RPG Review: Primeval Thule

Primeval Thule is a Sword & Sorcery campaign setting that was released last year for Pathfinder, D&D 4th Edition, and 13th Age. It is set in the “Pre-cataclysmic Age” of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu, which has been the backdrop for the worlds of many Sword & Sorcery stories and RPGs, like Conan and Kull, Barbarians of Lemuria, and Atlantis: The Second Age. Primeval Thule adds a fourth mythic continent to this famous group, which takes the form of prehistoric Greenland. In the world of Primeval Thule, is a place very different from the one we know today. A vast tropical island covered by lush jungles and home to many strange beasts.

133780As someone with a passing interest in geography and geology, the map of Thule is quite interesting. For one thing, all the maps have west “up”, which I find pretty clever. Greenland is so far north that the difference between the axis of the Earth and the magnetic pole becomes quite significant and any compass would be pointing to a spot off the northern coast of Canada. Which seen from Greenland is in the west. A somewhat odd thing though, is that the map seems to be based on the geography of the rock below the modern Greenlandic ice and all the fjords and clacial valleys would not be existing yet before the coming of the ice. But hey, this is a pulp fantasy setting, so it’s not like that would actually hurt the world in any way. Another nice touch is that even though you’ll recognize all the islands of the northern Atlantic, Iceland is missing. Because Iceland is geologically speaking a very recent addition. By which I am saying 16 to 18 million years old, which was long before the evolution of the first apes. Scientifically widely incorrect, but I still like the idea.

Primeval Thule reads a lot like an honest attempt to merge Dungeons & Dragons with the Prehistoric Sword & Sorcery of Robert Howard, much more so than even Dark Sun. But my feelings about the result are a bit ambigous. Thule is inhabited by humans, atlanteans, beastmen, and serpentment, but also D&D races like elves, dwarves, and rakshasa. The elves I feel are done very well. They are in fact an alien race from another dimension that created a colony in Thule a long time ago and had several big wars with the local serpentmen and rakshasa. Which they did defeat, but ultimately they also fell into decline and were pushed back by explorers and conquerors from Atlantis in the south and are now almost disappeared. The center of remaining elven culture is a single large city which is increasingly falling into ruin and decaying anarchy, which I think integrates them very well into this type of fantasy setting. On the other hand, dwarves are just boring. They have a single small kingdom somewhere in the mountains, which is of no significance to the rest of the setting as a whole. It feels like the dwarves are only there because the rulebooks of the three games the setting is written for have them as a player character race. But they are just shoved into a back corner and then forgotten. Why bother then? I even saw a single case in which a village of halflings is mentioned. And that’s all. For any intents and purposes, halflings don’t really exist in Thule. I don’t think there was any mention of orcs or goblins and I am not sure if I’ve seen any instances of dragons and ogres. Other than that one dwarven kingdom, there isn’t really much D&D specific in the setting, which works quite well for integrating it with the Precataclysmic Age.

The book looks great, being in full color and the background of the pages of each chapter is tinted in a different shade, which makes it quite pleasing to look at. The art is also quite nice, but most of the time I had the impression that the images were ordered before the book was written and then put onto various pages pretty much at random. Often I saw a picture of an interesting location and wanted to know what kind of place it is, but couldn’t find any description on that double page or the one before or after it that would match it even remotely. That’s rather week and disappointing. In the pdf for the Pathfinder version all the maps are really blurry and often almost unreadable, which is just bad and should not be happening. The big continent map is better, but I can’t really say I am a fan. Even though Thule is supposed to be this wild and savage land, the map is absolutely cluttered with markers for villages and ruins, the majority of which doesn’t even have a description in the book and is just a name. As a result Thule feels very overcrowded and not really wild and unexplored at all.

Which brings me to my main problem, which is the geography chapter. On the plus side, the amount of great and evocative ideas for various kinds of is very high. There is tonnes of stuff that made me really think I want to have an adventure set there. But the problem is that each of these places appear to have been written and existing almost in a complete vacuum. Nothing is ever connected or related to anything else on the continent at all. You could easily take any place in Thule and drop it into any space of the map you want to. You could even drop them into pretty much any other setting. There are plenty of factions with various interests, and many of them are pretty interesting ideas. But again their interests are entirely restricted to a single place, which quite often is not much more than a short paragraph or two. Combined with the overcrowded map it just doesn’t feel like a living world. Despite all the flavor it is still somewhat stale and lifeless. That’s often good enough for one-shot adventures and mini campaigns, but in that case you probably don’t want to read a 280 pages book on the setting.

