#here is european fantasy forest number one and number two and number three

[girlvinland]

Ok was thinking more about some of my DS place HCs (these are just ones I personally like using for stories and whatnot. It is 10000% ok if you don’t like them or disagree). These are specifically places that appear in my own OC stuff, I’m not going through all three games for that at this second (maybe at some point though for fun though lol). Oh, and I’m leaving out places we see in-game for now (Lordran, Oolacile & the Royal Wood, etc.). Oh yeah, one more thing to add. A lot of these HCs are more oriented toward a time before everything started going to shit, however I imagine that in Dark Souls, there are still some cities or villages that maintain a way to either keep undead/hollows completely out or to cohabitate with undead who still have their wits about them. I like thinking that these places are still operating (for the most part) as close to normal as they can.

Carim: I always imagine it to be a very cold region that doesn’t get a ton of sunlight (I mainly based this on how in DS1, the character creator mentions people from Carim being very pale. A silly note, but dark blue hair is also specifically mentioned, so I gave that to two of my Carim chars 💙). In addition, I imagine Carim to be a mountainous, very mineral rich area, with coniferous/montane forests being the most common forest types. One may also find meadows, mountain springs, and geothermal features in the lower parts of the mountains. Titanite can be both mined and collected from monsters, and the region also has a major mineral export called Velkite (maybe this is a silly name, but I went with it anyway lol. I like imagining this material is used to make armor and weapons, and that’s it’s the same dark metal Morne’s armor is crafted from). Snowfall typically occurs from late autumn through early spring, and may transition to rain or other forms of precipitation before leading into a short few weeks of late spring or summer sunlight. These warmer periods are used in crop or flower cultivation in some areas, so predicting when (and if) they will occur has become something of an art in Carim. (No wonder though that some of our canon chars from Carim are so pissy— they’re not usually getting enough Vitamin D 😫).

Astora: Somewhat geographically diverse, with different sections of the region stretching into different biomes. Part of Astora is covered in rolling, grassy hills and meadows that bloom with wildflowers in the spring. I HC that some flat areas may be used for the growth and harvest of certain crops, as the climate is relatively temperate and receives a lot of sunshine (praise it 🌞) with enough short periods of rain to encourage growth. Vegetables (corn, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, soybeans, etc.) are a big export, and fields of sunflowers are quite commonly seen being cultivated as well. Like Carim, this is another region where weather prediction has become important, although in Astora’s case it relates more to rotating crops appropriately and planning for any potential dry spells. Other parts of Astora are more forested with mostly deciduous forests, but occasionally you will find coniferous woods. In these areas, forestry is abundant, with tree growth being managed and timber being harvested for firewood and construction purposes. Much of it is kept within the region, though a small amount is exported. Several rivers flow through Astora, creating nutrient-dense soil. Throughout the region, outcrops of limestone, sandstone, and shale can be seen.

Zena: I HC this region as being an island off the coast of the mainland. It is, therefore, a smaller region, but it is a common location for merchants and tradings. There are a couple of major ports on the island (one closer to the mainland, and one that receives ships and boats from lands elsewhere). The climate here is mostly tropical, and remains hot and humid for much of the year. Most inhabitants of Zena hail from other regions, and few of its original population remain. For those traveling further out from the mainland, it serves as a last stop for goods and preparation, and for many it also holds the allure of black market trades 🏴‍☠️.

Catarina: A large region with a big amount of geographical diversity, as one stretch is coastal with a Mediterranean-type climate, while the remainder ranges from subtropical to temperate. Like Zena, the coastal area has port cities where one can find bustling marketplaces and visitors from all over. Beyond those cities, the region is home to a couple of mountain ranges that contain and further lead into deciduous and coniferous woods as the landscape transitions towards that of Carim’s. While these more wooded areas experience a fair amount of precipitation that ranges from light rain to snow, much of Catarina enjoys a slightly dry and fair climate, with decent amounts of sunshine that encourage a well-minded populace. Certain fruits, wines, and ales are common exports from Catarina 🍻. Livestock and animal-derived products get special attention as well: milk, cheese, and chocolate from this cooler sections of the region can be sought after.

[niseamstories]

I took historical sword-fighting lessons to make the fights in my novel more realistic - here’s what I learned.

Edit: Whew, this blew up! Stoked so many of you find this useful. :) Leave me a follow if you like, I’ll try to make more research posts like this (next one will probably be about my meeting with a linguist for a fictional language).

To make the fighting scenes in my low fantasy novel more realistic, I went to see a trainer for historical sword-fighting last week, both to barrage her with questions and to develop realistic choreographies for the fight scenes in the novel. Since I figured some of what she told me might be useful for you too, I put together a small list for you. Big thanks to Gladiatores Munich and Jeanne for making time! (Here are some more pictures if you're interested.)

Caveat: I’m by no means a sword-fighting expert myself, so take these nuggets with a grain of salt – I might have misremembered or misinterpreted some of the things Jeanne told me. If I did, feel free to tell me.

1.) Weapon choices need to make sense

Let’s start with a truism: always ensure your character’s weapons make sense for a.) their profession, b.) their cultural background and c.) the environment they’re going to fight in. A farmer probably couldn’t afford a sword and might use a knife or threshing flail instead, and someone who doesn’t want to be noticed probably wouldn’t be milling about sporting a glaive or another large weapon. Also, soldiers native to a country with wide open plains would be more likely to carry long-range melee weapons such as spears or large swords, than those from a country consisting of mostly jungle or dense forests. The same applies to situations: if your character is going to be fighting in close quarters (even just a normal house), he’d get little value out of a spear or even a longsword, as there’d be no space to swing it effectively.

2.) Boldness often beats skill

In real swordfights, recklessness was often more important than technique. The fighter less afraid of getting injured would often push harder, allowing them to overpower even opponents with better technique.

3.) Even a skilled fighter rarely stands a chance when outnumbered

While a skilled (or lucky) fighter might win a two-versus-one, it’d be extremely unlikely for even a single master swordsman to win against superior numbers, even just three and if they’re below his skill level. The only way to plausibly pull this off would be to split the opponents up, perhaps by luring them into a confined space where you could take them on one by one. The moment you’re surrounded, you’re probably done for – because, unlike in Hollywood, they wouldn’t take turns attacking but come at you all at once.

4.) Dual-wielding was a thing

... at least in some cultures. I often heard people say that people using a weapon in each hand is an invention of fiction. And while my instructor confirmed that she knew of no European schools doing this—if they did, it’s not well-documented—she said it was a thing in other cultures. Example of this include the dual wakizashi in Japan or tomahawk and knife in North America. However, one of the biggest problems with the depiction of dual wielding in novels/movies/games are the “windmill”-type attacks where the fighter swings their weapons independently, hitting in succession rather than simultaneously. Normally you’d always try hitting with both weapons at once, as you’d otherwise lose your advantage.

5.) Longswords were amazing

Longswords might seem boring in comparison to other weapons, but they were incredibly effective, especially in combat situations outside the battlefield. The crossguard allowed for effective blocking of almost any kind of attack (well, maybe not an overhead strike of a Mordaxt, but still), the pommel was also used as a powerful “blunt” weapon of its own that could crack skulls. Though they were somewhat less effective against armored opponents, the long, two-handed hilt allowed for precise thrusts at uncovered body parts that made up for it.

6.)  “Zweihänder” were only used for very specific combat situations

Zweihänder—massive two-handed swords—were only used for specific purposes and usually not in one-on-one combat as is often seen in movies or games. One of these purposes was using their reach to break up enemy formations. In fact, one type of two-handed sword even owed its name to that purpose: Gassenhauer (German, Gasse = alley, Hauer = striker)—the fighters literally used it to strike “alleys” into an enemy formation with wide, powerful swings.

7.) It’s all about distance

While I was subconsciously aware of this, it might be helpful to remember that distance was an incredibly important element in fights. The moment your opponent got past your weapons ideal range, it was common to either switch to a different weapon or just drop your weapon and resort to punching/choking. A good example of this are spears or polearms—very powerful as long as you maintain a certain range between you and your opponent, but the moment they get too close, your weapon is practically useless. That’s also why combatants almost always brought a second weapon into battle to fall back one.

8.) Real fights rarely lasted over a minute

Another truism, but still useful to remember: real fights didn’t last long. Usually, they were over within less than a minute, sometimes only seconds – the moment your opponent landed a hit (or your weapon broke or you were disarmed), you were done for. This is especially true for combatants wearing no or only light armor.

9.) Stop the pirouettes

Unfortunately, the spinning around and pirouetting that makes many fight scenes so enjoyable to watch (or read) is completely asinine. Unless it's a showfight, fighters would never expose their backs to their opponent or even turn their weapon away from them.

10.)  It still looks amazing

If your concern is that making your fight scenes realistic will make them less aesthetic, don’t worry. Apart from the fact that the blocks, swings and thrusts still look impressive when executed correctly, I personally felt that my fights get a lot more gripping and visceral if I respect the rules. To a certain extent, unrealistic and flashy combat is plot armor. If your characters can spin and somersault to their heart’s content and no one ever shoves a spear into their backs as they would have in real life, who survives and who doesn’t noticeably becomes arbitrary. If, on the other hand, even one slip-up can result in a combatant’s death, the stakes become palpable.

That’s about it! I hope this post is as helpful to some of you as the lessons were to me. Again, if anything I wrote here is bollocks, it’s probably my fault and not Jeanne’s.  I'll try to post more stuff like this in the future.

Cheers,

Nicolas

[buzzdixonwriter]

Spock Grok Shock Squawk

Lemme get my main thesis out in the open first thing:

The search for intelligent life in space is a quasi-religious endeavor.

The unstated hidden hope is that we will find up in the sky people who are better and wiser than us, and who will prove they’re better by sharing that wisdom, ushering in, if not exactly a golden age, then one of shiny brass.

The unstated assumption is that they will be like the Vulcans in Star Trek, more advanced than we are, but impressed by our courage and our curiosity and our just plain ol’ fashioned humanness so that even though they are technologically and culturally far superior to us, they’ll toss the keys of the galactic federation in our lap, letting us run things for everybody’s betterment.

Snowflake, please…

(I mean let’s acknowledge this is a white and / or Anglo / European colonial fantasy from the gitgo, okay?  No sane species will let us anywhere near the torpedo room, capice?)

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a harmless enough exercise, and I’ll be honest, it would be cool if they actually found something, but at its core it’s no different from going into a place of worship and attempting to contact the divine.

(Mind you, I have absolutely no objection to that in principle, either, but I know how a lot of supposed spiritual searchers are actually searching for cudgels to batter their fellow humans into submission; and besides, as will be pointed out below, the search for the divine shares some similar issues with SETI, so read on, MacDuff…)

My next major thesis is this:

Nobody knows what they’re looking for, SETI or conventional religion.

They dress it up in fancy costumes but when you strip both groups’ sky beings naked, you find they’re looking for people just like us in every important way (i.e., we understand them, they understand us, and they don’t hold us accountable for our bullshit).

Here’s a few issues I have with the current state of SETI affairs:

We don’t know what alien life would look like.

We don’t know how alien life would think.

We don’t know what alien life can sense that we can’t sense.

We don’t know how alien life would process information.

We don’t know how alien life would adapt to its environment.

(There’s more -- much, much more -- but these will do for the moment.

Point 1: I’m not talking about green skinned Martians with six limbs, I mean we don’t even know if alien life would have a cell structure or pass along generational information via DNA.

Personally, I think there’s a remote possibility life on Earth did not evolve but is a product of panspermia, in which case any life we encounter on other planets in this solar system may indeed use cell structure, DNA, etc.

But that’s just “a chance greater than zero” not hard evidence.

We literally have no idea what other life would look like so we have no way of knowing where or what to look for.

Someone familiar only with North American forest insects might have a hard time identifying life found at the bottom of the Marianas Trench -- and that’s part of the planet we all share.

There’s a fringe science called shadow biology that wonders if there may be life on this planet that we can’t identify because it looks and behaves so differently from us.

That’s another one of those “greater than zero” speculations -- but the fact we can define right now what would constitute alien life means all we’re doing is looking for Vulcans.

Point 2: We don’t even know how we think; howda %#@& can we anticipate how alien intelligence would think.

I got into this discussion decades ago at a sci-fi con and the fan I was talking with blithely assumed we would recognize one another as intelligent based on whether we used mathematics and my question then and now is:  ”How would you know?!?!?”

Math is a symbolic language that (apparently) interprets basic underlying principles in a way that humans can grasp and apply.

