  What kind of weird YouTube crap is she watching?  But, from a GM² perspective, it’s gold.

Now, some things changed as time went on, but the final character is remarkably similar to what she gave me that first day.  Corva Ravenstone is a half-elven ranger with turquoise hair and lavender eyes.  Here’s the current version of her backstory:

Corva’s parents disappeared into the jungle when she was just a baby.  Corva thinks they were studying nature, but she doesn’t really remember because she was too young.  When she was barely old enough to walk, they never came back from collecting herbs one day; the only clue Corva has is that some blood and black fur were left behind. From then on she was raised by her tiger friend Bone.

Corva dresses all in green, except for her light blue armor.  She carries a bow and has a monkey companion named Chip.

Please note that, although I helped put the thoughts above into nice-sounding sentences, I didn’t really write any of it.  None of it.  It’s all her.

So, naturally I decided that this deserved a corresponding effort on my part.  This couldn’t just be a throw-away character concept; this had to be a real character that my daughter played in a real campaign.  The problem, of course, is that creating D&D campaigns is a major effort.  I did a little bit of it for my eldest child, but mostly it’s just been using pre-written adventures for the last several years.  But for this I felt like I had to put together something memorable.  The other two kids are joining us, of course, for what we’re currently dubbing “the Family Campaign.” And I’ve probably put more time and effort into trying to write background and plot and adventure hooks for this one game of D&D than I have in the past 15 years.

Therein lies the problem, of course.  I bit off more than I could chew, and it’s taken me six months to get ready to go.  All this is pressure I put on myself; the kids, I’m sure, would be happy just to play whatever.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ideas I had, and the more the older two started to get excited as well, and the more complicated it all became.  Definitely no one to blame but me, but it just felt like it had to be ... well, not perfect, but at least special.

And I’m definitely not done yet.  But I came up with this wacky idea where each of my three children would play a short, solo intro adventure, which would set up the whole background, and then they’d come together.  I’ve taken to calling these “flashbackstories,” an over-obvious portmanteau word to be sure, but too cool to pass up.  They will each take place 5 – 7 years “ago”³ and they will tell the story of how each character left their original home and came to be indebted to a mysterious benefactor, who will then call upon them to perform a certain mission in return (which will be the kickoff to their shared adventure).  For this purpose, I’m designing mini-adventures that are specifically too hard for their beginner characters, but then pairing them up with a higher-level NPC.⁴  So, the idea is, basically, there’s a fight they can’t really handle alone, discovery of a greater danger, and a guide to help them get out alive and take them away to some relative safety, whence they, years later, come together at last.

Did I mention I was making it way too complicated?

Anyhow, I finally got to the point where I could start with the first flashbackstory, which is Corva’s.  And, this past Wednesday night, my youngest child played her very first game of D&D with her own character.  And it was pretty amazing.

She took to it pretty naturally.  There was the standard amount of newbie fumbling around with which dice to roll, and which numbers to add to the totals, but my eldest volunteered to help out with that aspect.  What is often harder for people to get into is putting yourself into your character’s position and really roleplaying.  That part she just instantly grasped.  She asked intelligent questions and made intelligent choices.  When she ran into her first dangerous encounter, she understood instinctively that it was a fight that she couldn’t win and opted to stay under cover while her much more capable tiger mentor went in to do the heavy lifting.  Then, in a twist that frankly astonished me, she correctly identified my NPC as a friendly and ran to her (staying hidden, of course), and said “I want to grab her by the wrist and help her run away and hide.” This was the character I sent to make sure she survived, you understand.  But my girl knew that Corva knew the jungle better than this outsider ever could and wanted to get her to safety ... she was trying to save her would-be-savior.

We played for a couple of hours before we called it quits, and the next morning she asked when we were playing again.  “Soon,” I promised.  “Maybe when you get out of the shower?” she asked hopefully.  “I have to go to work,” I pointed out.  She seemed very disappointed.  And she’s already asked at least twice more since then.

So I would have to say it was a success, and, assuming I don’t kill myself trying to do all this extra work, I think it will be a pretty cool campaign.  And I think my youngest child will, at age 7, be a pretty amazing player.  I can’t wait to see how it all comes out.

__________

1 For those of you who speak 5th edition D&D, I was playing a pact of the chain warlock, and so she played my improved familiar.

2 And, for those of you who don’t speak D&D, the GM is the “game master.” Sort of like the referee of the game.

3 That is, from the perspective of “today,” which will be whenever we start the full campaign and they all meet for the first time.

4 You might find it interesting if you’re a fellow D&D player (and especially interesting if you’re a D&D player from my old gaming group) to know that, for these NPCs, I’m using updated-to-5e versions of my own old player characters.  At this point, I’ve played for long enough that I have an old character for just about every occasion, and I found what I think is the perfect one for each of my 3 kids’ character concepts.

It's the most overstressed time of the year ...

This has been one of our busiest weeks of the year:

• Monday the Smaller Animal was in D&D class.
• Tuesday The Mother took all the kids to Magic Mountain.
• Thursday was Inspire’s Winter Wonderland followed by Dojo Boom.
• Friday was Dave & Buster’s.
• Saturday was our belated National Heroscape Day celebration; I took the kids and The Mother stayed home this time.
• Sunday was a birthday party.

Additionally, there was going to be a vendor fair Wednesday and the annual holiday party for $work on Thursday night, but somethings had to give.  Partially because it’s been raining like crazy here in the desert, which is, needless to say, somewhat uncharacteristic.  So, I wish I had time to write more, but I’m just too tired.  Next time.

Shadowfall Equinox VI

"The Hungry Ghost That Lingers"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

I really thought that, after narrowly missing being the first mix to achieve a sixth volume, surely Smokelit Flashback would be the second.  But it’s funny how things work out.  See, I listen to a lot of music at work, and, when I’m doing more mindless work that I don’t have to allot that much mental capacity to, upbeat fare rules the day: Salsatic Vibrato is a go-to, but Sirenexiv Cola or Totally Different Head are good choices too.  When I need to actually concentrate on stuff, though, I need something that’s a bit mellower, a bit more background-able.  For many moons Smokelit Flashback fulfilled that need for me.  Lately, though, Shadowfall Equinox has been coming to the fore.