My opinion of Primeval Thule is that it is a great source of ideas for Sword & Sorcery campaigns, and in that regards it is one of the most interesting settings I’ve read. But as a campaign setting it falls somewhat flat and I don’t see myself ever getting excited to actually run a campaign in it. For people interested in learning about various types of Sword & Sorcery settings, I really do recommend it. But I would not expect to find something that is as compelling to start a campaign with like Dark Sun or Spears of the Dawn.

Movie Review: Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Synopsis: What a shitty movie.

I’ve watched this movie about a year or so ago, but my memory was a bit hazy so I watched it a second time before doing a review of it. Why did I even bother?

Conan the Barbarian 2011
Conan the Barbarian 2011

The movie is called Conan the Barbarian, which is exactly the same name as the famous and highly regarded movie Conan the Barbarian. It’s neither a remake nor a reboot, nor anything like that, so why us the name of an already existing movie? There is an infinite number of possible titles, and so many options to name it that make it clear that it’s Conan. And now we always have to call it Conan the Barbarian 2011. Conan the Barbarian is not even the name of the series of stories, comics, and other stuff. Conan the Barbarian is just the name of a single movie. The Ahnold movie. This is a cheap attempt to cash in on someone elses good work. Despite not being a remake of Conan the Barbarian, and I think the director explicitly said it’s not a remake but a completely separate movie, Conan the Barbarian 2011 recycles the stupid subplot of Conan searching for the warlord who destroyed his village and killed his father. Which is a completely original invention of Conan the Barbarian and doesn’t exist anywhere else in the story of the character. Totally not a remake. Because they said so. Even Conan the Barbarian could barely be considered an adaptation of the Conan stories. Conan the Barbarian 2011 does a bit more name dropping so you know that it takes place in the Hyborian Age, but feels even less connected to the source material. Conan the Barbarian may not really have had much to do with the original stories, but I think it did a great job at visualizing the setting and bringing it to life. This movie doesn’t.

The movie is way too dark most of the time, so you can’t see anything. The music is also way too loud and the voices way too low, so you can’t hear anything either. Not that there would be anything to hear either. The plot is pretty much nonexistent. Any 20 minutes episode of Conan the Adventurer had more plot than this. And this is no joke. I actually mean that literally. While the indoor shots are always too dark, the outdoor shots of cities and fortresses all look terribly fake. They look like out of 300 or a Diablo III cutscene. Pretty, but completely inappropriate.

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Book Review: Bloodstone

A while back I reviewd Death Angel’s Shadow by Karl Wagner, which I really quite liked. So I picked up Bloodstone, which was published two years later, but being a somewhat obscure series from the early 70s I have not the slightest clue in which order they were originally written. I have a feeling that Bloodstone might actually be a bit older, and perhaps even the first story of Kane.

Bloodstone
Bloodstone

Bloodstone is a single full-length novel which begins with Kane coming into possession of a strange old ring with a large green and red bloodstone. It awakens some long lost memories in his immortal mind and leads him to start another one of his enigmatic plans of conquest. In typical Kane fashion, even though he is the protagonist of the story, Wagner doesn’t tell us anything of what Kane is knowing or planning for most of the time. Usually witholding important information from the readers which the characters obviously know ranks at the very lowest level of cheap writing tricks for me. But with Kane Wagner is always consistent and we’re always kept in the dark of what is going on in his head. In fact, for large parts of the book Kane is completely absent and as in the other stories, the plot mostly follows other people who had the unfortunate fate to get caught up in his wake as he leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes. Of those other characters we do learn a lot and their thoughts and plans are usually revealed very quickly. It’s a very daring and couragous method of telling a story, but one that Wagner manages to pull of successfully and it works really well.