The principles exist whether or not they are expressed, or how they are expressed.

We humans “see” 2 + 2 = 4 as “logical” because out symbolic language links the concept of two distinct objects added to another two distinct objects as being the equivalent of four distinct objects, but we have no way of knowing if an alien intelligence grasps the concept of distinct objects.

For them it may all be just part of a continuum.

There could be aliens desperately trying to contact us right now, using methods we can observe, and we just can’t grasp that there’s even a message to be grasped! 

Point 3: Holy cow (no, not a religious exclamation), this point is huge and we just keep glossing over it.

Humans possess better color vision than canines.

We see three primary colors, they see only two (blue and yellow).

There are other terrestrial species -- butterflies and mantis shrimp, to name two – who see colors far beyond human range, well into what Dr. Seuss would call the “on beyond zebra” range.

Even if we could talk to dogs, we couldn’t tell them what green looks like:  There is literally no place in their brain to process that color.

Or consider binocular vision, i.e., depth perception.

Most humans have depth perception but many -- for any number of reasons -- do not.

A lot of animals lack binocular vision (indeed, on Earth encountering a creature with binocular vision is fraught with danger because they’re almost always predators of some sort, using depth perception to attack prey).

Try explaining depth perception to someone who’s only had vision in one eye since birth.

“Well, it doesn’t have a color or a texture or anything like that, you really can’t ‘see’ it except…well…you actually can see it insofar as you can ‘see’ the actual space that exists between two objects instead of just guessing based on visual clues…”

Again, we may be bombarded with messages from space all the time that we simply lack the ability to sense.

Point 4: This is a lot like Point 2 but different enough to enjoy its own category. 

I mean a couple of things when I refer to processing information.

First off, there’s the actual processing time.

Remember the sloth DMV scene in Zootopia?

Imagine we contact a life form that takes a standard terrestrial year just to express “2 + 2 = 4”.

The entirety of human history would pass before it could get to basic trigonometry.

How do you communicate with that?

(And what would you talk about?) 

Conversely, we would be like ferrets on espresso, the worst form of cultural ADHD imaginable to them

And the script could be flipped!

We could be the ones taking forever to respond, their elaborate and erudite answers might flash by in less than a nanosecond.

We also don’t know what an alien species would value.  We have Maslow's familiar hierarchy of needs but there’s no guarantee these would motivate any other species.

Thigs that would be extremely vital to us might be wholly unimportant to aliens and vice versa.

The fact our sky is blue is just an interesting fact to us, to aliens it might be the single most important thing they’ve ever encountered.

We simply have no way of knowing!

Point 5: Europeans encountering North American native peoples dismissed them as “primitive savages” because they didn’t smelt ore, they didn’t use wheels, and most of their cultures lacked a written language.

Ignore the fact they had well traveled trade routes stretching from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, ignore the fact many of them governed and protected well organized territories the size of France or Germany, ignore the fact they lived in an environment not only abundant with easily available natural resources but also possessed the time to work those resources at a leisurely pace.

The European interlopers sure ignored those facts.

SETI looks for machine based physical communication from alien life (physical here including any form of energy used to convey information such as a telegraph or a laser beam).

Presuming alien life exists it may never have occurred to them to attempt to communicate in the manner humans do!

It would be like putting a mime on the radio.

The great unuttered chauvinism of the Drake equation and Fermi paradox is this: That there exists a basic template to intelligent life that’s so common the law of averages says we must find examples of it just like us wherever we look.

That’s an awfully big assumption, folks.

And we’re nowhere close to proving any of it.

  © Buzz Dixon 

[langwrites]

Merc Work

I have no excuse for this other than needing a break from my NaNoWriMo break from Kei.

Be warned: It has no ending.

--------------------------------------

On a half-decent day, Kei would wake up with the dawn in a world without alarm clocks. If the day was especially good, she’d do so in her own fucking bed and not be on a ridiculous solo mission that’d gotten blown so thoroughly off track that she couldn’t see the proper path with the Hubble telescope. Waking up in an unfamiliar continent was already a sign of a bad time, and then the power of an unfeeling cosmic gearbox threw in the unasked-for bonus of pervasive xenophobia while surrounded by European fantasy analogues. Especially while being trailed by three Academy students on what should have been a harmless trip to visit the graves of their family. 

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the comparatively minor setback of Kei being on third watch. Sleep was for people who didn’t have a demonic turtle sitting in their lap. And who weren’t “new meat” by local standards.

So, between having to join up with a mercenary band to avoid dealing with racist jackasses through the power of numbers and swords, the apparent tech levels not supporting indoor plumbing, the safety of her students, and sitting in the cold for two hours before sunrise… Well, Kei could be forgiven for feeling a bit crabby.

Ha.

You hush. 

Never.

Kei considered the complete inability to actually keep Isobu from intruding on any conversation he liked, then sighed. There was such a thing as a hopeless fight, even for her. 

Isobu folded his armored forelegs under his belly. Had you not been transported here alongside the children, would you have joined this mercenary band to begin with?

Kei made an “I dunno” noise without opening her mouth. I mean, the sheer isolation would be an absolute nightmare. I know my limits a bit better now. 

The spiritual wreckage of her left arm attested to that issue. 

Isobu looked down, over the edge of Kei’s lap and toward the forest around Remire Village. They were probably about ten meters into the crown of the oak tree Kei chose as her lookout post for the last week, with only minor modifications to the branches. The only real change between this night and others involved Isobu being a lookout alongside her, rather than haunting the nearby river and stealing fish for his own amusement. 

And for feeding the kids, but that hadn’t happened since they’d joined the Jeralt mercenaries last month. 

Even if Kei didn’t trust rowdy men and women to look after a bunch of kids with special powers, she did trust Isobu to keep track of them. If the mercenaries got into a skirmish with bandits or anyone else, Kei ordered Kaito, Aiko, and Roku to hide with their spiky guardian as their sole point of contact with the group. When the situation was safe, Kei would call for them. If it wasn’t… well, that wasn’t going to happen. Kei had seen the local idea of what “power” meant and was left unimpressed. 

Nothing could get past me if it tried.

There’s a sentiment I can get behind. She’d survived worse than angry knights chasing her with spears.

The only one Kei wasn’t entirely sure of was the mercenaries’ second fiddle. The Ashen Demon, sole child of the Blade Breaker, went by Byleth Eisner (or just Byleth) to everyone else. They were half their father’s bulk and didn’t resemble him much in either coloring or general features. The lack of visible emotion on their face left most people around here fairly unnerved, but Kei found it was actually something of an advantage upon joining the mercenaries. Because people like Jeralt were already used to Byleth’s culturally-remarkable flat affect, they had an easier time giving some slack to Kei’s preferred mask of complete professional stoicism. 

The kids didn’t bother hiding their feelings about the whole thing—they latched onto Byleth insofar as they did anyone, perhaps because they were the smallest adult available who wasn’t Kei. 

But Byleth also had a job, and that job included enough of Kei’s personal stabbing quota to disqualify them from combat babysitting duties. 

Though she’d asked once about it anyway.

Byleth’s microexpressions were difficult to read. She left the conversation with the impression they were more confused by Kei’s willingness to approach them than insulted by the presumption, and thus joined Kei and her ducklings at dinner on occasion like they had a standing invitation. 

They basically did. Kei wouldn’t shoo away people who liked her cooking, and Byleth didn’t get loudly drunk all damn night. 

Don’t worry, though. You’re still the indisputed babysitting champion of the battlefield.

Pah. Isobu swatted Kei’s hand with one of his tails. 

Rowdy for a clone, aren’t you?

Insulting for a host, are you not? Isobu reversed it, because of course he did. And it is not as though this clone could be destroyed by anything less than your brute strength.

Fair.

Normally, Kei could have continued this line of thought for some time. Bantering with Isobu was a peaceful way to pass a watch shift. He had good night vision. She had the ability to interact with the world as a human being. These things were very complimentary. 

And Isobu used his sensitive eye, adapted for exploring the sea, to spot the problem before Kei heard it. Smoke at night was difficult to see without decent moonlight, at least for humans. Isobu poked at her brain to draw her attention to it. Likewise, the orange flicker of distant flames was just barely visible in Kei’s periphery if Kei angled her vision, like she would if observing the stars. 

That is going to be our problem in short order.

Isn’t it always? Kei replied, leaning as far sideways as she can to see through the modified canopy. Any farther and gravity would be held at bay only by chakra usage. Time to get up.

Indeed. And that was when Isobu opened his mouth to roar.

It was a tiny noise, relative to his true form’s size, but the sleepy village below them started to stir. The mercenaries were used to the sound of Isobu’s dying rabbit screams by now. 

And down.

Kei shoved Isobu off her lap, sending his spiky ass tumbling out of the tree to land among the three kids piled up in their camping bags. Kaito stirred first, patting sleepily at Isobu’s ridged belly before sitting up. This dislodged Roku and Aiko in order, just in time for Kei to land about a meter away with her finger in front of her face in a clear shh gesture. 

None of her three charges moved a muscle. 

“All three of you need to hide,” Kei told them, in the language no one around here spoke. 

One by one, she hugged each of them tightly enough to convey the seriousness of her request. Three pairs of cautious eyes met hers, in turn, and then they scrambled to hide their possessions under thickets in the village’s outskirts. No bandits could know there might be someone here to chase. 

After about a minute, she picked up Isobu’s little clone and placed him in Kaito’s shaky arms.

The kids knew she’d come back. The mercenaries had fought in five skirmishes since they joined like glorified camp followers, and not one of those battles featured a single opponent Kei couldn’t destroy with her eyes closed. 

But this was their comfort zone. Each time Kei left them, like a mother wolf leaving her den, she stripped that security like a worn bandage. 

Even only after a month of immersion, the kids picked up the local tongue fairly fast. They were young and adaptable and Kei was the only human adult around who spoke Japanese to them. Until they heard it again, from either her or Isobu, they’d stay out of sight. The waiting, though, never really got any easier. 

“They’ll never find us,” Roku said, tugging gently at Aiko and Kaito’s wrists. The oldest, at barely eleven, and already forcing himself to be the most responsible. 

“Bye, Sensei,” Aiko said reluctantly, before Roku curled his arm entirely around her to keep her from running off. 

“Stay safe,” Kei told her. She looked directly to Kaito and added, “Be good for Isobu-chan.” 

Kaito didn’t say anything at all, instead just fixing Kei with a stare like he’d forget what she looked like if he didn’t. This lasted until Isobu ordered Roku to get all three kids away from there, and he did. 

All three of them disappeared into the forest. They knew how to climb trees like bear cubs—or shinobi—which would have to be enough. And if a single enemy got near them, Kei would probably need to cut a grown man in half. Perhaps several.

Byleth would help.

I’ll let you know when it’s safe to be out here again, Kei thought to Isobu. 

You should know that I was not designed for an arboreal existence. I have many prehensile tails, but I am not a squirrel.

But you’re so cute!

Flattery will get you nowhere. With that sassy rejoinder, Isobu did the equivalent of flicking Kei in the forehead.

Kei headed to the village’s front gate, cutting directly through the forest with the ease of someone who’d been in and around the wilderness her entire life. She could hear another group crashing through the woods at high speed, relative to normal human averages, and a larger group likely in pursuit. 

Well, that wouldn’t do. 

Hidden Mist. Though the hand seal for this technique was more of a stance, she could still put her detection trick in action. She just had to make sure it was concentrated on the pursuers, not the pursued. Deliberately leaving voids was useless for her strategies, but it probably kept people from breaking their necks unnecessarily.

And it let her know that the slower, louder group was thirty strong.

She kept going until she reached the village’s gates, spotting a mercenary named Arkady on duty. Backlit by torches, his five earrings caught the light and gave him away. 

“Back from the camping trip already?” Arkady asked, a note of alarm creeping into his voice. “Where are the kids?”

“Safe,” Kei told him. She slid into place on the opposite side of the gate, hand on the borrowed steel shortsword that’d carried her for the last month. Her katana was not to be wasted on bandits around here. Or in sparring. “But hidden. Someone is heading this way.” 

Arkady paused, eyed the forest, and then nodded. “I’ll wake the captain and his kid. Stay here.”

Kei let him go and drummed her fingers against her sword’s hilt, waiting. The crashing was getting closer, and her kids were fifty meters away in a tree. Even while dead certain Isobu was with them, her nerves refused to settle.