This makes perfect sense, of course.  As I began describing way back with the inaugural entry into this series, and perhaps culminating with my deeper exploration of just what “ambient” means as a musical style in the third installment, SfE is all about ambient, and ambient is all about contemplative thought and creative endeavor.  As Brian Eno put it way back in ‘78, “Ambient Music is intended to produce calm and a space to think.” So it’s a crucial part of my work regime, and every once in a while I decide I need some more variety ... something new.  And that invariably leads to a new volume of this mix, my tribute to the Hearts of Space program that really kicked off my mixes as they exist in the modern sense.  So here we are.

Just as with Salsatic Vibrato VI, this mix is falling into a groove, but also showing even more variety as it goes along.  Volume I, you may recall, featured 3 tracks from Jeff Greinke and 2 from Black Tape for a Blue Girl, whereas this mix has only one track from each and no repeated artists at all.  In fact, only 3 other tracks are from artists we’ve seen before in this mix, leaving a whopping 13 tracks from new artists.¹  Sure, that means that several artists we’ve come to expect—such as This Mortal Coil, Falling You, and Stellamara—aren’t here this time out.  But fresh faces are always good: new blood keeps the mix from going stale.

Of course, old blood provides continuity, and we weren’t about to see a Shadowfall installment without hearing from Jeff Greinke, who is the only artist to appear on every volume.  Though we’ve explored a few other albums from this ambient master, we haven’t fully exhausted the album where we started, Wide View.  “Glide” is another track typical of that amazing album: slow and autumnal, with a crispness somehow reminiscent of the brittleness of first frost.  From Black Tape for a Blue Girl,² also a fairly typical piece: “Tear Love from My Mind,” from one of Rosenthal’s early(ish) albums, A Chaos of Desire.  There are muted, muddy vocals in there somewhere, but mainly it’s a swirling, floating, goth-drenched ethereal piece that epitomizes the darkwave sound.  And, while Kevin Keller didn’t show up for our very first volume, he’s been on every volume since, and this one is no exception.  “Peace” is a calm, soothing piece from only about a decade ago, and shows off Keller’s style admirably.  His marriage of ambient and neoclassical is sometimes referred to as “ambient chamber music,”³ and this track embodies that pretty perfectly.

Our other two returning artists are Jade Leary and Jens Gad, both of whom we saw for the first time last volume.  “Salvatrice,” is a fairly typical piece of gothic minimalism from Leary, while “El Momento” harkens pretty strongly back to Gad’s days with Enigma.  It’s tough to beat “The Orbiting Suns” (which is his piece from last volume), but this one is pretty solid too.

The Cocteau Twins are not technically a returning artist, but only because their track from last time (“Sea, Swallow Me”) was a collaboration with Harold Budd.  For this volume, I thought it high time we have a proper, solo⁴ effort from the Cocteaus.  “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” is another beautiful piece off Victorialand⁵ which provides that amazing, dreamy sound that the Cocteaus are so well-deservedly known for, as well as a touch of a dark reminder that they started out as a goth band.  Angels of Venice we’ve not seen before on this mix, but of course we’ve seen them plenty: mainly on Numeric Driftwood—every volume so far, in fact—but also on Penumbral Phosphorescence and even Fulminant Cadenza.  “The Sins of Salome,” from their second album, has a bit of Middle Eastern flair (as the name implies), but mainly its wordless vocals and sombre cello carry us, relaxed and untroubled, into our closing track.  Likewise, Télépopmusik has so far been relegated to Smokelit Flashback—specifically volumes IV and V—where their downtempo trip-hop fits in perfectly.  But “Swamp” is something a bit different: not quite creepy, but not quite not creepy either, the science-fiction background noises and the lonely jazz saxophone backed by strings in the foreground combine to make something more downbeat and ethereal than their usual fare.

Many of the new faces here result from an exploration I did looking for neoclassical bands I had not yet discovered.  Mira Calix, for instance, I was assured (by the Internet) was neoclassical, but I’m not sure I buy it.  South African born, London bred, Calix is mostly electronica of the decidedly weird variety, though she does have a tendency to mix in classical instrumentation.  “Schmyk” is a minimalist piano piece with some concurrent synth noodling and not as much discordancy as she seems to be prone to from my limited experience with her thus far.  Opener “Somnolence” is from Swedish dark neoclassical band Arcana.  They remind me quite a bit of Dark Sanctuary, the French dark neoclassical band we first heard on volume II.⁶  For a while, this volume just opened with “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow,” but eventually I decided it needed a short intro piece, and “Somnolence” is just too awesome to pass up.  I don’t like all of Arcana’s output,⁷ but this track is great: quiet, just slightly menacing, and building up to something.  Here I pay that off with the Cocteaus, which I think is a better choice than whatever Arcana used on their album.  Finally, Ludovico Einaudi is an Italian pianist whose spare “Solo” (from Nightbook) is the perfect closer for this set of late-fall-inspired contemplative tunes.

As for the new ambient artists, the collaboration bewteen Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner is actually one I’ve had for a while now, but I think I must have forgotten about it and only recently rediscovered it.  It’s pretty amazing, if not particularly genre-transcending, and “Vicis Pro Vicis” is one of the most spare and ethereal pieces on an album where spare and ethereal are the words of the day.  Whereas Esther Garcia, who I originally found on Jamendo with one of those sets I like to refer to as “soundtrack portfolios,” is harder to pigeonhole.  Like all such albums, her Incidental Fussion is very eclectic, with no two tracks really sounding alike, but the delicate, airy beauty of “Air Elements” is the one that seemed perfect for this mix.