In Death Angel’s Shadow and Undertow, I always had the impression that Wagner was not a man of great words who uses relatively simple language to talk about very complex and fascinating things. In Bloodstone, it seems more like he is trying too hard in channeling Lovecraft and Howard and pretty much every paragraph has at least one word which I don’t know. I always understand what he means out of the context of the sentence within the scene so it doesn’t hurt too much, but I think he clearly went overboard with it in Bloodstone. His other (and I presume later) works are much better in this regard. The other thing that I noticed negatively is that the story drags on for too long. Especially when it comes to describing the big fight scenes, but also when another mysterious location is visisted. I love well written description that go into a lot of detail to bring the sights and atmosphere to life, and the lack of such is something that often find frustrating in many fantasy stories I’ve read in recent years. But in this case Wagner is often not adding anything new and just repeats more of the same things he already said. With the big battle scenes I was sometimes tempted to flip ahead three or four pages, but I have to say that I generally get very easily bored by battle scene all the times. I usually skip the battle scenes when watching The Two Towers and I don’t even have Return of the King on DVD. So maybe it’s not actually that bad. Overall, this books seems not particularly strong when it comes to the degree of skill at the craft. Language a bit too cheesy, pacing could be a lot better, and the characters are not particularly deep or complex.

But all that doesn’t bother me at all, because it’s the plot where Bloodstone really show. Like the other stories I’ve read, Wagner once more showed that he had a really good instinct for creating plots that don’t tread down the old paths. At several points in the novel I got the feeling that everything seemed close to resolution, but when you’re only a quarter into the book, you know that it obviously can’t be the case. Part of this comes from the fact that we never really know what Kane is planning in the long term and we only follow his antagonist or allies as they are dealing with the issue currently at hand. But any time it seems like the adventure has been wrapped up, Kane plays his next card and reveals another step in his grand plan to the rest of the world. In a TV show or comic this could probably get pretty frustrating, but as Bloodstone is a single volume novel you know how much more you can expect to follow. There are plenty of nice twists, with probably the best one being the one at the end. It’s a rather unusual approach you’ve probably not seen before very often, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere and you probably see it coming two sentences before it happens.

Kane himself is mostly Kane as we know him. A brilliant schemer and utterly selfish bastard. But while his planning and manipulating in this book is very nicely done, his character is not quite as fascinating and disturbingly ambigous. In Death Angel’s Shadow, it is made very clear that everyone who know about Kane thinks that he is a terrible monster in the shape of a man, and everything we learn about his thoughts actually supports that assesment. Not that he’s eating babies and impaling people on big spikes, but it is very clear that his mind has absolutely no regard for anything that normal people would consider just or decent and that he walks on the corpses on innocents without any second guess. This element of his character, which combined with his compelling charisma makes him such an intriguing character, is mostly absent in this book. Here he is simply selfish. If you havn’t read any Kane stories before and then read Bloodstone, you’d probably not feel anywhere near as fascinated by him as I do. If this is indeed one of the first stories Wagner wrote about the character, he’s getting a lot stronger later on.

What I found very interesting about this book is that it finally reveals why Kane does anything that he does. In Death Angel’s Shadow that was always a great mystery. Why does he consider his immortality a curse and why does he live the kind of life he does if he could do pretty much anything he could ever want to? In Bloodstone, this part of his character is explored only briefly, but deep enough to get a pretty good understanding of how he ticks. It’s not really complicated at all and makes a lot of sense. If this is actually a good thing I am not sure. I really loved the walking mystery that was Kane in the stories I’d been reading before, and as of now I can not say if understanding his way of thinking makes his character more enjoyable or less. I probably have to read another collection of stories before I really know.

With all that being said, I still really loved reading this book. And I do recommend it, but with some considerations. If you havn’t read any Kane story before, I don’t think this is a good one to start with. It’s still a pretty good book, but it doesn’t really showcase how good Wagner could write this character. Even if the series of Kanes stories is something you’d love, Bloodstone might not be the book to win you over. If you know Kane and consider picking up this book, I fully recommend doing so. But if you are thinking of giving the series a try for the first time, better start with something else. Death Angel’s Shadow would be a good start, for example.

Petty Gods: If this is a joke, I’m not laughing

Petty Gods is a book of about 300 minor deities and 100 monsters connected to them, which has been released this month and is entirely free for download. It’s the work of probably about a hundred different contributors, with most simply having contributed one or two gods or an illustration.

149434That sounded really interesting to me, as I always love to see an approach to religion in RPGs that is more animistic and dealing with minor spirits instead of continent spanning hierarchical churches. So I gave it a look.