Strictly speaking, she didn’t need to keep herself and her team so far away from the mercenaries. They were a rowdy crew, but they were only of the rough-and-tumble sort. They expressed affection by going out drinking and slapping each other on the back and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder through wind and rain. Since Byleth had been with Jeralt since before he founded the company, presumably the various members would be at least peripherally trustworthy with children.

Kei, as a nineteen-year-old with dependents who had one half-cracked voice between them, only trusted the company on the battlefield. 

Arkady returned without Byleth or Jeralt, but he did have Marcel. The two of them were like a pair of piratical brunet bookends and cracked jokes anytime they weren’t on the job. It made her students edgy around them, but they were well-liked within the boisterous mercenary crew. Like many soldiers of fortune, they wore a fair amount of jewelry to emphasize their success, which was some of the best advertising around. So was the mess of scars, though only Marcel was missing a chunk of his nose. 

“What’s the matter?” Marcel asked, right before the group Kei’d been hearing for the last sixty-odd meters finally crashed out of the woods at nearly the same volume it started.

Three muddied, twig-strewn teenagers stumble up to the pool of torchlight, panting. 

Kei pointed at them, because it was faster than bothering to explain herself.

One white-haired girl and a dark-haired boy, at complete opposite ends of the “has this person seen the sun in the last decade” skin tone spectrum, while the tallest is the blond boy in the middle. If not for the torches, Kei wouldn’t even be able to call them “kids” in any meaningful sense, but she did know what school uniforms look like. Kei wandered out of her education as a baby adult, by one reckoning or another. Both of them. She hadn’t been able to look up information on the internet for unfortunately obvious reasons, but in a world where bespoke tailoring is a norm rather than a luxury and damn near nobody wore customized clothing unless they were rich, Kei’s intuition was subsumed by screeching alarm bells. 

Third watch on a morning  when they were supposed to be marching north into the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and now this. Kei’s private list of complaints kept getting longer.

“Scarface,” said Marcel, while the kids caught their breath, “why don’t you back up?”

Kei did so, because these kids were likely to react to Kei’s not-Caucasian features with the traditional xenophobia displayed by basically every non-mercenary person from Fódlan so far. If she had to deal with weapons swinging at her face before the sun came up, they’d better be attacks from people she already wanted dead. She didn’t have the patience this early in the morning.

The motion caught the eye of the boy with the yellow shoulder-cape, but little else about Kei was too distinct once she was out of direct torchlight.

Well, mostly. 

Sort of.

She was wearing a haori, her armguards, and the local pants-and-boots combination because her sandals could be saved for special occasions. Instead of covering her face with a mask or even wearing her headband as intended, she tied it around her neck like an ascot. There was only so much point in pretending to be anything but foreign. Between her accent and facial features that she was not going to burn chakra trying to hide, it was something Kei kept in perspective. 

And the yellow-themed kid was still looking at her.

“Kid, eyes over here,” Arkady demanded.

Kei silently cheered at even a token attempt to direct attention away from her.

At this point, Jeralt and Byleth arrived. 

Jeralt was a huge, dull-orange mountain of a man with dirty blond hair and a braid and undercut combination Kei didn’t think would ever catch on. His scarred face told even more of a story than Kei’s did, and no one was quite sure how many battles he’d rushed into and out of alive.  Nor were they sure how old he was. More than anyone else in the company, Jeralt was a cavalry commander down to his metal greaves and could be trusted to lead the group to victory come hell or high water. 

Competing for second place was his shadow. Byleth, the quietest person in the company and therefore the one Kei’s students tolerated best besides the horses, was about Kei’s age. They were also one of the few adults shorter than Kei was. Their eyes were a distinct deep blue and their hair a dark teal, which almost blended in with the charcoal-gray clothes they preferred this late at night, punctuated by matte black armor along their arms and legs. The ghostly complexion stood out like the fucking moon by comparison. 

The two of them commanded all the attention better than a weird foreigner did. 

“Please forgive our intrusion,” said the blond one, bowing with his hand over his heart. Kei’s brain tried to calculate angles to assess formality before remembering that cultures were weird and American accents were weirder. He went on, “We wouldn’t bother you were the situation not dire.”

Jeralt visibly took note of the formality, then said, “What do a bunch of kids like you want at this hour?”

“We’re being pursued by a group of bandits.” Oh for fuck’s sake. While the blond noble kept talking—and he was a noble, because Kei had much more experience with the blunter speech patterns commoners used. Couldn’t be anything else. “I can only hope that you will be so kind as to lend your support.” 

“Bandits? Here?” Jeralt’s gaze flicked to Kei.

She nodded, because it was as good a designation for the enemy still shouting their way through the forest as any. Bandits had been trying to kill Kei since she was Aiko’s age. This wasn’t new.

Jeralt didn’t give the order to attack them just yet. Instead, he turned his attention back to the kids as they started talking. 

The white-haired girl said, “It's true. They attacked us while we were at rest in our camp.”

Not a great sign. Why had three noble children been exposed like that? In Kei’s experience, nobility tended to spend a lot more time cloistered inside protective structures, and even traveling daimyo tended to take a proper procession with them. Where were the guards? People died when they were caught alone. 

Maybe the fire she’d seen was a part of it?

As though to confirm her rising tide of suspicions, the noble boy in yellow said, “We’ve been separated from our companions and we’re outnumbered. They’re after our lives…not to mention our gold.”

Well, then. If they were anything like the bandits Kei ran into during the initial month she’d spent as her students’ sole reliable defense, this wouldn’t take long. 

“I’m impressed you’re staying so calm considering the situation. I… Wait.” Jeralt’s body language went rigid. Like he’d just found an armed opponent in a darkened hallway. “That uniform…”

One of the group’s archers—Rickard—ran up with his bow drawn. He shrugged off Marcel and Arkady’s questions, attention locked on Jeralt so thoroughly that he nearly tripped over Kei on his way to report in. If she’d stuck her foot out, he’d have slammed face-first into the village’s defensive wall. 

“Bandits spotted just outside the village.” Rickard gestured out at the forest. “There are a lot of them.”

Byleth turned their head toward Kei, making an inquisitive gesture with their hand. One of the many, many reasons Kei’s students liked them was because they were willing to pantomime nearly everything if necessary. And while body language didn’t often cross national boundaries, Byleth was willing to learn almost anything Kei put in front of them.

Kei held up three fingers on her right hand—counting her thumb—then brought all five of them together to a single point.

Byleth’s gaze sharpened. 

Jeralt considered Rickard first, then said to the kids, “I guess they followed you all the way here.” He’d caught the gesture conversation with Byleth, and said to his child, “We can’t abandon this village now. Come on, let’s move.” 

Byleth nodded. 

“Hope you’re ready,” Jeralt grunted. “Kid, you take these three into cover and pick off anybody you can reach. Rickard, you’re with Marcel and Arkady. Rally the rest.” Then Jeralt only had Kei left to address. “And you. Your job is skirmisher. Don’t let them get around the village’s defenses.” 

Kei bowed, arms held rigidly at her sides. “As you wish.”

Jeralt waved her off, so Kei decided this was an excellent time to make herself scarce.

[moralanxietystudio]

Buried In Words - Roadwarden Devlog

(Roadwarden is an illustrated text-based RPG in which you explore and change a hostile, grim realm. It combines mechanics of RPGs, adventure games and Visual Novels, and you can now wishlist it on Steam!)

Since the middle of December, working on Roadwarden is mostly about writing new events, dialogues and quests. There were almost no updates on social media - I don’t have time to draw (aside of some inventory icons), and by popular demand, I try to avoid deeper spoilers. I’ve written quite a bunch of stuff, but the results won’t do for exciting screenshots.

I’m  currently focused on designing and filling up Howler’s Dell, the largest settlement in the game, so there’s a LOT of important character interactions to introduce, including quests, merchants, and lore. But in the meantime, some major changes have also been introduced:

 1. The game over screens

In the original Roadwarden’s Design Document, there were no game-overs. You could get significantly hurt during your journeys, but never to the point where you’d hit a brick wall that would make the further progress impossible. You’d need to rest and heal your wounds to participate in some events, but you could always move forward.

I’ve finally decided to change it. In most situations, reaching 0 HP won’t result in an instant death. But in some scripted encounters - usually when facing an overwhelming opponent while being completely unprepared - your character will be broken.

Still, I hope to make it as player-friendly as possible. Did you forget to save your game? Was autosave ran in an inconvenient spot? You can jump back in time a bit, no strings attached.

In various European cultures, the winged hourglass is an image related to the ephemerality of life, and it has became an important part of the Viaticum fantasy setting over ten years ago. Since there’s no single “canonic” design, I’ve had an opportunity to experiment with various approaches.

 2. New “regular” font

The text has now more space to breathe, the letters have more personality, and thanks to the serifs, it’s going to be easier to keep track of the lines you read. Everybody wins:

While the majority of feedback that I’ve gathered shares my enthusiasm, I’ve also seen some words of criticism. It’s still possible that the font is going to be replaced with a different one, but I’m convinced it’s still a step in the right direction.

Even if the font is going to be replaced again, this little feature will be kept in the game. The good old “select a font” setting now showcases a small frame that explains the most significant traits of the regular font and the pixel one. Even though the pixel font looks cool on screenshots, it won’t be gentle on your eyes.

 3. Updated inventory menu

From now on, pointing at an icon in your inventory will showcase not just the item’s brief description, but also its name.

This update was essential due to the constantly growing number of items added to the game. Usually, the player will keep using or loosing some of them as they complete more quests or take a part in more unique interactions, but you may reach a point when you’ll see a couple of dozen of icons at once, and they may start to get a bit blurry. When there was maybe 20 items in the entire game, clicking an icon to see the broader description wasn’t a large problem, but it became clear that it was a short-sighted, flawed design.

 4. Redesigned armor system

I’m not gonna lie. The gambesons that were present in the demo? They were a placeholder, waiting for a better idea to show up. And here it is.

The original two “types” of armor were related to the character’s class selected at the beginning of the game - the Warrior gets the good stuff, while both the Scholar and the Mage have a piece of trash, since they couldn’t afford anything better.

I was expecting to introduce some encounters “better” armors later in the game, and also script interactions where the better armors help you survive major injuries or even death, but I felt it was not good enough. This approach doesn’t introduce much decision making, and it introduces sort of a boring stagnancy.

The new system offers three “levels” of armor. The level 1 - “A Worn Gambeson” - offers you little to no protection. If you want to be saved during some difficult encounters, or maybe get less hurt when you screw up, you want to get to at least the level 2 - “A Decent Gambeson” - which is given to the Warrior class at the beginning of the game.

Upgrading armor requires getting in touch with a tailor, and paying them to do some fixes for you. However, when the armor “saves” you, it often also gets damaged. Its level decreases.

The 3rd level of your armor - “A Fine Gambeson” - follows the same rules. Wearing it will save you from most wounds, but during this process, it may also get torn, downgraded to level 2. As the player, you have to decide how many dragon coins you are willing to invest to keep yourself in one piece.

So simple, yet so much better. And I can still decide to introduce levels 0, 4, 5... Depending on  what will turn out to fit the larger picture.

 5. Updated journal menu

The journal has received the very needed scrollbars, which appear only when there’s too much text to fit in a single window. From now on, I don’t expect that the player will just “figure out” that they can use a mouse wheel, or drag the text box. Nice and easy:

Also, when you select a chapter (like “Quests”) or a specific entry (like the “Necromancers?” quest), the button is now highlighted, what will help you keep track of what you’ve been clicking through:

Also, unlike in the game’s demo, the “People” chapter is now cohesive with the “Quests” formatting. Originally, these sections had different sizes, what didn’t look as good as I intended.

6. Dolmen updates

Just to make it clear - the game receives a whole bunch of updates and bug fixes every week, and I don’t plan to list dozens of small adjustments just because. But this one is pretty fun for me, since it shows the progressing level of attention to detail, and the evolution of the game’s design. : )

Since the day I’ve introduced this area to the game’s prototype, I was unhappy about the low amount of visual changes it had to offer. No matter what you’d type down to solve the puzzle, the only clues you’d receive were presented in text.

The updated dolmen required some rewrites and a fair bit of drawing, but from now on, once you find something that provides a significant clue, you’ll also see a visual feedback that’s going to reflect your discovery. It will help you backtrack the older information, and focus your attention on more successful guesses. Oh, something new has showed up? I guess it’s important!

7. The world map reworks

Some of those updates are difficult to spot without a looking glass. Some percentage of the “bushes” have different colors now and a couple of new shapes; the forests and trees now cast shadows; the lake nearby the Southern Crossroads has more details; the river in the east is broader; there are new hills nearby Tulia’s Camp...