Like Télépopmusik, Laika is mostly downtempo trip-hop,⁸ but “Dirty Feet and Giggles” is more of a weird interlude on its home album.  Here it makes a bare-bones, echoey, too-long-to-be-a-bridge into the second third of the volume, and specifically into Kid Loco’s amazing remix of Talvin Singh’s “Traveller.” The original is a meandering piece of rave-adjacent electronica from Singh, a Brit known for fusing Indian style into drum&bass.  What French DJ Kid Loco does with it here, on the other hand, is much closer to downtempo/chill.  It’s just a hair away from landing on Smokelit Flashback, but it’s just light and relaxing enough to end up here instead.

When it came to picking a volume title, it was slim pickings indeed this time out.  The line I used is from the Black Tape for a Blue Girl track, supposedly; I sure can’t hear it, but the Internet assures me it’s true.  And it sounded cool in any event.

Shadowfall Equinox VI
[ The Hungry Ghost That Lingers ]

“Somnolence” by Arcana, off As Bright as a Thousand Suns
“How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“El Momento” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Vicis Pro Vicis” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Dirty Feet and Giggles” by Laika, off Sounds of the Satellites
“Traveller [Kid Loco's Once Upon a Time in the East mix]” by Talvin Singh [Single]⁹
“Swamp” by Télépopmusik, off Angel Milk
“Salvatrice” by Jade Leary, off And Come the Sirens
“Tear Love from My Mind” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off A Chaos of Desire
“Sleepwalker” by Colourbox, off Colourbox
“Godnat” by Analogik, off Søens Folk
“Peace” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“Schmyk” by Mira Calix, off One on One
“Glide” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Air Elements” by Esther Garcia, off Incidental Fussion
“Find the Song” by Mary Youngblood, off Dance with the Wind
“The Sins of Salome” by Angels of Venice, off Awake Inside a Dream
“Solo” by Ludovico Einaudi, off Nightbook

Total:  18 tracks,  80:19

In the “what the heck are these guys doing here?” category, we have first and foremost Colourbox, the not-really-dreampop alternapop labelmates of the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance.  And, since they were part of the 4AD stable, members of Colourbox appeared in the music collective This Mortal Coil, which is how I discovered them.  Colourbox is known—inasmuch as they’re known at all—for eclectic, upbeat songs, but “Sleepwalker” is something entirely different: another spare piano piece, but (unlike Keller’s “Peace”) with a more lonely sound, almost like the background music in the sad part of the movie, where the protagonist is feeling low before the climactic comeback.  Next up, Analogik, a Danish electrojazz group who came to me via LittleBigPlanet.¹⁰  “Godnat” is uncharactistically slow and meditative; its electronic sounds—reminiscent of an old ship creaking on the waves—are almost hypnotic here.

And, last but not least, I found Mary Youngblood when I went looking for some Native American music ... not the traditional sort, but more modern fare infused with Native American elements and, if possible, performed by Native American artists.  This is how I discovered that there used to be such a thing as a “Best Native American Music Album” Grammy, and that Mary Youngblood had won two of them.  I confess that I don’t properly appreciate all her songs, but her flautism is undeniably beautiful, and “Find the Song” is easily my favorite tune of hers.

Next time, we’ll swing back a bit more upbeat, to our bright-and-shiny videogame-inspired mix.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox V

Shadowfall Equinox VII ⇒

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1 Although, to be fair, several of them have been seen before here on different mixes.

2 Who we’ve seen on every volume but one.

3 At least Wikipedia refers to it that way.

4 Well, I suppose “solo” is not the right word to describe a three-person band named after twins, but you know what I mean.

5 Feel free to refer back to my full discussion of how I discovered this amazing album.

6 And, since the two bands started within a couple of years of each other, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a whole dark neoclassical scene in Europe that I’ve missed out on.

7 Come to think of it, I don’t like all of Dark Sanctuary’s stuff either.

8 Only they’re from the UK instead of France.

9 As always, I hate linking to YouTube.  But this one doesn’t seem to available for purchase anywhere, at least in the US.  Maybe if you’re overseas you’ll have better luck.

10 And, thus, they will eventually start showing up on volumes of Paradoxically Sized World.

Less than nothing to say ... practically a negative amount to say, really

It’s a short week, and I’m a little busy on top of that, so I’m not going to say much this week.  Tune in next week to see if I can muster up a full post.

D&D and Me: Part 6 (The Contemplative Life ... of Punching the Crap out of People)

[This is the sixth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time I talked about more of my D&D characters and what attracted me to each one.  I had just reached the point of buying 3rd edition and thinking I should try out a new class, with my friend Tim DMing.]

Tim, ever my exemplar, had played a monk, named Edax Rarem, for many years, and I’d always admired him.  Many people hate monks in their D&D games, for basically the same reasons that they hate psionics, or dinosaurs, or guns (even very primitive ones): fantasy purism.  Get your chocolate out of my peanut butter, so to speak.  But I like mixing odd things, so I never had any hang-ups about scifi-style psychic powers in my high fantasy, nor about wuxia-style mystical monks in my solidly Eurocentric medieval-based fantasy.  Bring on the weirdness, I say.  And, as it turned out, Jin Shangtzi was probably the character that I ran for the longest amount of time.  He survived an edition upgrade (from 3e to 3.5e), he played with multiclassing into psionic classes, he spoke little and broke things a lot.  To this day, Jin is one of my fondest D&D character memories.

The thing that is awesome about D&D monks is that they are not the greatest offensive fighters, they are not the stealthiest, they have little abiltiy to sling spells and can’t heal for shit, but, when it comes to defense, they are insanely good.  They have the best saving throws in the game, their armor class scales with their level and their nearly-always-astronomical wisdom score, and they’re the fastest characters in the game.  Besides a nearly pathological desire to break things, Jin was focussed on mobility.  I kept his balance and tumble skills maxed out at all times, and his climb and jump and escape artist weren’t far behind.  I used his few psionic abilities to enhance his already impressive strengths: inertial armor boosted his already high armor class, burst briefly upped his already crazy-high speed, and catfall on top of the monk-standard slow fall ability meant that he never really worried about falling off anything.  He wasn’t the character who could take out the enemy in one round, but he didn’t really care about how many rounds it took, because he wasn’t getting hit by anything, and he was running circles around the bad guys while they tried.