And I have to say I am deeply disappointed. I don’t know what exactly I expected, but from the cover it was very clearly not this. Basically, all the 300 gods are jokes. You got such things as the god of coin debasement, a god of old string, the goddess of dumping corpses under a bridge at night, and about a dozen gods of crossroads. Is this book meant to be a parody? If so, I don’t find it funny at all. If this is an attempt at something serious, it’s a complete failure. If it’s meant as a nostalgic tribute to early D&D, I am not feeling it either.

I have nothing against a bit of silliness in fantasy and RPGs. Many of my favorite works are greatly overstretching any sense of plausibility and two of my favorite words in any language are ludicrous and preposterous. But even the most over the top Sword & Sorcery or Pulp Adventure at the very least takes itself serious and actually means to tell a genuinely exciting story with great themes. But this is not laughing with the genre, this is laughing about the genre. And I don’t find it funny at all.

"Stop that! This is getting silly!"
“Stop that! This is getting silly!”

The one good thing I can say about it is a ten page article by M.A.R. Barker in the appendix, which is about creating religion in realistic fantasy settings. Unfortunately, the good man had been dead for three years when this book was released. If he had had a chance to contribute directly to its creation, it might have turned out a lot better. Or perhaps the article should have been given to the other contributors before they wrote this nonsense.

Since its free, I can just easily delete the file and try to forget this wasted hour of my life, but if you would have to pay for this, I would consider this an exceptionally terrible book. Really can’t recommend it at all to anyone.

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

When Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 2007 the oppinions I hear about it were mostly pretty bad and calling it by far the worst Indiana Jones movie and absolutely terrible, and it causing the series to be ruined forever!. So I never watched it in all the years and had no desire to ever do so. But I got the series on DVD for christmas and it had the movie included and yesterday my parents were visiting, and since we wanted to watch a movie and none of us had seen it before, we watched it. Otherwise I still wouldn’t have watched it, preferring to simply don’t know what’s in it. (I might do the same with the new Star Wars movies.)

Indiana_Jones_and_the_Kingdom_of_the_Crystal_Skul_01Right from the start some things seem to be odd. Indy aknowledges being old and mentions his father having died, which doesn’t match the ending of the previous movie. But no explanation is ever given or the events of the movie mentioned, which I found rather odd. The second scene is set in the famous warehouse from the first movie and we get a quick lool at the arc as its box is broken, but otherwise the first movie isn’t mentioned either. It’s just like “look, we made a reference to the other movies!” That’s weak. Indy starts the movie with a new sidekick, whose name I can’t even remember, which always is a very bad sign about the strength of a movies characters and dialogues. It’s never explained who he is or what his relationship with Indy is, and except for two short scenes he has no real relevance to the plot or any meaningful dialogue. The other new character is Mutt, who follows Indy around after fat moustache guy has left for a while and after his first scene has no real impact on the plot either. Later of course we meet Marion again, who is a fun character but also has just one relevant dialogue with Indy and doesn’t really contribute anything to the plot. John Hurt also plays a character who gets picked up with by Indys crew and hangs around for the rest of the plot, but after drawing a map in his first scene does not have any meaningful dialogue or impact to the plot. Indy himself is okay, but you probably can see the problem here. Indy could have gone on this whole adventure by all by himself, or at least with only one companion to give an opportunity to explain the plot to the audience.

There are two villains in this movie. One is a Russian psychic played by Kate Blanchet, who tries to read Indys mind once but fails and then never shows any supernatural abilities for the rest of the movie at all. She keeps chasing after Indy for all of the movie but except for one scene in the middle of the movie she never catches up to him so her impact on the plot is also almost nothing. She has a henchman who commands a group of Soviet soldiers, but since he almost only speaks in Russian without subtitles and very little of that, we don’t really know anything about him. *sigh* And yes, he also does not do anything relevant for the plot. Indy has a fist fight with him, but he simply falls over ans gets pulled into a hole by a swarm of ants. It doesn’t remotely reach the fight against the random German mechanic in the first movie, which is clearly what this scene tries to allude to. At two point during the search for a lost ancient city in South America does Indy run into local tribes of Indians who menacingly sneak around with seemingly supernatura skill in the dark. But they show the Indians the skull and they back off, doing nothing at all and then disappearing while Indy explores the city.