But it’s the eastern part of the map that has seen some major updates. It’s filled with hills and mountains, and because of it, it provides more limited vision than lands in the west, covered with plains and swamps. Previously, this disproportion was quite a bit larger, and I’ve decided to town it down a bit. I hope that the effect I’ve had in mind is still clear to spot.

 8. More “stable” text boxes

When the player points at an icon, it usually creates a text box with a related description. From now on, more of these text boxes will be anchored to specific parts of the screen, instead of showing up in an area related to the player’s cursor. It should make the information less chaotic, and won’t cover other icons anymore. Also, there will be no more situations when the text box is partially outside of the game’s window.

---------------------------------

Thank you for taking a look at this devlog, for your support and kindness. Remember, you can also find me on Twitter and Facebook, and the game has a Steam page on which you can add it to your wishlist. Have a great day!

[prairiedust]

The Folktales of Supernatural

Here is the third and probably last post in my trilogy of the folkloristics, folklore, and folktales of Supernatural. You do not have to read the first and second posts necessarily, but it is a series, so…

Anyways, in Unhuman Nature, Ross-Leming and Buckner gave us a thumbnail of season three’s main arc-- Dean’s imminent hell deal-- in Jack’s perfectest day evaar. However, Dean got to do for Jack what no one was able to do for him when he was living under the shadow of his own death. Instead of taking a joy ride, going fishing (or to the beach, come ON show,) or fine okay spending some time with a girl with daddy issues (come ON buckleming,) Dean took care of business and showed Sam how to take care of the car. When Sam was also undergoing the Trials, they were again racing against the clock. Cas, too, was under the shadow of the Leviathan infestation, and there was very little carpe in the few diems he had left until the creatures destroyed him. There was always the understanding in Unhuman Nature that TFW would be doing everything possible to save Jack, but while Sam and Cas were best tasked with trying to find a cure, Dean knew that what would be the right thing for Jack was not being in the bunker dwelling on his imminent demise, and living is a particularly Dean thing.

It was a wonderful way of retelling this particular series legend, and using that series “motif” in a new way (anyone want to tackle a Supernatural Motif Index LOLOLOL) to do the “what happens when a story is retold” theme.

So, to tie up this trilogy of close readings, I want to talk a little about how the European version of Sleeping Beauty is a good way to understand what else is going on thematically with the trifecta of recursion-retelling-mirroring that’s been going on.

There are very few citations here as the evolution of Sleeping Beauty is more or less accepted as general knowledge now-- the concept is explored in Folk and Fairy Tales 2nd edition, edited by Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek. It’s also on Wikipedia, if you’re into that.

CW for discussion of the non-est con to ever non-con and other unsettling themes that are nonetheless perfectly ordinary in folklore.

Sleeping Beauty was once considered to be perhaps one of the most wholesome of the Grimms’ fairy tales, but (in pop culture at least) the shine is starting to wear off. I was playing the Ellen edition of Outburst with some people I didn’t even know about a month ago and one of the “clues” was “Sleeping Beauty” and as soon as the guesser put that card up on her forehead, a guy shouts out, “That story is about sexual assault, fight me!”

Which makes this particular “folk tale” a neat way to show how folklore, or storytelling and retelling, is such a good frame for season 14.

I mentioned in the first post of this series that Sleeping Beauty is a great example of the intercycling of folklore and literature-- oral tales can become literary works, and vice versa, and they can comment on one another in surprising ways.

Let’s start with one of the most recent iterations of the Sleeping Beauty story and a move from one kind of text to another-- Disney’s 1959 animated movie, “Sleeping Beauty.” I know a lot of readers on here will know it-- and we’ll work our way down to the centuries-old bones of this tale.

Right off the bat, we get a really great (and subverted!) example of that “rule of three” 2/1 pattern I already talked about. The king and queen invite three “good fairies” to their daughter’s christening. They are even called “good fairies” by the herald as they enter on a sunbeam, so you already know there’s gonna be a bad one. The first fairy, Flora, gives Princess Aurora the gift of beauty. The next, Fauna, blesses the baby with the gift of song. Before fairy #3-- Merryweather-- can bestow her gift, Maleficent arrives, totally pissed that she hadn’t been invited but cool as a frozen cucumber, casually lies about her reason for showing up and then curses Aurora to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die on the evening of her 16th birthday. Merryweather uses her turn to alter Maleficent’s curse, as she does not have the power to nullify it: Aurora will fall into a deep sleep that only “true love’s kiss” can awaken her from. In hopes of protecting her from the curse in any way shape or form, King Stephan orders every spinning wheel in the kingdom to be burned, but the fairies say that this will not be enough so they sequester her in the woods under the alias Briar Rose, and they all live as peasants, eschewing magic and raising her in almost total isolation so that Maleficent can not find her to work the curse. Neat. Briar Rose gets into mischief anyway, gads about the forest singing like a klaxon, meets a prince named Phillip who is having Adventures in the Woods, falls In Love™ with him despite some now-creepy hand-grabbing. Later the fairies tell her not to worry about mysterious forest dudes and traumatize her by telling her that her entire life has been a lie, and then inexplicably send her home to the palace for her 16th birthday celebration despite the fact that the whole reason for hiding out was to keep Maleficent from being able to find her. Maleficent discovers that Aurora is at the palace, games the anti-spindle situation by luring Aurora up to a tower to a magical spinning wheel; Aurora pricks her finger on the spindle, and Bob’s your uncle. The good fairies put everyone in the castle into a deep sleep (so that while they are waiting for some weirdo to fall in True Love with a sleeping teenager, eugh, the people she knows (aka JUST MET) will sleep with her so that they won’t be upset by the complete failure of their plans) the fairies realize that Prince Phillip, the guy that Aurora has been betrothed to since she popped out of the womb, is one and the same as Mysterious Forest Dude that she fell in love with, and they send him to Aurora’s castle. Maleficent imprisons him, the fairies help him escape, he tears through a thorn bush that Maleficent creates as an impediment, kills the witch, and wakes Aurora with a chaste kiss. It’s fine, they met once, it was only a kiss (IT WAS ONLY A KISS), and this was 1959. So, that’s the Disney text in a nutshell. Folklorist Kay Stone says in her book Some Day Your Witch Will Come that while Disney had been called “a ‘Master of Fantasy’ in fact Disney removed most of the powerful fantasy of the Marchen and replaced it with false magic.” While her criticism of the Disnified Grimms tales is explicitly feminist, the criticism stands as Disney’s product is far divorced from the folk “originals.”

Most people are familiar with the Grimms’ written version of “Sleeping Beauty,” or “Little Briar Rose,” as they titled it when they published it in their first collection. This is the version that Disney partly modeled their story after. I won’t retell it, I’ll just discuss differences between the two versions, so please go read D. L. Ashliman’s translation here. It’s short. And. It turns out that the German “folk tale” that the Grimms brothers harvested is more than likely based on a story that was published by Charles Perrault in France which re-entered the Germanic oral tradition at some point. In this version, there are thirteen “wise women” (as opposed to fairies) in Briar Rose’s estimable father’s kingdom, but he only has twelve golden plates for them at the celebration of her birth, so he only actually invites twelve wise women (which is a hilarious commentary on what the lower classes thought of the nobility, am I right? Heaven forbid you don’t have enough fancy plates, quelle horreur or rather wie schrecklich or whatever the German equivalent would be.) Again, after eleven blessings, the evil crone who was disrespected barges in and curses the princess to prick her finger on a spindle (not the spindle of a spinning wheel, though) and die at fifteen; The next-eldest of the wise women modifies the curse and dad has all the spindles destroyed. Fifteen was apparently too young for a sexual awakening in 1959 but it was fine in 1812. Also, there were no shenanigans in the woods-- Briar Rose grows up a princess. She finds an old woman illicitly spinning in the castle one day and wants to try it, pricks herself with the spindle (the German version never specifies where) and her sleep is so profound that the entire castle falls asleep with her. A massive thorn hedge grows up because neglect, and eventually conceals the castle, and all that is left of the kingdom is a legend. Many other princes met agonizing deaths in that thorn hedge trying to get to Briar Rose but one day Her ACTUAL Prince shows up. The thorns turn to blossoms, he sails right through, kisses the girl, and as she wakes up so does the whole castle. The tale is over with an “and they lived happily ever after�� ending.

Charles Perrault, the Frenchman who wrote the version of “La belle au bois dormant” or “The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” that the Grimms’ informant possibly retold a hundred years later, has seven good fairies invited to the shindig, because everyone assumes that fairy number eight is dead or too ill to travel or senile or whatever. Here you can see that this isn’t an error made because a king was afraid of committing a faux pas and not from being afraid of the “bad” fairy, but because no one bothered to check on the old woman and find out what the reality was. You know what they say about what happens when you assume. So this time a young fairy steps forward and changes the curse, and instead of violently burning all the spinning wheels and spindles, the king merely outlaws their use. When the princess is sixteen or seventeen, (French nobles apparently had a little more childhood than German peasants,) she finds an old woman spinning in a tower who has remarkably never heard of the spinning ban. She hands over the spindle and the princess pricks her hand, and faints dead away. The king puts her on a bed of gold and I’m gonna quote Ashliman for this next part: “When the accident happened to the princess, the good fairy who had saved her life by condemning her to sleep a hundred years was in the kingdom of Mataquin, twelve thousand leagues away. She was instantly warned of it... [and] set off at once, and within an hour her chariot of fire, drawn by dragons, was seen approaching.” She puts everyone in the castle to sleep and this time the thorn hedge is actually a privacy fence that sprouts up under the good fairy’s magic. A hundred years later, some prince is having Adventures in the Woods when he sees the tops of the castle towers from a distance. One of his retinue tells him there’s a pretty girl inside, so he goes to check it out. Bruh, the brambles part for him magically, but allow only him, out of all of his party, to enter. He doesn’t awaken this princess with a kiss, but by the mere act of falling down beside her and being so genuinely and enormously in love with her that she wakes up on her own. Ol’ Charlie’s story is not over by half, though. They talk for hours, Perrault has a lot about eating and getting dressed and then they nap together a little, and finally get married. The prince’s mother is an ogre, however, and wants to eat her grandkids, Dawn and Day. Where does this come from? Why is it in here? What the actual heck? And it gets crazier from there. The prince becomes king and rides forth to wage war in a distant land, and the queen actually tells her steward that she wants to eat the little girl for her dinner. He tricks her by hiding Dawn and serving the queen a lamb instead. Next day, she wants to eat the little boy. He tricks her again by serving her a baby goat. Then, she wants to eat her daughter-in-law and they serve the evil queen venison. Then one day she hears the voices of her erstwhile entrees in the castle, discovers that she had been tricked, and prepares a cauldron full of venomous reptiles to throw the three innocents into to their deaths. The prince-turned-king shows up just in time and his mother is so beside herself with rage that she actually throws herself into the vat instead. So, yeah, weird stuff. Stuff that the Germans left out, or forgot, or decided that there was no “moral” that they wanted anything to do with. Was Perrault out of his damn mind?

WELL AS IT TURNS OUT, Perrault was actually retelling a Neapolitan folk tale that had been collected long before by a fellow named Giambattista Basile. He called the story “Sun, Moon, and Talia.” There is some evidence that it predates Basile, but most folklorists start there because the problem with oral tradition is that it’s rarely written down (ba-dump-tsss.) So we can definitively pick up the European version of Sleeping Beauty in Naples, Italy, in the early seventeenth century, when this mid-level clerk and author writes down a whole bunch of “nursery tales” and then dies. One of the stories he writes down is called “Sun, Moon, and Talia.” And I didn’t want to talk about it much before, except that I think understanding that Perrault seriously sanitized Basile’s story is the perfect illustration of “what happens when a story is retold.” In Basile’s story, to which I’m linking an okay version here with a content warning for rape and for the fact that they linked that painting “Nightmare” to the story, http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=story&act=select&id=3364, Talia the princess is not cursed, but her father’s scholars tell her fortune and say to the king that she would “incur great danger from a splinter of flax.” He forbade flax (from which linen is made) from entering the castle. So in this version, it is the material, not necessarily the method of transforming it, that imperils the princess. Yes this is a giant metaphor for sexual intercourse and/or loss of innocence. Nonetheless, she comes across a woman who is spinning flax into thread, wants to try it, and gets a splinter under her nail. She falls down dead. The king is heartbroken, shutters the castle, and leaves her propped up on a throne. Some time later, another king comes across the castle, explores it, sees the dead Talia who seems to be weathering her death remarkably well, and has his way with her. I can only imagine what ran through Perrault’s head when he came across this. “Sacre bleu!!! Non, non ma petite chere, this will not do. A true king would never!” or something like that. ANYWAY, Basile’s story is still the frame on which Perrault based his literary fairy tale, for Talia gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl, Moon and Sun, one of which sucks the splinter out of her finger, and she awakens. The king finds her but keeps her a secret. The king’s wife (he has a wife!) sends for them, and then to get revenge on her husband she orders the children cooked and served to him one day, but again there is a switcheroo and the cook uses lambs instead, and later it all comes out and Talia marries the king and Basile’s moral (vastly different than that of Perrault) is “Those whom fortune favors find good luck even in their sleep.” I don’t know if that was written in “sarcasm gothic” or not.