A quick story, which may have been one of my favorite Jin moments ever:  We were attempting to rescue some captives who were being experimented on in this big open underground chamber which was overlooked by a large balcony thing—the way Tim described it, it sounded like the observation deck at a sports stadium or something along those lines.  But there were no stairs or ladder or anything; it seemed that you had to get to this balcony from somewhere deeper in the cave system, because there was literally no way to get from where we were up to it.  And, up there, looking down and (figuratively, at least) thumbing his nose at us, was the Big Bad (or at least who we thought was the Big Bad at that time).  So I decided to let the rest of my party handle taking out the mook guards down here and resucing the hostages: I was going go get that fucker.  You can’t reach the balcony, says Tim.  Jin jumps for it, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you’re just hanging off the bottom of the balcony; you still can’t get to the railing, he says.  Jin starts climbing, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you realize that the balcony isn’t just open, there’s a transparent barrier of some kind, he says.  Jin breaks it, I say.  But it’s not glass, Tim says; it’s some sort of crytsal, only fairly thin, so you can see through it, but still pretty strong.  Jin starts punching it, I say.  It might take him a while, but he’ll get through it.  By this point, the bad guy’s sneer is gone, and he’s starting to look a bit worried.  As the first cracks appear in the giant crystal window, he decides to get the hell out of there.  Patient as ever, Jin just keeps right on punching.  No need to worry: he knew he could run twice as fast as the bad guy ...

Jin was ostensibly an Asian character, but I never really borrowed the cultural aspect of that.  It was mainly a physical thing: if you’re going to play a monk character, who doesn’t want to look like Bruce Lee?  Actually, Jin was more of cross between Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but bald.  And no shirt.  In fact, although it wasn’t exactly a vow of poverty, Jin never had any interest in material possessions, and generally travelled around wearing nothing but pants and a rope belt.  He was thin and ropily muscled; not overly strong, but very lithe and wiry.  As a child, he was the youngest of a huge family.  His parents couldn’t really deal with having one more mouth to feed, so, when a group of traveling monks passed by, they agreed to offer their young son in service, in exchange for some food and perhaps a few coins.  Yes, they essentially sold their child; but, on the other hand, he probably ended up getting a better life out of it.  Unlike the standard dark backstory of dead parents, Jin just didn’t ever think much about his family: they never really mattered to him.  The monastery was his family, and there he learned the wonder of breaking things.

See, I had decided that Jin was a monk dedicated to a deity.  This wasn’t strictly necessary, from a game standpoint—if you were a cleric, you definitely had to pick a deity, and if you were a druid or a paladin, you were encouraged to pick a deity, but monks could just be monks.  Not Jin, I decided.  Glancing through the Greyhawk gods,^* there was one clear choice: St. Cuthbert, who was, as Wikipedia puts it, “the combative deity of Wisdom, Dedication, and Zeal.” Could there possibly be a divine figure that more screams “monk!” at you?  I think not.  So I decided that monasteries of St. Cuthbert, while perhaps rare, did exist, and they would typically house two orders of monks: the Gnostics, who believed in study and meditation and concentrating on developing the mind, and the Somatics, who believe in exercise and disciplined movement and concentrating on developing the body.  The Gnostics were the majority in any given monastery, but there were always at least a few Somatics, who were the adventuring monks, the monks of action ... the ones that the D&D class was referring to.  Jin was one of those.  From a mechanical perspective, Cuthbert was lawful neutral (as was Jin), but, while he was not explicitly good, he didn’t allow evil clerics either (Jin certainly leaned more towards good than evil).  Among Cuthbert’s domains are strength and destruction, which is awesome for a monk whose primary mode of dealing with the world is to punch it in the face.

But I decided that Jin was not just a thug who liked beating people up under the guise of religion.  No, Jin (like all the Somatics, in my wholly invented history) believed that the only way to understand the universe was by breaking as much of it down as possible, and by breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces, until you could understand the nature of matter by understanding each of its components.  That the best way to break things down was by punching the living shit out of them was just a bonus, as far as Jin was concerned.  With his absolutely abysmal charisma, he was socially awkward, but not in a shy way.  You know how some people just say whatever they think, without regard for social propriety or whether it might hurt anyone’s feelings?  That was Jin.  He never lied, but not because he had anything against it, particularly: he just sucked at it.  If the party engaged in any sort of subterfuge, they quickly learned that they had to tell Jin to just shut up entirely; if they encouraged him to try to play along with the deception, he would happily try ... and fail, every time.  In any event, he never much understood the point of lying, even if he was happy to play along with whatever his friends wanted.  So much easier to just say what you mean, and mean what you say.  He was a deep thinker (middling intelligence and, of course, very high wisdom), and he was well aware of his tendency to say the wrong thing, so he often stayed completely silent, preferring action to words.  He had no interest in gold or jewels, and even magic items only interested him insofar as they could help him break things.  I’m pretty sure his only real magic item, even at the higher levels, was something Tim invented specifically for him: they were bracers, and they increased his damage against creatures a bit, as I recall, but they were especially helpful in destroying objects, which is something Jin really loved to do.  Can’t get the chest open?  Ask Jin to break it for you.  Can’t pick the lock on the door?  Jin will be happy to break it into splinters, I’m sure.  Dangerous artifact needs to be destroyed?  Jin is practically salivating over there to have at it.