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RPG Review: Black Streams

Black Streams is a series of free, short supplements for the Red Tide campaign sertting by Kevin Crawford. Though they are directly tied to the setting, they are self contained enough to be eassily adapted for any setting in any OSR game and should also be useful sources of ideas for other systems.

122752Cults of Ruin expands on the cults of various evil forces that are mentioned in Red Tide and has a length of 7 pages. The Black Emperor was a powerful and evil ruler back in the days before the Tide, who was eventually destroyed for his dark sorcery, but somehow managed to ascend to becoming a god. Though most records of his terrible reign and evil transgressions had been deliberately destroyed or lost during the coming of the Red Tide, the truth can still sometimes be discovered by sages searching for obscure lore. Only scholars, alchemists, and other learned people can become true followers of the Black Emperor, who offers them secrets to extend their life and evade Hell and other necromantic magic. The God-Beasts are savage animal spirits that protect remote villages and can grant fertility to their fields and herds, but often demand terrible forms of tribute from their worshippers. The only salvation offered by the Hell Kings is the promise that those people who truly devote themselves to evil can gain their respect and admiration, so that when they ultimately will go to Hell after their death, they will be elevated to rank among the Hell Kings instead of suffering in eternal agony. Worshippers of the Hell Kings are expected to lead as many souls as possible into hell, but even among the high priests of the cults only very few reach a degree of evil that gets them a place among the lowest ranks of devils. The Red Gods are strange entities of evil and hunger that only reveal themselves to people suffering from famine and facing starvation. They grant the gift of great strength and vigor, but in turn those who accept it slowly transform into ravenous beasts who gain sustenance from a range of unnatural and depraved sources. Finally there are the truly mad cults that worship the Red Tide itself. They are compelled to create portals that allow the Tide to spill into the Sunset Isles and are usually the first to be torn apart by the horde of the Tides spawn that emerges. The last page describes the new Azure Minister class, a cleric variant specialized in secretly exterminating evil cults that threaten the Sunset Isles while keeping the existance and true nature of their organization secret.

The Pacts of the Wise seems to be heavily inspired by pact magic from the Tome of Magic of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s 7 pages long and describes six elusive entities that can be contacted by a wizard to be granted special powers. The ritual to make a pact take a month of preparation and have to be repeated once every year. Unless a ritual to be released from the pact is performed, wizards who fail to meet their obligations are suffering severe consequences until their debts are paid. The powers granted by the entities are not particularly powerful and more than balanced by the price demanded from the wizard, but still interesting and useful enough that players might consider it to be worth it. It certainly adds an interesting new element to the character and each pact includes ideas on how to create adventures around NPCs who have access to these powers or are struggling with meeting their part of the bargain and are getting desperate to gain the required resources. Even though there are only six entities described, they provide a sufficient base to create your own ones. Since the mechanics involved are extremely simply they are easily adapted to any game.

The Yellow Legion is 8 pages long and describes a powerful artifact and the Walking Ghosts it can create, as well as their history in the Red Tide setting. The artifact is a black rod that can be planted into the ground to grow into a large tree that produces magic fruit when watered with the blood of living people. The juice of the fruit have the power to restore any corpse and return it to unlife, and the blood of a single person creates enough fruit to create ten walking ghosts. However, the fruit can only revive creatures of the same type of creature whose blood is used to create them, so to bring a fallen army of human soldiers back to life, many humans have to be sacrificed to the trees. While those who have been sacrificed can be raised like any other corpse, they are henceforth forced to exist as undead. The walking ghost are loyal to the person who create the tree and appear just as they were in life. They do not eat, drink, breath, or sleep and they heal and can be healed like living humans, but even the terrible and horrific wounds can not kill them. Only when hacked to pieces or burned do their minds fall into delirious slumber, but over the course of many years their bodies can restore themselves and make the walking ghosta rise from their graves. Without purpose after the eventual death of their creator they wander the land with the appearance of a living person, but all living things can sense their unnatural aura. If there is a way to permanently end them, it has not been discovered.

Though short as they are, I really like all these supplements and in fact their briefness probably makes them even more interesting and useful for GMs not using the Red Tide setting. Pacts of the Wise is probably the most versatile and not at all connected to any specific settin, and I recommend it to everyone to give it a look. The other two have a much more specific cultural flavor, but since they are both short and completely free, I do recommend them all. Really nice stuff and a format I would like to see used by more games in addition to full sized books.