The bones of all of the stories are the same, but in each iteration something has changed which makes a huge impact on the overall themes of each telling. First, Perrault drops the rape of Talia, and slides the villain role over to the prince’s mother and makes the rape-king a virtuous prince to erase the royal philandering and necrophilia, and there is no kiss at all. The Germans bring the kiss back, weirdly enough, to somehow reach back through Perrault’s chivalrication to the sexual component of Briar Rose’s awakening-- it might be the imagery of the spindle, which in some cases is a big rod typically dropped between a spinner’s knees to make the yarn or thread, or it could be the completely bonkers idea that just kneeling beside her bed would not be enough to break the kiss (but then again, why wouldn’t a test of virtue be enough? Indeed, in the Disney version, the three fairies arm Phillip with “the shield of virtue.”) In Basile’s version, Talia dead, not sleeping, and in the Disney version there is the totally weird seclusion until young adulthood (that weirdly enough hearkens to the Irish legend of Deirdre, a woman who was betrothed to the king of Ulster and was sequestered to both preserve her innocence and thwart a dire prophecy but who still managed to run off with another guy and cause an epic war) and they rename the princess Aurora, which is Latin for Dawn, which is the name of her daughter in the French version. It’s all very intermangled.

Did other stories with similarities come from a single stalk, an ur-story like the Great Hunt may have? D. L. Ashliman in Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook tells us that Grimm and other folklorists believe that these SB stories are the vestiges of myths (132) such as the story of Brunhilde, who was put to sleep with an enchanted thorn for reaping a warrior favored by Odin. Or does this particular metaphor just crop up in cultures everywhere through synchronicity? In the Japanese folktale The Matsuyama Mirror, a young girl is given a mirror by her father, who tells her that whenever she is sad she can look in the mirror and see her mother, and eventually the mirror’s symbolism thwarts her evil stepmother, much as in the story of Snow White. Is there an even older story that connects these two?

I chose these four versions of Sleeping Beauty because for one thing this story was mentioned in the text of The Scar, they are clearly family, and the American/European versions are the most familiar to me (and I assume at least the American audience of Supernatural) so it easy to demonstrate this “digging down” to get to the seed of a story-- in this case the sterilization of the Sleeping Beauty story is an excellent metaphor for a powerful trauma weathering and being repressed-- or healed-- over time. Many scholars have noted the sexual symbolism of the spindle, which if you’ve never seen one is a rod of varying lengths with a round weight at the bottom, and in hand-spinning, typically a spinner hangs the spidle between their legs and it can pump up and down as it spins. Even the later versions of the story that feature spinning wheels have a spindle on them, and it is an unmistakably phallic component of the rig, coupled with the pistoning action of the spinner’s foot on the treadle to spin the flywheel. So hm. However, not all spindles are sharp enough to possibly prick a hand or a finger, and in the original “Talia” it is the flax splinter that inserts itself into her flesh. At any rate, it’s a metaphor for sexual penetration retold for an audience that has increasingly moved further and further away from being able to see (or is unwilling to acknowledge) sexual subtext.

Jack’s perfect day was bittersweet, but was also unmistakably idyllic and idealized, almost Disnified, although the magic was still unmistakably powerful. The scene by the river, where Jack explicitly invokes the memory of John, should also illuminate scenes from the series’ past, such as Dean’s dream sequence where he was fishing off of a dock, or where rogue angel Daniel was fishing when he was found by Castiel and Hannah. Fishing is a motif, if you will; it’s been featured in the show before. Jack’s eventual death is one of the show’s tale types. Dean, Sam, and Cas have all been through it-- as Cas says in The Spear, it’s “something of a rite of passage.” But we’re being told this story again from a point of view that was almost tragically abbreviated the first time-- when John trades his soul for Dean’s in In My Time of Dying, we got very little of what it means for a parent to sacrifice themselves for a child. Likewise, the other times that TFW faced their dooms, they had (albeit under duress) volunteered themselves. Jack was an innocent. Dying is perhaps the ultimate loss of innocence-- it certainly was for Talia. So by stripping away the halcyon glow of the river scene, we get to the bones of where the “under threat of impending death” tale type originated in the series.

This whole season so far has been the most clever way possible to do a “retrospective.” It’s not a sign that a show is tired, but that it has reached a point of self-reflection that very very few shows ever get to.

I have to wonder if this way of painting season 14’s arc through a constellation of motifs-- through callbacks as hysterical as the Scooby lunchbox full of pressurized gas in Mint Condition to returning characters as poignant as Lilly Sunder’s appearance in Byzantium, to thematic parallels to past seasons-- is going to continue into the second half of the season. We will know quickly, as the stakes have been raised after Dean’s repossession, whether Dabb and his writers continue to use the motif index of the show, or if this retrospective period is over and we’ll be covering new thematic ground. I will say, this theme has been tied up pretty neatly with the mid-season finale, that while Castiel essentially stepped into the Jack’s Fractured Fairy Tale much the same way that the way the good fairy modifies the evil fairy’s curse in Sleeping Beauty, that choice could shift everything in his mythos over to “beat the devil” which is another favorite SPN story, Tale Type 210a or whatever (and is irl ATU 330: The Smith Outwits the Devil and hopefully would be 330C which is the kind of “Devil Went Down to Georgia” classic American and African-American story.) (Imagine the SPN Tale Type Index starting with “1-199 - Origin Stories - 1a Burning Wife, 1b Burning Girlfriend, 1c House Burns Down, 2 Demon Blood Fed to Infant” and etcetera… anyways.) And we know that Cas and Sam are going into Dean’s headspace to get him, so there’s the rescuing forces storming the sleeping castle trope (remember the “sleeping” patron in Rocky’s Bar?) getting resolved potentially. But I do believe that this focused close reading brings to light a “healing trauma” theme that the history of Sleeping Beauty makes explicit. It is not the only reading of the show to do that, but again, if I could describe Dabb’s era with one phrase it would be “There’s no such thing as too much meta.”

See y’all Thursday night!

[mazikeentheshedimqueen]

Jewish Magical Creatures/Beings (with recs)

So @biperchik​ was looking for some resources on Jewish magical creatures and I was going to make a short list and message them but then...this happened. Anyway, I’ve been planning on making some info posts since I just finished my Jewish Magic class. So I guess we’re starting here! I’ll be posting detail posts for different categories soon.

From what I have read I would say there are three major categories of “creature,” all anthropomorphic: golems, dybbuks, and demons. There are others that don’t fit into these, which I’ll list further down, but as far as I can tell these three categories are the main ones.

Golems:

·         Schwartz has a section in Tree of Souls from pages 278 to 286 which covers pretty much all the main golem narratives. There are also a few passages in other sections which deal with golems, including in his creation of man section (some narratives say that Adam was a golem, which is a really interesting intersection of the two creation narratives in Genesis and I will blab about that later on my magic blog 😝)

·         Goldsmith, Arnold L. The Golem Remembered: 1909-1980: Variations of a Jewish Legend

·         Schäfer, Peter. “The Magic of the Golem: The Early Development of the Golem Legend.” Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 46, no. 1-2, 1995, pp. 249–261., doi:10.18647/1802/jjs-1995 (This one is a journal article, I don’t know how accessible it is or what level of info you’re looking for)

·         Golem! Danger, Deliverance, and Art by Emily D. Bilski. Haven’t looked at this one much but it has some cool art as well as the text which I have not read at all and it looks like it talks a lot about different portrayals (probably mostly modern/contemporary)

·         Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. This is a book about Kabbalah generally; I know it talks somewhat about golems specifically and I think a number of other books on Kabbalah do as well since its tied in tightly with Jewish mysticism (because golems use name and letter magic and are almost always made by rabbis…I have words to say about “acceptable” acts of magic and elitism and patriarchy, but that’s a whole other rant)

·         Golem by Moche Idol (haven’t looked at this but my prof recced it)

 Dybbuks:

 Other than Schwartz, I only have one rec for this: Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism by J.H. Chajes. It gets pretty technical in some places (apparently, our professor had us skip them) but it’s pretty good and has a lot of information and narratives surrounding the exorcism of dybbuks in Early Modern Europe.

 Oh, also Trachtenburg’s Jewish Magic and Superstition has a number of chapters on spirits.        

 Demons:

Okay so this category is really wide. I’m gonna give you some recs but mostly just subcategories to look into. Also infodumping because demons are my jam right now.

Jewish demonology goes back to at least the adoption of the Zoroastrian mythology into Jewish belief, since that is where a lot of this comes from. A lot of Jewish (and non-Jewish) demonology also comes from the gods of other surrounding societies.

Later Jewish demonology kind of faded into the background and Medieval/early modern European Jewish demonology is a lot less intricate and varied probably, but is also probably what most resources are going to be pulling from.

Joshua Trachtenburg’s Jewish Magic and Superstition is great and has a couple chapters dealing specifically with demons. It’s pretty old so it might be available for cheap/free, idk. My prof just posted literally the whole book in our resources for the class. It’ll also give you a lot of terms which might make finding stuff easier.

Schwartz has a big section on demons (and also Gehenna). It has a lot of older and more specific stuff too.

Different things to look for:

Lilith and the lilim are a big deal; Lilith is one of the very few specific demons that has survived into the medieval and early modern era.

Ashmadai is the king of demons (originally Zoroastrian). There are some stories about him and King Solomon from pretty early in the integration of his mythology into Judaism.

Another word describing demons in general is mazikeen/mazikeem

There’s a story called The Tale of the Jerusalemite which includes Ashmadai. A guy winds up in a town/kingdom of demons, some of whom study Torah. Ashmadai is really into Torah in the Solomon myths too. Trachtenburg talks about this also; its related to an idea that demons are constantly searching to become a more complete and perfect creation.

The main creation myth for demons is that they are unfinished because God started making them before Shabbos and had to stop, then left them that way in order to show the importance of keeping the Sabbath.

Magical creatures from other cultures were integrated into medieval/early modern European Judaism with a creation myth saying that they were the children of Adam copulating with a demon (possibly Lilith?) during his (100 year?) separation from Eve after leaving the Garden of Eden. Trachtenburg talks about this too.

 More animal-like creatures (from the “mythological creatures” section of Tree of Souls, p. 144-151)

·         Adne Sadeh,  who doesn’t fit in this category because it’s a kind of primitive man but it is so freaking cool so I don’t care. They’re attached to the earth by an umbilical cord.

·         Leviathan

o   Sea monster

o   Want dragons? Here is a dragon

o   The Great Sea/Okeanos is on top of Leviathin’s fins.

o   God takes this guy for walks

o   We get to eat it in the World to Come

·         The Ziz

o   Big bird. Very big bird. The ocean only comes up to its ankles and one time its egg broke and flooded sixty cities

o   Messenger of God

o   We get to eat it in the World to Come

·         The Re’em

o   A horned creature kind of like a unicorn or rhino but like…big. Really big. “A re’em that is one day old is the size of Mount Tabor” big.

·         The Phoenix

o   “the only creature that didn’t eat the  fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

o   Guards earth from the sun

o   “Over a thousand years, each Phoenix becomes smaller and smaller until it is like a fledgling, and even its feathers fall off. Then G-d sends two angels, who restore it to the egg from which it first emerged, and soon these hatch again, and the Phoenix grows once again, and remains fully grown for the next thousand years.”

·         The Lion of the Forest Ilai

o   It’s like a lion but it roars super loud. I don’t know how big a parasang is but it made Rome shake from four hundred parasangs away.

o   Basically there’s a line in Amos 3:8 that uses lions as a metaphor for G-d and the story says Caesar was like “hey lions aren’t that bad people kill lions” and Rabbi Joshua ben Haninah was like “um no not this lion.”