Though Jin concentrated on being a monk, I still retained my fascination for D&D’s weird little system of psionics, and when the Psionics Handbook came out, with all new (much simpler) mechanics for 3e, I instantly siezed on the psychic warrior class.  Keeps the base attack and the fortitude save at appropriate levels, while adding cool psionic powers and (oooh!) psionic feats.  I’d already played a psionicist, so I was familiar with what psionics could do.  And, while many people (including my eldest child) don’t see a connection between monks and psionics, I always thought it was a natural fit: they both need discipline, they both concentrate on developing their minds, they both are just slightly to the left of “regular” magic.  So I loved adding a few psychic warrior levels to Jin’s solid monk background.  The last level I took (which I believe brought Jin up to 12th) was a variation of sacred/psionic fist, which I reworked specifically to get access to the destruction domain.  Once a day smite and an inflict light wounds deliverable via touch attack?  Well, Jin’s method of “touching” people was to punch them in the face, so, hell yeah: sign me up for all of that.

Jin was a big part of my D&D experience and, as you do with any of the PCs you carry around for a while, I began to think of him more like a friend than a fictional character.  It was definitely the only time I really enjoyed being a primarily combat-focussed character, but then Jin was always more that just a guy punching people (although he thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of it).  He was a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a mentalist, and a big believer in the orderliness of the universe.  He never wanted to be the ruler of the kingdom, but when his friend Magnus (a sorceror-cum-dragon-disciple played by our friend Marcus) ended up taking the throne (due to a series of weird circumstances kicked off primarily by his emergent draconic nature), he was quite pleased to take over the job of head of the palace guard.  Instill discipline in a bunch of raw recruits while simultaneously keeping all the important people safe?  It was perfect.

Next time: the long break, exploring Pathfinder, and coming back home to 5th edition.

__________

* Greyhawk was the default setting for 3e, just as the Forgotten Realms is for 5e.

Happy birthday to me

You know how I said that this weekend was my birthday weekend and I wasn’t going to promise you a full post this week?  Yeah, well, this is me delivering on that non-promise.  Or anti-promise.  Or something.

Hey, you know what I just found out?  Neil Gaiman is a Scorpio, just like me!  This is important, of course, because (as I’ve written about before), Neil is the fifth point on my pentagram of literary idols.  There are any number of excellent reasons to love Gaiman—Coraline, Stardust, Sandman, Neverwhere—but surely the epitome must be American Gods.  Read the novels, watch the series, listen to the sequel Anansi Boys as read by amazing vocal talent Lenny Henry ... get it any way you can.  And send Neil some good thoughts today.

This weekend we didn’t do much.  My computer keeled over again, so that consumed 5 hours of my life.  We watched Men in Black: International finally; it was good.  We went to a fancy Italian place that we hadn’t tried yet; the lasagna and the mushroom risotto were particularly lovely.  I worked on my D&D spreadsheets and made a small amount of progress.  And the donut shop actually had cinnamon donuts for a change!  So, overall a fine weekend.

Next week, a proper post for sure.

Dark night of the soul

This week, our lovely power company turned off our electricity for about 24 hours.  It was quite a trying experience, especially for our children, who think that if you don’t have any electronic devices, your life is pretty much over.  “I’m so BOOOOORED!!” was the call du jour.

Now, on the plus side, located as we were between (at least at one point) four wildfires, we feel very lucky that we suffered zero property damage, never had to evacuate, never were in danger of losing any of our family, be they fleshy, furry, or scaly.  So we’re very pleased about that.  On the other hand, the fact that power was restored to the vast majority of our city—including the vast majority of our very own neighborhood!—nearly 12 hours before it was to us was pretty irritating.  The Mother is of the opinion that they just plain forgot to turn us back on.  I prefer the theory that they foolishly tried to turn everyone back on at once and a couple of the circuits just keeled over dead from the shock of it all.  Either way, we’re not pleased at the extra expenditure at Costco (for flashlights and headlamps) or the food that will be slowly going bad faster than usual over the next few days and weeks.  What makes it even more frustrating is the fact that the power company claims that they have to cut the power to reduce the risk of starting new fires when the winds get high.  Yet, within minutes after they turned the power back on, a whole new fire broke out, and the current working theory (at least according to that bastion of accuracy, the Internet) is that the sudden resumption of power actually caused the fire.  So it’s quite frustrating overall.

On the plus side, my children finally got to play that Minecraft Uno game we bought them, and I now understand why people used to go to bed so damn early in the olden days.  Also, if there was any lingering doubt in my mind that I need that stupid CPAP machine to sleep, they are firmly put to rest.  I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 2am, then at 4am, then at 6am, then the next time I didn’t even bother looking at the clock because obviously it was 8am, then the next time I woke up it was 7:30am, so obviously I was wrong before, and then the power came back on 8:30am and I promptly got up and reassembled my machine and got 3 good hours of sleep.  So that was fun.

Compared to all that, nothing else this week is even worth mentioning.  Tune in next week when (hopefully) there will be a longer post.  However, next weekend is also my birthday weekend, so I make no promises.

D&D and Me: Part 5 (Multiple Personalities)

[This is the fifth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time I talked about some of my earliest D&D characters and why I enjoyed playing them, including the very first time I played a woman.]


I’m not sure I fully understood it at the time I wrote the last installment, but, having had some time to reflect, I think that I probably have my good friend Tim to thank for having the courage to play a female character.  It’s one of the many things I have Tim to thank for: he also taught me more about how to be a good game master than anyone else.  Tim was never bothered by playing a woman, which he did fairly often.  I recall the exquisitely icy Toxana, a drow whose class I can’t recall, but who wielded a powerful +3 sword as well as a broom of flying.  And then there was the lithe and elegant Raeze Terpsichorean, who approached battle like a dance and just flowed from enemy to enemy, slicing as she went.  The thing Tim did that was so great was to play the women exactly as he did the men: there was never any juvenilia, never any “hey, look! I’m a chick!” ... it was just that, sometimes, he was a she.  No big deal.  Looking back on it now, I doubt I would have been comfortable enough to play a woman without Tim’s example.  But, after I took the plunge the first time, I was never hesitant about doing so again.