 I really can’t recommend Tree of Souls enough. I’ve been writing fantasy for a long time and I was doing primarily Celtic paganism for a long time and that book really opened my eyes and showed me that I could find the things I was looking for in my own culture. That’s also where I learned about the Shekinah and started to feel like there might actually be a place for me in the religious part of this culture and I didn’t have to imagine G-d the way They’re portrayed in mainstream (and particularly Christian) culture. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, and everything has sources and annotation which make it a great jumping off point, as well. It’s HUGE so it might look intimidating if you’re not into that but all the individual myths are very short. Also I think Schwartz has some other books that might be less academic and tome-like.

[finalhourdotcom]

Causes of the apocalypse by Carmen Harshinii

The term Apocalypse originates from the Greek word apocalypsis, which refers to the act of unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known. Apocalypse is a wide term and its description highlights three major aspects. First, apocalypse refers to the anticipated end of the world as described in religious books or movies. Secondly, an apocalypse the end times are a marvel portrayed by disasters that are like occasions depicted as indications of a final ending. Thirdly, an apocalyptic event is troublesome and provocative to disclosures. An interesting aspect of the Apocalypse is that there is no history that can be used as a reference as it has never happened before. There have been occurrences where a small group has faced annihilation but humanity as a species and the superior race has never faced promised destruction. Although this fact remains until now, there are researches and studies done by acclaimed scientists which prove that certain causes may bring about the future end of the world as we know it.  Although some of the factors might sound like the plot of a science fiction movie or a fantasy novel, in reality, we are actually faced with these factors in our everyday lives but for the worst case scenario to happen, which is something as huge and impactful as global annihilation it would mean a factor has to be used/worked to its full, deadly effect. Here are the most evident and likely causes that can make the humans to go the way the dinosaurs did; global warming, nuclear war, global pandemic,and asteroid impacts. These causes can be grouped into two categories which are natural disasters; global pandemic and asteroid impacts, human triggered disasters; global warming and nuclear war.

Focusing on the natural disaster point of view, a global pandemic is one of the top reasons why the world could end. A global pandemic is the spread of an infectious disease which can reach all around the world and end civilisation so fast we would not even have the time to process it. History can vouch for us by proving that global pandemics can almost erase the human population in a blink of an eye. Diseases like the Black Plague killed 1 in 4 Europeans in the 14th century, the Spanish flu robbed the lives of 50 million people, and the influenza took 20 million lives in just a year. Although one might think that due to modern medicine and technology, such disasters could be avoided but the recent AIDS and Ebola virus has similar death tolls. The scary and unnerving fact is that some strains of bacteria such as cholera and measles have developed a certain resistance to antibiotics, and antibiotic resistant bacteria are held accountable for an estimated 70,000 deaths in a year. The worst case scenario is that a new incurable fatal disease with a long incubation period could occur in a single pathogen, the emergence of this new strain would spread so fast that we are caught off guard and no chemical means of control, causing the death toll to reach extremes. In today’s day and age of easy means of transportation by air travel all around the planet and the increasing number of densely populated cities it makes it easier and faster for the disease to spread and affect every human. Outbreaks were aided and abetted by inept health systems, human behaviour, and the complete lack of consistent political and financial support for disease-fighting preparedness everywhere in the world (Garette, Laurie 2000) According to public health experts, the looming threat of a global pandemic is very real and it should be taken seriously as the risk of it occurring is greater than ever before.

In addition to that, another way we as living beings might cease to exist is through the betrayal of the solar system and the universe in which we inhabit, by bombarding earth with asteroid impacts. Asteroids are space rocks that are rocky worlds spinning around the sun that are too little to even consider being called planets. They are otherwise called planetoids or minor planets. There are a great many asteroids, running in size from several miles to a few feet over. Altogether, the mass of the considerable number of asteroids is not as much as that of Earth's moon. In spite of their size, these space rocks can be risky as many have hit Earth before, for example, a 200-foot-wide comet fragment exploded in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 and more will collide with our planet later on. It may sound unbelievable and quite frankly something out of fictional books/movies but scientists are deeply concerned and have theorized that a huge gigantic asteroid impact enough to cause the Apocalypse would hit our earth once in 120,000 years. We have heard before that asteroids were the reason dinosaurs do not coexist with us and even if one-tenth of the size of the one that became the reason for their extinction hit our Earth today, global catastrophe would occur. The effects of the asteroid impact occurs in a chain reaction method where should an asteroid land on earth, it would cause firestorms, burning everyone and everything in the vicinity followed by an effect similar to nuclear winter which is so much debris and clouds of dust would block out the sun causing a global cooling. The radiation from the asteroid impact would annihilate the ozone layer through nitrogen oxide hence causing ultraviolet rays from the sun to bring about skin cancer for the rest of the survivors. Not only that, the food supplies would be affected too and it would lead to political instability, humans would turn against one another and finish each other off even if they survived the first two phases of the impact. Moving on to human triggered disasters, the most probable cause of the potential end of the earth would be global warming or climate change. Nowadays, we are bombarded with news stories about tragic disasters such as forest fires, melting of the polar caps, rising sea levels etc almost everyday. In fact, several disasters occur at the same time in different places around the globe and they all stem from global warming. Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants and greenhouse gases collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth’s surface. Normally, this radiation would escape into space—but these pollutants, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter, also known as the greenhouse effect. Scientists have deduced that the higher the temperature on the planet increases, the worse the condition our earth will be with more serious and often occurring cyclones, flooding of cities due to rising sea levels, loss of harvest which indefinitely causes famine, mass destruction and death of all organisms including the human race, turning the ecosystem upside down and leading the earth into an inhospitable and uninhabitable place to live in. The sad truth is that we as caretakers of our planet do not dedicate enough attention to climate change the governments of the world are not spending enough money on combating the issue, therefore it is just getting worse day by day and when it is at its most dangerous point, it would be too late by then. In 2018, Dr Leena, acting general at the Energy and Resources Institute points out that we’ve put enough time and resources into airplane safety that only 27 airplane crashes happen in a year but if dying in a flight accident was as likely as a degree Celsius global temperature increases, then the number of people dying in airplanes every year would be 15 million. Besides that, another human triggered disaster which could bring the apocalypse is nuclear war. Nuclear war is a product of war between countries that have political unrest between each other, for example North Korea, Iran, The United States of America, Russia and so on. These countries possess the tools and equipment to generate nuclear energy to use against their enemies in order to fight back and this is especially dangerous as  nuclear energy can be turned into nuclear weapons which then can destroy the Earth in a despairing and horrible way, purposely or even accidentally. A massive explosion could not only disintegrate humans but it would plunge the Earth’s upper atmosphere in so much dust, smoke and debris that the rays of sunlight would be blocked out for months maybe even years, possibly destroying the ozone layer, causing the earth’s temperature to plunge below freezing and then to decrease by 8 degrees Celsius over four to five years making it a freezing cold wasteland also known as a ‘nuclear winter’. So, the earth goes incredibly cold and the long winter basically freezes out vegetation and freezes out life (Richard Binzel, 2017) With no food and the lack of resources to live, chances of the human race to survive would be slim to none. In conclusion, scientists have well researched these causes and came up with many theories and predicted that a global pandemic, asteroid impact, global warming and nuclear war are the top reasons how the world could end. Although we have no control on how natural triggered disasters can affect us, such as a global pandemic or an asteroid impact, the least we can do is take precautions and strive to come up for solutions or strategies for dangers that have not yet come as it is better to be safe than sorry. On the other hand, human triggered disasters such as global warming and nuclear war should make us realise that we should not take things for granted and do everything we can to prevent such tragedies to happen as the only solution is in our hands. Playing a small part can make a huge difference in saving our world from mass destruction and the responsibility lies in each an every one of us, no matter how young or old. After all, how often do we get second chances in life ?

[fireminer]

Writing advice: Forging a sword

Let me say upfront that this list is meant to fit a wide variety of settings, from high-magic to low-magic. And it is NOT the ONLY which you can make an awesome sword. In fact, your character can simply pick up any tree branch laying on the side, enchanting it with a multitude of spells, and there you have something which can take on the likes of Dragons.

What I am about to say is, however, gathered from my real-life experience (as both a sword affectionado and amateur blacksmith,) mixed with a very low amount of fantastic elements. As I said above, what listed here can be put in almost any campaign and would not look completely out-of-place. You can expand the list, or choose to remove elements from it, it depends on how you are going to play.

So, let’s us begin

--

I. MATERIALS & TOOLS

- Steel: Meteorite ore gives that “Oomph”, but if it is not possible I recommend Magnetite (Fe₃O₄). In some cases, you may want to have a sword which was made from several types of steel (more on that bellow.)

But Ore is not the only type of steel you can use. Recycling steel is something which blacksmiths have been doing since the dawn of their carrer. Any steel, even those have rusted, will do as long as it is homogenous (made from one type of steel only) such as a hovel or a pot (cast iron is fine, too.)

Sometime recycling steel also has spiritual meanings. The most obvious one is scourging the battlefield for broken blades, but you can really made a spin on this idea - for example, a sword which is a tribute to a god can make use of the steel from the nails which are taken from a shrine dedicated to that same god

Also, never use stainless steel, unless you’re looking for a knife. Use steel with high carbon content

- Coal: Good old fat coal, or if coal is not available then use charcoal, which is normally formed by slow-burning wood or (sometimes) bones. If you want to add some more “Oomph”, considering the coal is fossifulized from the remains of an ancient magical forest or bones of magical beasts.

[Unconfirmed sources tell that in the pre-Medieval time, people did use the bones of their ancestors/enemies, not as the primary fuel source, but for the carbon content gained when burning the bones while smelting the metal.]

- Tools: The older the tools are, the more prestigious they carry (and, work like the extension of an arm.) If possible, then have a dragon to substitute for the furnace (so as to raise the temperature as high as possible, therefore pushing out more impurities from the iron during smelting), and let a spirit possessing you and guiding your hammer hand

- Steel types: Hagane/Shigane/Kawagane (edge steel/core steel/skin steel used in the making of Katanas,) Crucible, or Damascus (essentially a variation of Crucible) steel. You can see that these types of steel all consist of several layer of steel of different strength, which gives the sword both strength, sharpness, and flexibility.

Steel-working in the ancient days was also more advanced than we thought. For example, the 2nd century Romans used naturally occurring metal alloys (Molybdenum from Dacian iron ore) as cores, with soft iron sheathing. It was basically a sandwich forge-welded together with a hard edge and tough exterior

- Wood: For the grips, blacksmiths has always favor straight-grain woods (oak, ash, etc with teak the most expensive of them) for easy shaping and durability (it’s much harder to break a straight-grain wooden stick when you put it on your knees and break)

- Enchantment: Ofuda or any other types of paper talisman to wrap around the still-hot ingot (Japanese steelmakers still do this today.) Having a priest (or any supernatural entity) blessing everything also help, too

II. STEPS TO FORGE A SWORD

- Smelting the ore into steel (or buy already-made steel)

- Drawing out the shape of the blade: Heating the ingot till it is red, hammering it, reheating the ingot again, hammering again. Repeat the process until you have the basic shape of the sword in your hand. Then it is all about grinding which you create the profile of the blade, which includes its point and edges. All engraving should be done by now

- Hardening the blade: Heating the blade till it glow, then quenching it in a liquid. Please note that curve swords (like the katana) only become curved after they have been hardening

- Tempering the blade: Heating the sword (at a temperature lower than the temperature which the Hardening happened), then quenching it again. Repeat the process for several times. This is one stage where the skill and experience of the swordsmith is invaluable. It takes trained hands and sharp eyes to understand the properties of the metal

- Finishing the sword: Polishing and applying finish to the blade, then adding hilt, guard, pommel, etc to the sword.

III. TIPS

- Metalworkers were rarely specialized in the way we think of having a "job" today. The local blacksmith was also the dentist, not because he had medical training, but because he had tools. Metalworkers often had a toe dipped in alchemy, which is not surprising since they appear to transmute "dirt" into metal and then tools

- Choose the type of blade: Look online for “Oakeshott Typology” and see for yourself what kind of blade you are going to make. Stranger types of blades, such as the Flamberge, also work but you must first think of the setting which your characters stuck in. Is it a period where full-body armor prevails? Are you more likely to fight against men-at-arms, thugs, or knights, etc.

I notice that the most commonly used blade style is a hybrid Viking sword/Arming sword style with little taper and a wide fuller (in practice, however, depend on the sword you may have to adjust the size of the fuller.) Artists tend to exaggerate the width of the blade, though.

- Sharpness: European longswords were never much sharper than a butterknife. They didn't need to be sharp to cleave armor and limbs, and a sharp blade will be more likely to warp, chip, and shatter. Rapiers and other quillion-hilted swords take this to the next step – as they are mainly used to thrush and lunge, the edge are left blunt

- Hardness:

The hardness of the steel can be determined when you are grinding and polishing it: The more spark it creates, the harder the steel is. Normally, with swords which just have been quenched, you will have the outermost layer of steel quite soft. You must grind the edge down so as the now-hardened edge can reveal itself

- Fuller: Depend on the type of the blade, the number, length and width of fuller will change. You should do some research first before coming to your decision

- Folding: The primary purpose of folding the ingot is to beat out the impurities. The "wavy" pattern on Damascus swords are only a byproduct of folding. That said, never fold the steel over 5 times, unless you're really sure what you're doing. Long short story, the molecular structure of steel is messed up so bad it can no longer be used to draw out a sword

- Tempering: Use either oil or water for tempering, but in any case DO NOT use blood. Medieval sources tell that blacksmith once quenched their blades in rendered lamb's fat

If you use a single type of steel for your blade construction (most likely the case with modern steel. Most of the “backyard knife/sword/etc making videos you see on Youtube are actually like this, with the maker traced their sword on a sheet of steel and then cut it out), quenching the blade in oil will make the blade lost its curve. The opposite happened with cruxible steel, as the sword curves more when quenched with oil (for example, the shape of the Katana is formed like so.)

- Blade decoration: The sky is your limit, but remembers that any carving must be done before the blade is tempered, and even then the blade can still be weakened if not properly treated. Inlaying gold or silver, however, is done after tempering but before polishing. If you want to inscribe something after tempering, use acid and stencil. DO NOT attempt to use a chisel on a finished blade

A lot of times gold, silver, ruby, and other precious materials have magical and/or religious meanings, so make sure you know what you’re doing.

- Grips, hilts, guards, and pommels: Once again, go with the Oakeshott classification. The hilt, guard, and pommel are actually the part where all of the “Blings” will go, and whether a sword is visually impressive depends on these parts. That said, do not try to “hang” everything on the three of them. In some cases they will make the sword impossible to be used.

Do not have the grip rounded, for when your character wielding that sword, he won’t known which is the front and which is the back of the blade (wrong blade alignment.) Have the grip quadrilateral, hexagonal, or octagonal.

For the wrapping of the grips, hilt, guard, uses cured hide of a monster, or its dried tendons. If necessary, boil down bones to make glue

- Finishing: Choose between browning, bluing, blackening, Parkerizing (the last three methods are recent inventions, and while they may not give the most aesthetically-pleasing look, they certainly protect the metal surface weel,) or just a simple layer of oil.

A traditional and effective method was to warm the blade and melt beeswax over the surface. It will protect the blade until rubbed off, and it has a good look.

Remember that your sword will certainly rust, considering the amount of blood you are going to douse it with, so if your game has a “Breakable Weapon” system, remember to clean and sharpen your sword after each engament

+ Case hardening: In case you want to make your sword fancier, there is the Case Hardening method which turn the polished blade into the color of translucent rainbow (seriously, Google it up.) There are two plausible way Case Hardening can be done in a medieval-fantasy setting: dunk the parts in a bath of boiling cyanide, or, packing the metal parts in a box along with charcoal, leather, and bits of bone (you can add some copper coin for an even shinier finish,) then heat everything up for several hours, and then quench it in water.

[i-just-like-commenting]

Final Thoughts While Reading “The World of Ice and Fire” (part 6)

"Some of that is, Here there be dragons," Martin cautioned. "It's beyond the world they know."

Once you get beyond Westeros, the tenor of the book starts to change. You get a lot more talk about things being “exotic” or bizarre or mysterious. Martin himself has said that the further you get from Westeros, the less seriously you should take what the book says, because the more Yandel is relying on hearsay and third- or fourth-hand accounts. You wind up with different levels of knowledge:

The six coastal Free Cities, Braavos, Pentos, Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, and Volantis, all of which have extensive trade and interaction with Westeros directly

The three interior Free Cities, Lorath, Navros, and Qohor; the Summer Islands; and Ib, which while they trade with Westeros are much more reclusive and harder to reach

Central Essos and the Basilisk Isles, which Westeros is more likely to trade with via intermediaries

East of the Bones, and Sothoryos, which are mostly rumor and speculation

Also, this section of the book can be hard to follow unless you have a nice big map of the Known World that came with The Lands of Ice and Fire, which a certain someone just so happened to get for Christmas:

…so let’s started.

How many weird-ass societies can you come up with?

There are a ton of orientalist overtones in this section of The World, but that is, I think, intentional. It is imitating the tone of European works on “the East” for the presentation of Essos. Within the books, too, there tends to be a POV-derived sense of things being mysterious/exotic/bizarre. The characters who are just sojourners there, like Tyrion in Volantis and Dany in Qarth very much have these ideas in their minds. In contrast, Braavos (though not the Faceless Men) becomes more and more ordinary the longer that Arya lives there. I’m looking forward to her reverse culture shock when she comes back to Westeros.

What I do find impressive about this description of Essos is how Martin, for the most part, tries to avoid doing direct one-to-one parallels with real-world cultures. Especially with the Free Cities there’s a strong sense of their situatedness within his own universe and history that defies attempt to make them perfect analogs of anywhere in Europe or the Middle East. The Summer Islands, Sarnath, Ib, Hyrkoon, Qarth, the Dothraki…they all take cues from cultures in real life, but are so mish-mashed that they don’t feel like fantasy counterparts of anywhere real. Some are problematically culturally monolithic (especially with the Dothraki), but at least this particular snarl is avoided.

The one major exception is Yi Ti, which is China. Or rather Cathay, the Medieval image of China as it was received passed down and exaggerated by travelers. Setting aside the fabulous extravagances, there are similarities to Chinese history with its periods of long dynastic stability interrupted brutally by civil war. The monosyllabic nature of most names and words hints at a tonal language ala Chinese (though the consonants, with the inclusion of non-nasal final consonants, are very different from modern Chinese). It’s not a particularly offensive fantasy-China, however, so I’ll let this one slide.

The oddest culture is Hyrkoon, dominated by women who supposedly castrate all men but a handful they use for breeding. It would be great to know more about their history and how much of these tales is true, but unfortunately Yandel’s only real source is Addam of Duskendale (the Marco Polo of Westeros), who

instead spends most of its time finding ways to remind readers that the warrior women walk about barebreasted and decorate their cheeks and nipples with ruby studs and iron rings.

In other words, rather than give cultural background and history, he was too obsessed with just talking about the sexy~~~ bits and I think this might be Martin throwing some shade on the show, especially since this was written around the same time that the notorious Dorne arc happened in seasons 5.

Where do dragons (and other creatures) really come from?

The Valyrians say that dragons were born naturally out of fire and that they were the first to tame them. In Asshai it is said that some pre-Valyrian people tamed them in “the Shadow” and later taught the Valyrians. The maesters assert that there were dragons of some kind in Westeros long before they were tamed in Valyria. And Septon Barth says that dragons were created by Valyrians using fire magic out of the monstrous but not particularly supernatural wyverns that live in Sothoryos.

A good rule of thumb is that Septon Barth is probably right, but that means having to figure out how all the other pieces fit together. Some can be dismissed as self-aggrandizement, but there seems to be a common root in several of the stories, namely the importance of fire magic. Asshai is a major source of fire mages; if they had worked with Valyrians to create the first dragons, it could have served as the basis of their respective myths.

But that leaves the question of whether there were really dragons in Westeros before the Valyrians created them. I can come up with three major possibilities:

Septon Barth is wrong and there have always been fully functional dragons all over the place. I think we can dismiss this one out of hand.

The maesters correctly attribute things like knighthood or seven references to anachronism, but don’t with dragons. In reality dragons only appeared in Westeros as strays from Valyria much later in history.

The “dragons” from ancient Westeros were very different from Valyrian dragons – maybe related to the wyverns of Sothoryos, maybe even “feathered” to give rise to the idea of griffins. These extinct creatures took on the attributes of Valyrian dragons by later singers.

I’m partial to the third idea, because it would take care of multiple questions, and the best theories are usually the ones that explain the most data points.

Of course, griffins and wyverns are far from the only mythical creature that one finds in Essos. There are also mentions of centaurs, which are dismissed with the same argument given in our world, namely that people who didn’t know about horse riders got the wrong idea. Whether or not ice dragons in the North are real remains to be seen, but it would be interesting if “cold” became another element in the magical universe – it would certainly fit the Others more than the elements of earth or water. The brindled men of Sothoryos (who are seen in the fighting pits in Meereen so they’re definitely real) seem like another surviving hominid offshoot like the Ibbenese (who are clearly Neanderthals). Shrykes and winged men are probably mythical, given how far east they are. Tiger-men sound like skinchangers. The Jhogwin and Ifequevron may be proof that giants and the children of the forest were native to more places than just Westeros.

Indeed, a lot of what this does is put the local history of Westeros into a global scale, and on that note…

…let’s see if we can catch all the Lovecraft references!

The Deep Ones and the Drowned God’s famous words are really obvious Lovecraft references, so obvious that most people quickly notice them. There are others here in The World – lots of them, in fact, some of them fairly obscure.

BUT GUESS WHO’S GOT TWO THUMBS AND A SERIOUSLY PROBLEMATIC FAVE! I’ve added numbers on them, see if you can figure out why before the end. (cw: racism/anti-semitism/xenophobia on all these links, because it’s Lovecraft and he was a bigot)

Church of Starry Wisdom: originating in Yi Ti (4) but found throughout the world, including in Braavos (1), it originates in Lovecraft’s The Haunter in the Dark

The Black Goat of forested Qohor (2) seems a pretty clear reference to one of the titles of Shub-Niggurath (don’t think too hard about how that name is pronounced), “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”

“Ib” (2) references “Ib” in The Doom that Came to Sarnath

The idol of “a gigantic toad of malignant aspect” on Toad Isle (3) is a shout-out to Lovecraft’s version of Tsathoggua, an “amorphous toad-like god” dwelling in N’kai

The lizard men of Sothoryos (4) are a possible nod to the inhabitants of The Nameless City, though lizard people have a long history elsewhere

The lost city of Sarnath (3), as in The Doom that Came to, from above

The people of the Thousand Islands (4) worship “squamous, fish-headed gods,” included because nobody uses the word “squamous” unless they are doing Lovecraft pastiche, even though he only used the word once

N’ghai (4) might refer to N’kai, since N’kai is an underground city like Nefer

Carcosa (4) with its yellow emperor is an obvious nod to the pre-Lovecraft stories An Inhabitant of Carcosa and The King in Yellow that is sometimes used in Cthulhu mythos stories (though not by Lovecraft himself)

K’dath (4) is Kadath from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and if you have not read that novella, it is bizarre but one of my favorite Lovecraft tales and reads a lot like an RPG campaign

Leng (4) reference the Plateau of Leng, which is also in The Dream-Quest, but appears in At the Mountains of Madness and The Hound as somewhere in the waking world, in Antarctica or Central Asia. The people of Leng revered the Old Ones in ages past, a very obvious reference to the Great Old Ones, extremely powerful and long-lived aliens that serve the Outer Gods

I may have missed a few in the weirder names, too, since a few of these have messed up spellings. Now, with this many references, man, it might seem that this is straight-up part of the Cthulhu mythos, but there’s a reason I have those numbers. They correspond to the concentric rings of knowledge I started this entry out with, and as you can see, the references get more and more common the further you are away from Westeros and the closer you are to “here there be dragons.”