In the midst of all these nature-based characters, I was convinced, a handful of times, to play a fighter, one of the 4 core classes that I was trying to avoid because I naturally gravitated to the paths less traveled.  Both times I decided that, if my class had to be that vanilla, I would let my freak flag fly using my choice of race.  Once, for a morally questionable mission,¹ I played a half-ogre named Trask.  I desperately tried to embrace the “just turn off your brain and deal buckets of damage” philosophy, but I hated it so much that by the time he lost his lovely plate mail to the rust monsters outside the dragon’s lair, I didn’t really care any more.  I charged screaming at the dragon and was fried to a crisp.  I vaguely remember just shrugging and starting to plan out my next character.

There was also a short stint that we referred to affectionately as “the freak campaign,” where everyone (except our resident min-max-er, who of course played a human, because: no penalties) played a totally non-standard race.  Tim was an aarakocra (bird-person) named B’Gawk, my friend Marcus played a wemic (like a centaur, but with a lion instead of a horse), our other friend Carl played a bramble (tiny faerie creature covered with thorns), and I chose the alaghi, sort of a yeti-like creature.  His name was Gron, and he couldn’t really speak the common tongue, but he was perfectly happy to work for raw meat, and he was fiercely loyal to his comrades.  (In retrospect, I still should have been a barbarian.)  But, overall, I failed to make playing a plain fighter interesting enough to hold my attention.²

Anyway, after my happy, bright, nature-y phase, I went through a dark brooding phase.  Because: Batman.  I mean, seriously ... who doesn’t love Batman?  Even I liked Batman as a kid, and I pretty much hated all the popular superheroes.  But Batman got a pass, because being all wrapped in shadows like that while punching bad guys in the face is just plain bad-ass.³  And, honestly, starting with Batman can quickly lead you to the real dark and mysterious heroes like Phantom Stranger and Ghost Rider and Moon Knight and Swamp Thing and Ragman and Cloak & Dagger ... if you have a love of horror and a love of comics, there are plenty of characters waiting in that juncture to scratch your itch.  And why not carry some of that over to your love of fantasy?

For one of our “evil campaigns,” I played a sneering, ultraintelligent psionicist named Ravell, a salt-and-pepper bearded, one-eyed gray elf, who carried, among other things, a cloak of absorption and a carpet of flying, and who had inherited Toxana’s magic longword.  For another evil campaign, I was Galbraith, a wannabe necromancer who was an expert in anatomy and necrology, worshipped Mictlantecuhtli (the Aztec god of death), had the flaw of “insane babbling,” and was too low level to animate anything really useful, so my GM (the ever-excellent Tim again, as it happened) let him wander around with a small flock of undead chickens.  Then one day I was reading over someone’s shoulder while they played Arena and saw that one of the class choices was something called “nightblade”: apparently a cross between magic-user and thief.  I was very intrigued, but that kind of thing wasn’t really doable in D&D at the time:⁴ thus far in my gaming career, we’ve only gotten as far as 2nd edition.

Then along came something called the Player’s Option series and of course we bought them all.  The first book in the series, Skills & Powers, contained a character point system, including a way to trade in some of your standard class abilities for other things.  Strictly speaking, you weren’t supposed to be able to buy the abilities of another class, but we never paid any attention to restrictions like that.  My first attempt at the “nightblade” concept was a thief who gave up some of the less useful “thief skills” in exchange for a few choice wizard schools (probably just necromancy and illusion).  Thus was born Shan Blackmoon, probably the closest I ever came to an actual Batman rip-off.  He dressed all in black, could cast some spells—but only at night!—and could use his short sword just as well in total darkness as in full daylight (thank you, blind fighting proficiency!).  Worst of all, a previous injury (I think it was something like someone had tried to slit his throat once but he miraculously survived) left him with a rough voice and a hesitancy to show his lower face and neck ... so he talked exaclty like Batman, and he had the partially exposed face thing, just in reverse.  Still, I really dug that guy, even if I couldn’t really make the mechanics work the way I wanted.

Attempt two was to do it the other way around: start with magic-user, give up a bunch of schools of magic (even the flashier ones like evocation—I wasn’t in this for the fireballs), and grab a bunch of thief skills.  This required taking a hell of a lot more flaws, so I decided this woman (my second female character, I believe) had been fathered by a demon or somesuch, so she had blue skin, red eyes, and a forked tongue.  I can’t remember if she had a tail or not, but probably.  Of course, I was essentially creating a homebrewed tiefling:⁵ tieflings probably existed by that point, but they were only in Planescape, and I don’t think we had bought that setting.  Certainly I didn’t find out what a tiefling was until a bit later, at which point I went, “oh, yeah ... wish I’d had that when I was designing her ...”  I can’t actually remember her name, except that I’m pretty sure it started with a “V” ... Valandria, maybe? Valestria?  Something like that.  Valandria-or-whatever-her-name-actually-was lived in Ravenloft, where she’d been raised by Vistani, and was used to hiding her demonic features, but, despite her appearance, she was actually quite gentle, and worked hard to overcome her cursed ancestry and the prejudicial expectations of strangers.

Of course, with today’s rules (5th edition), Shan would probably just be an arcane trickster (at worst a rogue assassin with a few sorcerer levels), and my Ravenloft waif would just be a classic tiefling warlock (or tiefling sorcerer—Strix from Dice, Camera, Action is a useful role model).  In fact, I recently(ish) did a sort-of-almost-recreation of / homage to my demon-girl for a one-shot run by my eldest: Sabina Zinkara was a tiefling rogue/warlock (inquisitive/Raven Queen patron) who fancied herself a bit of a detective.  But, back in those days, gluing together classes via Skills & Powers was the best we could manage.

Of course, in retrospect the Player’s Option series is sometimes referred to as “2.5e,” as it indicated an ackowledgement that the old edition wasn’t flexible enough and had too many restrictions.  Little did we know that a new edition was in the works, and a mere 5 years later, we had 3rd edition, with proper multiclassing, many fewer arbitrary limitations on race and class combinations, much more sane psionics rules, and a more consistent ruleset all around.  We were very excited for the new edition and my friend and ofttimes GM Tim—by that point the only other remaining member of the gaming group I’d originally joined—agreed to DM us through our first 3e campaign.  I was over my dark broody phase, and I wasn’t ready to go back to playing nature-bound characters,⁶ but I was still interested in going against the standard tropes.  I had bucked trends with druids and bards, by playing a psionicist instead of a wizard, and by trying to forge new classes out of combinations of two standard offerings.  What was left?  Well, I’d never played a monk ...



Next time: exploring 3e and the monk class, and even more things to thank Tim for.

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1 I’m pretty sure this was our trek to Dragon Mountain.
2 At least in 2e.  Fighters got cooler in later editions.
3 It also didn’t hurt that, via the pages of The Brave and the Bold, Batman introduced me to a lot of obscure superheroes, which is what I was really into.  See also part 1.
4 I mean, not really.  You could be a “magic-user/thief” if you were willing to be an elf—or could talk your DM into ignoring the race restrictions—but it didn’t really work that well, plus you were always at least 1 level behind everyone else.  Multiclassing in 2e sucked.  See also my History of Multiclassing series.
5 Although, honestly, I was probably more inspired by Nightcrawler, who was always my favorite X-Man.  I know Wolverine usually gets all the fanboy love, but I just always dug Nightcrawler.
6 Not then anyway.  I did so not long afteward though, with a class I built out of a heavily customized version of the NPC “expert” class, which I dubbed “naturalist.”

A nice break

Nothing much to say this week.  Half the humans in my family (apart from myself, of course) are off camping, and the other half and I just watched Bohemian Rhapsody, which we quite enjoyed.  Nothing else happening, really.  Hopefully a longer post next week.

Eldritch Ætherium I

"The Chase of the Black Beasts of Zephirus into the Caverns of the Demon King"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

So, I’ve been writing quite a bit more lately about my love of D&D and other gaming topics.  Of course, writing about music, and in particular my music mixes, is another of my favorite topics.  So why not combine the two and write about a gaming mix?

I’ve talked before in this series about my discovery of Shards of Eberron, albeit briefly.  Here I was buying a D&D setting book—already somewhat of a rarity, as I’m by nature more of a mechanics nerd when it comes to D&D supplements¹—and there’s a CD in the back of it.  Why is there a CD in the back of my gaming book?  Was it perhaps supposed to be a CD-ROM (those were all the rage at the time), with some maps in PDF format or somesuch?  No, apparently it was a music CD.  But why would I need music to go along with my D&D game?  It just didn’t make any sense.  Until, you know, I actually played the damn thing.

I was blown away.  I mean, sure: I was familiar with the concept of playing music in the background while you gamed.  Some people have a fondness for “Carmina Burana” or other Da Vinci Code-style music.²  Others swore by Wagner.  But, you know: either way, that’s opera.  I don’t do opera.³  And, anyhow: I just didn’t see the point.  I don’t need music for my gaming.

But this ... this was something else.  It was orchestral, and cinematic, but definitely not opera, nor even classical.  It was like the soundtrack to an epic fantasy movie that hadn’t yet been made ... maybe never would be made.  This was the epic fantasy movie that stars you and your pals, which is why you’re playing D&D in the first place.  You’re creating an awesome story, and, dammit, why shouldn’t that story have a soundtrack?  I was so enamored by Shards of Eberron that I immediately went out looking for more music just like it.

Which is where I hit a bit of a dead end.  At the time, there just wasn’t that much going on in this area.  I found V Shane, who did music and sold it via whatever the early-aughts equivalent of DriveThruRPG was.  Eventually I stumbled across Midnight Syndicate, because they had the grace to put out an album specifically named Dungeons & Dragons ... a bit on the nose, perhaps, but it had some great tracks.  Mignight Syndicate, of course, is a prolific band, and there were dozens more albums in their back catalog, but none really had the same vibe as their D&D-focussed album.  Most of their music, as well as that of fellow “dark ambient” artist Nox Arcana,⁴ is more in the “dark and spooky” vein.  Now, some of that stuff can be good for gaming music, but not all, by a long shot.  So selections from Nox Arcana and those tracks from Midnight Syndicate not off Dungeons & Dragons will be a bit more rare here.

In fact, Shards of Eberron and Dungeons & Dragons together provide 40% of the tracks here on volume I, though I managed to bring that down on future volumes.  As you may know (or at least could guess), gaming music has gotten much more widespread now: the rise of D&D actual play (in both streaming and podcast form) means there’s a much larger market these days.  But, at the time I developed the first volume, those two sources, plus the odd track here or there from V Shane, were most of what I had.

Of course, I could come up with a few other options.  Back on Mystical Memoriam I talked about my discovery of zero-project, an Internet artist from (probably) Greece who has some great cinematic music.  On that mix, I was mining their Fairytale album; here I move on to Fairytale 2, which is somewhat similar to Evil Dead 2 in that it’s not quite a remake and not quite a sequel, but somehow a little of both.  Again, not all the tracks are great, but they hit it pretty hard when they hit it.  And of course there’s Dead Can Dance’s epic Aion, which I originally talked about way back on Smokelit Flashback II.  Much of that album has a Renaissance faire vibe to it, which means that it features a lot of music with medieval origins, or at least medieval tendencies.  And if you don’t make the connection between Renn faires and playing D&D, then I doubt much of what I have to say here is going to help you out.

So nowadays I enjoy using music while playing D&D, although I have to say that you can’t make a proper mix out of it in that context.  See, when you’re actually gaming, you want to have different playlists for different moods: one for traveling, one for being in town and visiting shops or inns, one for pitched battle, one for exploring spooky underground caverns, etc.  But those sorts of playlists don’t make good mixes: too samey.  For a proper gaming mix, you need a mixture of proper gaming music.  So I don’t use this mix to actually play D&D to.  But I love to listen to it while I work on D&D-related projects: world-building, rules tweaking, and so forth.  It always puts me in the perfect mood to create fantasy goodness.

For this mix, as with Classical Plasma, I tried to arrange the tracks in an order that would tell a bit of a musical story.  As gaming music is almost entirely instrumental (except for a few “wordless vocal” tracks, and there’s not even any of those on this volume), I’m once again stumped for a volume subtitle, and reduced to gluing various bits of song titles together.  This time around I really embraced the potential silliness that can result from this practice and produced my longest subtitle so far:⁵  “The Chase of the Black Beasts of Zephirus into the Caverns of the Demon King.” Let’s follow the journey, shall we?

“Cut to the Chase” is the opener of Shards of Eberron, and I thnk it makes a great opener here.  It builds for a bit, but pretty quickly gets to a point where you feel the scope and drama of an epic adventure.⁶  From there to “Troubled Times” by Midnight Syndicate, which further sets the tone that something dramatic (and possibly just a bit spooky) is coming.  Then we visit Amber Asylum’s “Black Lodge,” which has a feeling of marching off to battle.  This is a long song, and it gains more dark, creepy overtones as it plunges steadily forward.  Then back to Dungeons & Dragons for “Beasts of the Borderlands,” another track that gives that sweeping, epic fantasy battle feel.

From there there’s the transitional medieval street-performer vibe of Dead Can Dance’s “The Garden of Zephirus,” and then the long, meandering “Lost Map” from V Shane, which is pretty much just what it says on the tin.  Once we get off the map, we go “Into the Dungeon,” of course, for some echoey, cavernous exploration music.  Which makes a beautiful transition into the underwatery, midnight-zone feeling that Reef Project is putting out in “Deep Mysteries.” That inevitably brings us to “The Lower Dungeons,” where the foreboding of the previous few tracks seems to burst into actual danger.  The tolling of the bells is pretty standard, but I consider it a bit impressive when you can turn in a tune fueled mostly by electric guitar that still somehow fits a fantasy soundtrack.

From there we slow it down a bit by letting Midnight Syndicate take us out of the dungeons and into an “Ancient Temple,” and then Nox Arcana takes over to guide us down, down, into the “Crone’s Caverns.” Things are sounding pretty dour and the outlook seems bleak at this point, but then zero-project gives us “The Defeat of the Demon King,” which makes it all okay again.

It’s mostly downhill from there.  There’s brief detour through the brightly-coloured Coraline-chaos that’s represented here by “Wybie,” then a final bit of relaxtion as we bask in the approval of Kitaro’s “Heavenly Father.” Finally, the reprise of “Cut to the Chase” reminds us that, while the journey may be over for now, new adventures await tomorrow.

Eldritch Ætherium I
[ The Chase of the Black Beasts of Zephirus into the Caverns of the Demon King ]

“Cut to the Chase [Main Theme]” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Troubled Times” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Black Lodge” by Amber Asylum, off The Supernatural Parlour Collection
“Beasts of the Borderlands” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“The Garden of Zephirus” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Lost Map” by V Shane [Single]
“Into the Dungeon” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Deep Mysteries” by Reef Project, off Aquaculture
“The Lower Dungeons” by zero-project, off Fairytale 2
“Ancient Temple” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Crone's Caverns” by Nox Arcana, off Grimm Tales
“The Defeat of the Demon King” by zero-project, off Fairytale 2
“Wybie” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Heavenly Father (Tenchi Sohzo Shin)” by Kitaro, off Silk Road I [Soundtrack]
“Cut to the Chase [Reprise]” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]

Total:  15 tracks,  71:55

Other than the sources I’ve mentioned thus far, there’s the one track from the Coraline soundtrack, which is really best suited for Phantasma Chorale, where it features prominently, but I thought this one track worked well here.  Amber Asylum has been seen before on Shadowfall Equinox I and II, but their Supernatural Parlour Collection works a bit better here.  Also featured on SfE2, as well as on Paradoxically Sized World II, Reef Project provides background music for underwater documentaries, which works perfectly for spooky, echoey sequences in gaming.  And, finally, Kitaro isn’t really known for epic fantasy music, but still his Silk Road suite occasionally comes close.  Designed as the background music for a Japanese documentary series way back in 1980, I think it’s one of Kitaro’s few albums that deviates from the meditative into a more dynamic, almost navigational feel.  It felt like an appropriate tune to help us wind down to the end of this epic journey.

Next time, we’ll celebrate the season with some more autumnal ambience.

Eldritch Ætherium II ⇒

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1 In proper gaming jargon, one would say I’m more of a crunch guy than a fluff guy.

2 To be fair, Hans Zimmer was still a year or two away from writing the soundtrack for The Da Vinci Code at the time, so “Carmina Burana” was still the go-to piece.

3 For a fuller discussion of this anti-preference of mine, check out Fulminant Cadenza.

4 Fun fact: Nox Arcana founder Joseph Vargo was a former producer for Midnight Syndicate.  This probably explains any similarities between the two.

5 A record which it will hold until we get to Eldritch Ætherium III.

6 You may also recognize it as the theme for Dice Camera Action, if you’re into watching D&D actual play.  As I theorized before, I’m pretty sure the Wizards of the Coast folks just don’t want to pay any royalties for music at this point.

Another proud father moment

Tonight my youngest told me her idea for what I believe is her first D&D character.  She will be a white-haired elven ranger with pink armor and a bow.  She likes bows, apparently ... my daughter that is, not her character.  Well, both, I suppose.  She’s getting to the age where she’s ready start playing—I suppose that, instead of finding myself a new gaming group, I’ve been breeding one.  But I’m cool with that.

My favorite part was that she had already concocted a backstory, which she described as “kinda dark.”  Remember the days when you had to explain to people what a backstory was?  Apparently kids these days are just picking it up on the streets.  I blame the Internet.

A longer post next week.