And on closer look, a lot of these references don’t amount to much more than name-drops. The exact nature of the Black Goat in Lovecraft is unclear, and was probably him ripping off another story called The Great God Pan; Qohor’s religion owes as much to ideas of Baphomet and Satanism as it does to Lovecraft. The Cult of Starry Wisdom didn’t worship a fallen asteroid, as they do in Essos, but rather a device they could use to see between worlds. Tsathoggua didn’t preside over merrow-human hybrids as on Toad Isle. The Neanderthal Ibbenese in no way resemble the green-skinned, bug-eyed, voiceless Ib. Sarnath’s doom is from a very mundane Dothraki invasion rather than being transformed into monsters. Carcosa should be a lost ruin. Leng is a cold barren plateau populated either by people with horns and hooved feet or by “a corpse-eating cult,” not a tropical island with tall beautiful humans. Kadath exists only in the dream lands – and the dream cycle is also where you find Sarnath, Ib, and sometimes Leng, all explicitly imaginary places in a string of Dunsany-esque fantasy stories with minimal connection to the rest of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The only real exception are those Old Ones in Leng, trapped beneath the earth in sealed underground caverns. One of the reasons I doubt the show’s explanation of the origin of the Others is the one from the books is that it’s so local, entirely driven by the children vs First Men conflict, whereas in the books the Long Night was worldwide. I don’t know how the show intends to reconcile this provincialism with the prophecies of Azor Ahai; how could Asshai care about this if it happened on the other side of the world? And it’s far from the only culture with Long Night myths. Yi Ti has a fairly elaborate one, and the book gives many names for Azor Ahai: Hyrkoon the Hero (Hyrkoon), Yin Tar (Yi Ti, and a woman), Neferion (N’ghai?), and Eldric Shadowchaser (Andal? First Men? The name is a Michael Moorcock reference so who knows); we can probably add the last hero of Nan’s tales to that list.

That there might be another sealed evil in a can under Leng doesn’t seem impossible, but the series already indicates what they might be: the Others. It is entirely possible that the Wall is not the only barrier keeping whatever caused the Long Night from once again covering the earth; it may simply be the most vulnerable because Westeros no longer believes in magic and myth as it used to, and everyone is too busy with local politics to care about another hibernal apocalypse. Martin has created his own strange mythos, with giants that are radically different from our own legends, monstrous merfolk, the strange child of the forest that rather than elves, and the unearthly and ethereal white walkers with their armies of undead and giant ice spiders. Frankly it would be a disappointment if he grafted on someone else’s stories.

[tipsoctopus]

Leeds, Norwich, Bristol City, Coventry: Who else makes up the perfect Premier League?

There was a recent all-too-brief trend on Twitter that saw fans compile their perfect Premier League table and this is brought up now, after the event, because presently the Championship is topped by Leeds United and Norwich City, two clubs who featured prominently in these fantasy top flights and duked out a thrilling clash on Saturday.

Three more popular choices – Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, and QPR – are also currently in contention to return to the promised land which means that come August we might be three closer to having our dream twenty, a list that varies from person to person but really not to any great extent.

We pretty much all want Leeds back for example and this despite the club retaining a hated status across rival fan-bases even in extended exile. Forest too was included virtually across the board on Twitter and they are hardly the darlings of the over-forties nor a ‘big club’ in 2019.

Breaking down the reasoning behind these selections reveals four overriding factors shared by one and all. Firstly there is a club’s fan-base to consider; the bigger the better. Then its stature is important with history playing a big part too. Lastly – and perhaps most obviously – the popularity or unpopularity of the club in question is key and interestingly either extreme works. Clubs that prompt mild apathy have no place here. This is a dream Premier League remember.

You may have noticed that only three reasons have so far been given. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the fourth very soon but before we do let’s stay with Leeds United and compare them to, say, Huddersfield Town to illustrate how the other factors come to the fore.

The Terriers are undoubtedly a popular club, with a large number of us admiring how they’ve managed to established themselves among the elite in recent seasons. Alas, in this instance unpopularity trumps popularity and their Yorkshire rivals massively win out. This can best be explained by the posing of a simple question: Who would you rather your club face this weekend? Huddersfield or Leeds? Which fixture would elicit the most enthusiasm?

Most would surely plump for the Elland Road giants and not only for the passionate antagonism implied. Stature comes into it also, with Leeds possessing a greater standing than Huddersfield even if the latter boasts an illustrious and proud history of its own.

Rightly or wrongly, Leeds are regarded as being a ‘proper’ club with ‘proper’ fans. Huddersfield are too, only less so. So a fan-base scores highly and history does too but pales in importance to stature. Being widely disliked meanwhile only helps a club’s cause.

Yet all of this is nothing to nostalgia, the fourth and most meaningful criterion when compiling a perfect Premier League. Let’s be honest, that’s why Norwich are so prominent and I really do mean prominent: having ploughed through so many of these lists I can safely say that the Canaries featured in every single one.

Is their widespread inclusion due to their fan-base? Of course not: Norwich have a mainly localised set of supporters who are perfectly harmless and keep themselves to themselves when not barracking Ipswich. Is it their stature then? Again, that’s a definitive no. With all due respect the East Anglia club cede to most in this regard and the same goes for their historic achievements that amount to two League Cups.

What Norwich does have going for it however, crucially, is that they were one of the founding members of the new, shiny Premier League and what’s more they have yo-yoed up and down since 1992. This means they were likely involved at the highest echelon when the person who compiled each list was a child; when they would stay up to watch Match of the Day in their pyjamas and it would be a magical world. When, in short, football was so very special.

A vote for Norwich City then is a vote for pure nostalgia.

That certainly explains their presence below, in my own personal top twenty; an assortment of clubs so utopian I would happily scrap relegation and see them fight among themselves forever more.

Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham

The top six is sacrosanct and rightly so, with their huge supporter base and inherent grudges. Take away any of this sextet and the Premier League would be a little more rational and reasonable. Who wants that?

Everton 

Unlucky not to be grouped with the automatic six, the Toffees are top flight mainstays with a fan-base as chippy as they are loyal. A credit to the division.

Newcastle United

Never less than a soap opera Newcastle’s bestowment of entertainment doesn’t begin and end with their off-the-pitch travails. On it few clubs have given more classic games and unforgettable moments. Throw in their legion of fans too and it’s a no-brainer.

Portsmouth

A toss-up between Pompey and Southampton as sadly there’s no room for them both. The inhabitants of Fratton Park win out because – in the best possible sense – they are tremendously mad.

Aston Villa

The Holte End. Three or four captivating – and at times underachieving – sides since the early nineties. A central location that makes it manageable to get to no matter where you live. Villa are wasted in the Championship.

Norwich City

Third place finishers in the inaugural Premier League campaign the Canaries soon after mined the leagues below, only surfacing a handful of occasions since. Who can’t be enamoured however by their unerring ability to get thrashed out of sight by the big guns only to then show resilience the following week. Then there’s the kits which oscillate between gorgeous and minging.

In fact the only consistent thing about them is a stoic insistence on playing decent football regardless of manager. That will do for me.

Fulham

One of the most beautiful grounds in the world and a strong contender for the most likeable London club.

West Ham United

Entrenched in local pride the Hammers are the very definition of a ‘proper’ club. Also score bonus points for so often taking great delight in bloodying the nose of the establishment.

Brighton and Hove Albion

You can’t have a vibrant and absorbing Premier League without a south coast derby and once again the Saints narrowly miss out. This time it’s by virtue of location, with an away day – or more accurately an away weekend – to Brighton always a highlight on the calendar.

Leeds United

On spying *cough* my rival colours a supporter outside Elland Road recently drenched me in expletives despite being old enough to be my great-great-granddad. Never change Leeds, and hurry back. We’ve missed you.

Coventry City

Residents of the top division for 35 consecutive years the Sky Blues deserve to be here on merit. That’s before we get to the fans and the despicable treatment they’ve endured courtesy of owners you wouldn’t wish on a worst enemy. The Coventry faithful warrant inclusion. They’ve earned it the hard way.

Nottingham Forest

The traditionalists’ choice and let’s face it there is always room for sentiment when it involves a two-time European Cup winner.

Bristol City

Admittedly a left-field pick but why waste the unique opportunity of creating a brand new Premier league model without finally giving the south-west the big club it justifies?

QPR

A compact, electrifying ground that evokes an elaborate Subbuteo set-up plus a compendium of flawed but occasionally brilliant sides. That equals full membership. Additionally, any side supported by Nick Cave and Pete Doherty is hard to omit.

Sheffield Wednesday

Ace fans who turn up en masse no matter the division. The Owls have also graced us with some fantastic ballers, particularly in the Chris Waddle era. A welcome addition.

from FootballFanCast.com http://bit.ly/2MNPBpb via IFTTT from Blogger http://bit.ly/2SoIEQE via IFTTT

[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: Dilvish the Damned, Solomon Kane, Black Panther, Black Mask Magazine

Writing (The Pulp Archivist): “In a writing job, dialogue stands out the most; it is also the potent element and certainly the most versatile. Excellent dialogue appears rarely, but it then invariably commands its just reward; and for that reason it certainly deserves your careful study and attention.

A cardinal rule in practically all writing is that the author should keep out of it entirely and allow his characters to tell the story. Nothing weakens or spoils even good dialogue so much as to have the author act as interpreter between the quoted lines.

Bill swung around upon Ed.

‘You blankety blank blank!’ “

  Fiction (P. C. Bushi): “One of the things I enjoy most about old Appendix N work (and similarly classic and formational SFF) is that there’s so much “not Tolkien” fantasy to masticate. Don’t get me wrong – I love me some JRR hobbits and trolls, but I’ve gotten kind of worn out on today’s brand of knock-off Gandalfs and Legolas clones. Even when they’re Dark-Legolas.”

  Fiction (Swordssorceryblogspot): “I’m excavating my parts of my childhood and revisiting some of the fantasy that was important to me before the age of sixteen that isn’t by J.R.R. Tolkien. I just read Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three (1964), I’m presently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), and next week I’ll pick up Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time (1962).”

  Cinema (Everyday Should be Tuesday): “Black Panther does two things very, very well.  It throws a lot of crazy-ass Afro-Futurism into the mix, resulting in something that is both fresh and looks great, and it undergirds the plot with thematic weight.  The actors are having fun, but aren’t ashamed to be acting in a superhero movie.  They are earnest without being self-serious or feeling the need to snark about it.  That, and the sheer amount of talent in the movie, more than make up for a somewhat paint-by-the-numbers plot.  Black Panther falls short of my top 5 all-time superhero movies, but it is comfortably in the top 10, I think.”

  Fiction (Vintage Novels): “When I first read this book ten years ago, I realised that it was utterly unique in my experience. There was classic literature that featured black protagonists – Othello, for instance. There was classic literature set in Africa – many of Haggard’s other novels about stiff-upper-lipped European adventurers discovering lost civilisations ruled by white queens of Egyptian or Arabic stock who presided over the rites of long-lost deities. But this was the very first historical romance I’d ever read which was about a documented period of premodern African history and featured an all-black cast.”

  Fiction (Cirsova): “The other day, during the discussion about Stark and Barbarians, I noted that Stark does NOT come from the template of European Barbarians, and would be more akin to an African warrior or Indian wild-boy. Cirsova contributor Jon M. Weichsel (whose story “Going Native” will appear in our Summer issue) jumped in, and we drilled down a bit on the nature of “barbarians”, though it’s a digression that took us fairly far from the original topic of Dungeons & Dragons.”

  Fiction (PulpRev): “To Holger Carlsen, Dane by birth and engineer by trade, science rules all. The immutable laws of physics govern the universe, and there is no space in this rational world for the mysterious and the magical. Yet one fateful day, when fighting along the Resistance in the Second World War, he is knocked out in battle, and awakens naked in a strange forest. Nearby is a horse of startling intelligence, carrying arms and armour that fit him perfectly, including a shield that bears the device of three hearts and three lions.

Thus begins Poul Anderson’s seminal work Three Hearts and Three Lions. Coming from an era saturated with Japanese isekai stories and Western dark fantasy CRPGs, Three Hearts and Three Lions is simultaneously refreshing and inspiring. Both of these media owe their origins to Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game, and Gygax in turn drew inspiration from a list of stories, stories he listed in his famous Appendix N. Among them is Three Hearts and Three Lions.”

  Games (Beast of War): “The crew at Mythic Games will be bringing you a miniatures board game where you will play as Solomon Kane and comrades as they slay deadly beasts, terrifying monsters and right unjust wrongs. We even got a rather awesome and early look at some of the miniatures they’re going to be bringing to life!”

    Cinema (Unbound Worlds): “According to deadline.com, Amazon Prime is planning a new television series based on Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories. Curious? Here’s what you need to know.

How will the series connect to the movies? It probably won’t at all. According to reports, the series will look to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories as inspiration, rather than any of the films. That means you probably won’t hear anymore about “the Riddle of Steel”, and you shouldn’t expect to see Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jason Momoa involved in the series.”

Sensor Sweep: Dilvish the Damned, Solomon Kane, Black Panther, Black Mask Magazine published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames