The Crazy Chicken-Lady meets the Psycho Puppy-Girl

Well, that was...an experience.

I love my dogs. I really do. Raven is our puppy-girl, our beautiful black lab-Chow who jumps on me when I come home from work and drops dead raccoons on our front porch. She's seven years old, and her bark has always been worse than her bite, at least until we moved here.

However, today was not a good day, not by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, sure, the first chunk of the day was fine, with me doing the work-thing and my wife at home doing the homeschooling thing. Nothing unusual at all.

When I got home, Dexter, the beagle, was all over me. But Raven didn't make an appearance right away. That in itself should have clued me in that not all was well. But she did come downstairs eventually, and got her lovin' and petting like she always does.

Honey-Bunny was cooking supper, Tanner was playing NHL21. After a while, my wife asked me to go up and check on the baby chicks, up in Tanner's room. No problem; I started up the stairs.

And then the theme from Psycho started playing in my head. I saw the first torn up chick-carcass at the top of the stairs.

And that was it for me; I was having Vietnam flashbacks, and I wasn't even born when that war started. I am not ashamed to say that I freaked out. I don't handle death well, even if it's natural death. Seeing a dead body just does not suit my mental well-being, especially one that died violently. I would make the world's worst homicide detective.

As I'm tearing back down the stairs, Raven runs down as well and jumps on the couch, licking her lips. This did not bode well.

My darling wife went up and surveyed the carnage. Out of forty baby chicks, eleven survived; one might not make it through the night. Raven killed nearly thirty of them, including nine of the ten egg-layers. We were angry enough to kill her ourselves.

Now, I suppose I can see things from her point of view; we were raising these birds to be slaughtered and eaten anyway, at least the meat-birds. She was just getting a head-start. But that excuse didn't fly with my wife.

So, my wife has decided to correct the problem by buying a hundred more meat-bird chicks. We'll be putting them in the garage, as we should have done in the first place. But it's starting to get cold, and they don't have their feathers yet. Well, three-quarters of them aren't going to get their feathers, now or ever.

Yeah, this was a rough day on the farm. Tanner's at least as traumatized as I am; I doubt he'll ever sleep in that room again. We're going to switch his bedroom to the spare room this week, and turn that one into a pantry/food storage room or something.

And no, I'm not posting any pictures of the slaughterhouse. In the first place, I didn't take any. In the second place, what kind of sick freak wants to see the torn-up carcasses of a bunch of baby chicks?

It's going to take a few days to get that image out of my head. Sometimes, having a near-photographic memory really sucks.

I Married a Crazy Chicken Lady

My wife is a wonderful woman. I love her beyond measure. But she's gone completely crazy since we moved here.

See, this spring we decided to get a few chickens. Not too many, just a few egg-layers that would provide us with some free eggs in exchange for being fed and kept in a decent coop. Well, the 'few' turned into twenty-one chickens: six roosters and fifteen hens. Well, that's not too bad. The coop gives them plenty of room, they've got some nice roosting spots, and they're laying eggs every day. Not all of them, but they are pretty regular.

Well, last week she decided that it was time to expand our chicken enterprise.

So, today she picked up thirty day-old chicks. These are meat birds; they'll be around for eight weeks, and then they're going to the processor and to the freezer. We'll probably sell some of them; they're supposed to be bigger birds, lots of meat. Sounds good to me. We might have gotten fifty due to the way the orders were processed at the seller, but we did end up with the thirty we had originally planned for.

She brought Garrett, our autistic youngest, with her. When he saw the little chicks, he asked the seller, "Where's their mother?" Which, for anyone who knows autistic children, is awesome. He kept asking the question, and he was pointing at another group of chicks. Ten of them. These ones were layers, not meat birds. And they were two dollars apiece. So, my wife came home with forty chicks.

Or so I thought.

While I was typing this post, I overheard her talking on the phone with her father. I didn't hear it all, but I did hear 'Glen doesn't know' and 'coop,' which set all kinds of alarms jangling. So, I ran downstairs and finally dragged it out of her.

She bought seven more laying hens. Hens, not chicks. There are now twenty-eight birds in the coop, and forty chicks in boxes. The boxes are in my son's bedroom to keep them warm for a couple of weeks. I've put two heat lamps in there for them as well. They're quite noisy; it's almost eleven o'clock, and they're still chirping away.

Well, we won't go hungry this winter.

Arabian Nights at the Gaming Table: Arabian Adventures

After the middling reaction (at best) to the Emirates of Ylaruam, TSR took their Arabian Nights interest into 2nd Edition AD&D with the first product of the Al-Qadim line, Arabian Adventures. The book makes it clear: Unlike GAZ2, this time we're going full-blown fantastic adventures, leaving the real-world comparisons to a minimum. Genies, sorcerers, desert scions with secret noble bloodlines...oh, yeah. Bring it all on. We even get the introductory scene from the Arabian Nights stories, with King Shahryar and Scheherazade and the start of the tales (not the Richard Burton version, of course; TSR was very much a PG company at this time).

After the introductory story, we are told that this book is about stories Scheherazade might have told if she'd gone on for another thousand nights. And there will be a fantastic setting filled with those magical wonders, with lots of fun stuff to explore, fight, and steal. Because the only difference between a hero and a grave-robber is whether or not the character is a PC, right?

They do pay some small homage to the historical Arabic Empire and culture, although there is no monotheistic religion here; even in a fantasy Arabia, TSR wasn't going to do 'Fantasy Islam,' especially in the wake of the first Gulf War (Arabian Adventures came out in 1992, one year after the first Iraq invasion). The Arabian Nights themselves, obviously, are a major influence, but not only in their literary form; Hollywood movies and North American perceptions of the Arabian Nights are also going to factor heavily. Sounds like a fun place to adventure to me.

So, Chapter 1 is an overview of Zakhara, the Land of Fate, where this fantasy Arabia is located. It's officially set in the Forgotten Realms (because everything had to be about the Realms in the early 1990s), but it doesn't have to be there. It's placed south of the main FR setting, Faerun, and west of the Kara-Tur, the land of the Oriental Adventures setting, so you can have a whole Marco Polo thing going on if you really want.

Needless to say, Zakhara's primary terrain feature is...desert. Two of them, in fact: The High Desert and the Haunted Lands. It's not all desert, of course; there's lush jungle to the northeast, and coastal lowlands where the cities are across the southern parts of the land. Lots of islands, too. Because you can't do Sinbad without lots of islands. Most of these islands are in the Crowded Sea, which is the sea to the south. On the north coast are the Corsair Domains, where lots of pirates hang out. Because if there aren't any pirates, what's the point of being on the water in the first place?

Arabian Adventures took a very different view on race in D&D; tolerance is the name of the game, and everyone in Zakhara gets along regardless of their race. So, elves and dwarves hang out at the bazaar, gnomes and half-orcs swap humorous stories at the coffee houses, and ogres give halflings piggyback rides on religious holidays. The reason for this is that everyone is so enlightened thanks to the amazing laws produced by the Loregiver (a woman who takes Mohammed's place in history), which convinced everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya across the desert. Okay, then. However, racial level limits and class restrictions still apply, so your half-orc isn't going to be a mighty sorcerer no matter how pious he might be. That wouldn't happen until 3rd edition eight years later.

Instead, culture in Zakhara is cut across two basic lines: the Al-Badia, or nomads, who hang out in the deserts, and the Al-Hadhar, who live in the cities and villages of the Land of Fate. The Al-Badia hold the city-dwellers in contempt as soft, money-grubbing effete snobs; the Al-Hadhar consider the nomads to be smelly, uncivilized, and poor. They don't go to war with each other; that would be uncivilized, after all. They just don't hang out at the pub on Sundays.

Honor gets a big writeup, because it's pretty darn important in this setting. I find it interesting that both the Oriental and Arabian Adventures books put an emphasis on honor, to the point where an OA character whose honor score drops below zero is literally removed from the game with their character sheet torn up. Meanwhile, the standard medieval fantasy setting that is generic D&D, complete with knights in shining armor, hardly ever mentions the word. Now, I realize that D&D's pulp roots focused more on barbarians and rugged individualist adventurers rather than Camelot and Roland, but still. Honor mattered in Europe, too.

Still, in today's touchy cultural setting, the honor section of AA isn't going to sit well with too many people; there's a section on honor killings and how people who dishonor their families will be killed by their own family members, and everyone's fine with it. Yeah, that hasn't aged very well.

Let's move on to family instead. Assuming your character doesn't give your family a reason to murder you in cold blood, family bonds are important. Families will consist of children, parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents if they're still around. Now, that could get awkward as you get back a few generations and end up with eight sets of great-grandparents, but things get simplified as married women end up as part of their husband's families. Cousins, uncles and aunts are still a thing, but families are maintained on the male side.

Next up is 'purity.' Coming from a traditional Catholic perspective, the Zakharan idea of purity doesn't quite square. Right in the first paragraph, polygamy is justified as the man being legally married to his entire harem. Divorce is totally fine, and nobody seems to care about it. I particularly like the last two sentences: "The fact that a sheikh or king is married to a particular woman for only few weeks or even days implies no impropriety for him or for her. Long or short, a marriage is sacred in the Land of Fate."

I'm not really sure that a Britney Spears-style marriage would count as 'sacred.' Maybe that's just me.

This is where the Islamic influence comes in; women don't touch other men in case they become 'violently tempted' by their charms. Even flirting is considered a sin. And yes, the burqa makes an appearance, although it isn't actually named. And women tend to spend a lot of time in the house, be it a tent or a palace, so as to avoid the risk of impurity. I doubt that too many gamers followed these rules. I certainly wouldn't want to play in a group that did.

Hospitality and piety are the next concepts; the Bond of Salt is discussed (as it was in GAZ2), wherein if you take salt in someone's home, you're considered a guest. And while the religion in question isn't Islam (being polytheistic), there is still a lot of the Islamic mindset going on (as we saw above). Mind you, the Arabian Nights stories were the same, so it's not surprising.

The last part of this chapter is a brief discussion of Fate (personified as a female being who is superior to the gods and goddesses of the realm) and the Loregiver, the woman who in ancient times gave the Law that got everyone to be nice to each other. it's been five centuries since the Laws were discovered, and they were just so darn awesome that everyone agreed to follow them.

So, that's the introduction and first chapter of the book. There's lots more to come, of course; it's a 160-page book, and we're just hitting page 20. This should keep me busy, assuming I remember to post more than once every other week.

Arabian Nights at the Gaming Table: The Emirates of Ylaruam, cont.

Welcome back, and let's get this Gazetteer finished tonight. There are some more 'procedures' discussed on the next page, including awarding XPs for role-playing points of honor and the social structure of the setting, as well as a Storytelling rating for characters who want to channel their inner Scheherazade. It's based on your non-physical stats (Int, Wis, Cha) and level, and you had better roll high if you don't want to lose the audience (or worse, anger them to the point that you actually lose XP). Since BECMI goes up to level 36, the best base score a character could possibly have is 18 for all three ability scores, plus 36 more, or 90 total, to which you get to add a 3d6 roll, so you'll get a pretty awesome reaction even if you're a foreigner trying to tell the story to a pack of evil efreeti. Not too many characters are going to reach that level, though.

Next, there's a discussion about the Dervishes, or desert druids. These guys don't actually follow the BECMI rules for druids, and are more like clerics in that they get to turn undead. They also have high constitutions and save as dwarves. They also get their own unique spell list which mixes the cleric and druid spells with a few unique ones. This is an interesting addition to the setting, since this is the first variant class in BECMI after the publication of the boxed sets. It's restricted to NPCs, but how many DMs are going to actually follow that?

There's a very helpful page on courtesy tips for foreigners, introduced, like many of the sections in the gazetteer, as a narration from a friendly NPC. There's also a brief section on how to use the Nahmeh (the setting's equivalent to the Koran, although it's not detailed), and how you can just take well-known quotations and adapt them to make them sound more Arabian. It's a useful tip for any setting, really.

Ah, a glossary. Usually found at the end of the book, this is at the end of the Player's Section, and gives a list of typical terms for locations and cultural markers in the Emirates, as well as a few things about the overall Known World setting, which is a handy thing to have for newcomers to the setting, regardless of what part of the world you're adventuring in.

A page of Ylari customs finishes off the Society in the Emirates portion. I should note that the Player's Section was just the middle eight pages of the book, which split the Society section. The customs listed here are useful for gaming and setting adventures, whether it's games and contests that are popular in Ylaruam, or how to flatter your host in hospitality encounters. Good stuff that helps bring out the flavor of the setting.

Now we get to the centerpiece of the book, which is a description of the Village of Kirkuk, a useful starting place for an Ylaruam campaign. It is not, however, given an official location on the map; it's described as simply an important stop on a well-traveled caravan route, with a sacred grotto where Al-Kalim spent some time during his time killing Thyatians. We are promised a DM's map and key plus a list of important NPCs, but it's not on the inside cover as advertised. And while the player's map of Kirkuk is supposed to be on the reverse of the large color map that comes with the book, the back of the map is a white blank space. Oops.

Anyway, Kirkuk is well-described, and it's the only place in Ylaruam that is well-described. But with only 400 residents, it's not much of a place. However, it does have a couple of interesting points that can lead to adventures. First, there is the Well of the Faithful Prophet, the grotto that Al-Kalim visited years ago. It's under a curse, which has poisoned the well. There is an adventure seed to fix the curse, of course, because what else are curses for?

Second, there is Barimoor. Barimoor is an Alphatian wizard seeking Immortality, and he is using his underground complex beneath Ylaruam to help him get there. Barimoor is a great choice for campaign's Big Bad, one the PCs shouldn't even learn about until they're name level. He's been there for eight centuries, with the patience of a spider and the cunning of a high-level evil wizard. He's cautious and taking his time; after all, he's expecting to become an Immortal at some point, so time really is on his side. Barimoor has a LOT of minions, and his various quests and plots can lead to all kinds of interesting adventures. He's not explicitly set in Kirkuk, but he does have agents there, agents that don't even know they work for him (they're magically controlled). Lots of opportunity for mischief there.

There are a few adventure seeds given for Kirkuk, which is a pretty busy place for a small village in the desert on a caravan route. Many of them are in the spirit of the Arabian Nights stories; an old beggar has been babbling in an unknown language; turns out it's the tongue of the Elemental Plane of Fire, and he finally figured out what he wanted to say, and opened up a portal to the Plane just as the PCs happen by. There's a missing nobleman's son who the PCs have been hired to bring back, except that he fled from his father to escape marriage to a spinster, and loves the beautiful maiden instead. Stuff like that, which is all over the Arabian Nights stories.

The last major section of this book is the Campaigning section. This book is unique among the Gazetteers in that it barely details the important cities of the nation; the city of Ylaruam is the least-detailed capital city of any Gazetteer, meriting only a few scattered paragraphs throughout the book. Kirkuk, by contrast, gets fifteen pages.

So, the campaigning section gives a more general overview of things; where are the characters from (natives or foreigners)? Why are they adventuring in this inhospitable desert terrain? The DM is urged to get beginner PCs (native or foreigners) to Kirkuk to start things off, placing it on the map wherever is most convenient for future plans. Pick a Big Bad (Barimoor is one option among several) or two. There's also a list of monsters likely to be found in the setting, from aerial servants to bandits, from camels to lizard men, from manscorpions to zombies. There's quite the selection to work with, with challenges at all levels of play.

There's also a chapter on treasure hunting, because what would the Arabian Nights be without fabulous treasures to find? There is even a list of magical artifacts to find for all levels of play, from Basic to Master levels. Of course, the Master level items are a bit more powerful than the Basic ones.

Finally, there are some adventure seeds for the overall campaign (not necessarily Kirkuk-related). The very first one involves an evil sorcerer who tricks the PCs into going into a cave to retrieve fabulous treasures. Sound familiar? At least they aren't so blatant as to say the sorcerer wants a certain lamp.

Another of the adventure seeds takes the PCs to the fabled City of Brass, which doesn't get detailed, but there are some very juicy tidbits to give an idea of what this City might contain. Check this out: "Inside is an impossible paradise of a lush green jungle and fierce beasts abiding peacefully with their normal prey. They are finally greeted by a talking lion, who takes them to the throne room where they see a beautiful enchantress. She gestures and everything changes again. The characters awake before the gates they shattered at a touch. The jungle has withered, the ground is littered with skeletons, and gaunt men and women wander mindlessly to and fro, marked by the plague."

Good stuff, and there's more where that came from. The adventure seeds are evocative, presenting a wide range of opportunities for adventures of all sorts. Ylaruam might be a big desert just south of a Viking realm, but it's got lots of stuff going on, stuff your PCs will enjoy exploring and overcoming.

Finally, there is the Suggested Reading section. It mentions a few gaming modules from both BECMI and AD&D, some other game references, suggestions to research Egyptians, Mongols, Arabs, the Crusades, and deserts, and one fiction suggestion: Frank Herbert's Dune. It's science fiction, but it's got desert warriors and high-tech magical items, so why not?

You know what they didn't recommend?

Any version of the Arabian Nights! Say what?! You would think that a gazetteer set in an Arabian desert with genies, beggars, and storytellers might want to point gamers in the direction of the most obvious source material there is. But they didn't.

Regardless, Ylaruam is a fun change of pace for a campaign, worthy of checking out. If you want a hardcopy, it's not cheap, going for around $70 minimum on eBay. But you can also get the PDF at Drivethru.rpg if that suits your fancy. I'm glad I still have the original copy I bought way back in the day, and I'll hang on to it.

Chickens, Chickens Everywhere!

 Yes, our chicken coop is big enough to hold about fifty chickens, but right now it's got a total of thirteen. However, we've got some new additions that will soon be joining them. My wife picked up nine laying hens from a commercial poultry plant this week. They're renting the chicken tractor as their home for the next month, then they'll be introduced to the rest of the chickens.

The problem with getting commercial hens is that they've been medicated and eaten nothing but processed crap their whole lives. Sure, it makes for a tasty egg and meat, but let's be honest: The chickens that come from these places aren't the healthiest birds around, are they? And these plants aren't exactly known for their sanitary practices when it comes to the chickens' living quarters. So, we're isolating them for a month to make sure they don't have any diseases or anything.

These birds are called Highland breed, which I don't have a lot of information on them. We found out after we bought them that they can be aggressive toward other chickens, so their beaks are usually clipped. We'll see how they get along in the new coop. They're supposed to be great layers, which means we'll get lots of eggs. One a day per bird, so we've been told. I'll believe that when I see it.

Not much else to say right now; the birds are getting used to their new home, so we'll see how they adapt. In the meantime, though, at least they aren't in a processing plant. That's got to be an improvement.

Arabian Nights at the Gaming Table: The Emirates of Ylaruam

I started playing D&D at the tender age of eleven. My father dropped me off at the local library and told me to meet some new friends. I'd never heard of the game until then, but there was a D&D club that met every Saturday. I got thrown into the deep end, playing a pregen ranger from the Giants series (Beek Gwenders, for you old-timers) who was with a group going through the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module, which was the hot new module that summer. Talk about a steep learning curve. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but it seemed to be a lot of fun.

Fortunately for me, the library had a copy of the old Moldvay Basic rulebook, which they were kind enough to lend me for a week so I could get an idea of what was going on. The other players in the group sneered at the 'beginner' material, but it was a life-saver for me. And, being the contrarian that I am, I developed a fondness for the B/X material despite their disdain. I still didn't know what a 'faerie fire' spell was, but I didn't care. There was real magic in that book, and I devoured it.

For Christmas, my parents got me the Cook Expert Set, which was my first introduction to the campaign setting that would eventually become Mystara. I still remember the amazing map, the weird names and the brief descriptions that accompanied them. Names that would become legendary in gaming circles: Karameikos. Glantri. Thyatis. And the Emirates of Ylaruam.

Ylaruam wasn't a big deal; it was desert stuff, which didn't interest my twelve-year-old self. I liked the elves and the Vikings, and I hadn't been exposed to the richness of the Arabian Nights stories yet. Still, it was an interesting place, and B4, The Lost City, was set there, so it had something to recommend it.

Five years later, the Gazetteer series began. While Karameikos had pride of place, being the traditional starting-point for a B/X or BECMI campaign, Ylaruam was the surprising runner-up, getting the second volume. I bought it as eagerly as I bought the first one, expecting a similar treatment of the exotic desert land. However, it was a much different structure; the Gazetteer format wasn't yet laid out as it would later be. It was the same size of a book, but it's focus was much, much different.

Written by veteran game designer Ken Rolston, Ylaruam started off similarly to the Karameikos book, detailing the regions history from both the 'what historians know' and 'what the Immortals know' perspectives. The second one, obviously, is the 'real' history of the land, as opposed what is commonly believed by the populace. And there was a timeline as well. I love timelines. It's one of my favorite things about Mystara, in fact: The timelines in almost every product.

Then we get an overview of the geography and the climate. The latter isn't hard to figure out; it's a desert. It's dry, it's hot, it's inhospitable...what do you expect? There's always been some controversy surrounding Ylaruam, as it's situated north of an empire much like the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, and directly south of the Viking raiders of the Northern Reaches. How exactly do you get a desert in there?

I don't remember if it's detailed in this book or in a later supplement or article, but the official explanation for Ylaruam's weird geography is Immortal tampering and a micro-climate that is really, really hot and dry. It's also related to the Elves of Alfheim and their magical forest that they created; I think it helped wipe out the vegetation in Ylaruam by using up all the rainfall to grow their trees. Elves are like that sometimes. Anyway, that's the 'canon' version, or something close to it, at least.

Next up are the various peoples of Ylaruam, including the Alasiyans (your typical desert-riding, camel-rustling desert tribes), the Makistani (refugees from Ethengar, a Mongol-like culture to the northwest of Ylaruam), the Nithians (the original inhabitants, but they aren't in charge anymore due to a massive curse that I won't detail here), and the Thyatians, who used to be the colonial overlords of Ylaruam until they rebelled a century prior to the campaign starting time.

Then we get a brief treatise on Ylaruam's economics, including a breakdown of the different major regions, such as the Emirate of Alasiya, the dominant group in Ylaruam at this point. This is followed by a discussion of the Ylari religion, the preachings and teachings of Al-Kalim and the Eternal Truth. Al-Kalim is a not-so-subtle version of Mohammed; Al-Kalim's philosophy is very Muslim in its outlook. His history runs almost as long as the history described in the first couple of pages, though it doesn't go into detail about what he's really up to at this point. I won't spoil it for those who haven't read it yet.

There are dervishes in Ylaruam; these are men who live in the wilderness like John the Baptist; they are clerics, and have some unique spells that replace some of the standard ones in the game. Then there's some basic 'this is what life is like here' stuff, and a discussion of the government and the various factions. It's basically what you'd expect from a culture based on late-medieval Islam: emirs, pashas, and sultans abound. We even get a foreign relations section, where the surrounding nations and the Ylari attitudes toward magic are placed within the greater concept of the world. Bascially, the Ylari hate the Thyatians for being their old overlords, they hate magic-users in general, they're not too fond of elves, they like the dwarves, they're fine with Karameikos, and they put up with the Darokinians because of the trade routes both countries use.

Finally, we get to the middle of the book, which includes a few pages on the nation from the player characters' perspective: lists of rumors they could hear in the market square, for example. There's also a helpful page on how to create an Ylari character, especially their names. Finally, there's a page of special rules for being in the desert and trying to not die of thirst.

And that gets us through to the halfway point. I'm skimming the heck out of this, but it's too much to do in a single post.

Arabian Nights at the Gaming Table

The Arabian Nights have been a part of Western culture's landscape for three centuries since the first stories of Scheherazade were translated into European languages in the early eighteenth century. One of the first complete translations into English is, of course, Sir Richard Burton's translation, of which I am fortunate enough to own a complete set, in the original printing. It's not a kid-friendly version, of course, but it's certainly full of adventure.

Hollywood got hold of these stories early on; Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, was made in 1902 by Georges Méliès, one of the earliest important film producers. Ray Harryhausen thrilled audiences with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and two sequels. And, of course, Disney made that fairly well-known movie in the early 1990s, Aladdin. The spectacle, exotic settings, and fantastic creatures have enthralled audiences for generations, both in print and in film.

So, it was only natural that tabletop gaming would eventually come around to the Arabian Nights setting. GURPS did it with Arabian Nights, a treatise on gaming in the setting, one that, according to a review in Dragon Magazine, took a very dry tone and sucked all the fun out of the setting. Fortunately, TSR did it quite a bit better.

The first time TSR used an Arabian setting was in The Emirates of Ylaruam, published as part of the Gazetteer series for BECMI D&D. The second in that series, it was not as well-received as the first offering, The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, but it included some useful ideas for desert gaming, and had an in-setting religion that was not even remotely subtle about its similarities to Islam. There wasn't a lot of detail on the setting; instead, the book focused on a small, starting village where adventures could be found. It was a game effort, though not their best.

Five years later, in 1992, TSR expanded their marquee setting, the Forgotten Realms, with the Al-Qadim setting. This was a limited line, deliberately set up to run for only two or three years. It was a good idea, as it kept the setting from becoming too bloated and losing the uniqueness. The line began with the Arabian Adventures rulebook, which gave the basic rules and setting information needed to get started. The highlight of the rules was the kits, which offered a fantastic amount of flavor to get players in the right frame of mind to play in Al-Qadim. Barbers, desert riders, moralist priests, sorcerers...and, of course, the setting's signature class, the sha'ir, the genie master.

The line was expanded with two setting boxed sets (Land of Fate and City of Delights), eight adventure boxed sets that expanded the setting and provided lots of adventures all over the place, a Monstrous Compendium expansion with a surprisingly low number of evil monsters to beat up, and the Complete Sha'ir's Handbook, which detailed the class and offered more kits for specialist wizards. In addition, the Complete Book of Necromancers added more detail to the setting in the form of the Isle of the Necromancer-Kings, which was officially set in Al-Qadim, specifically the Ruined Kingdoms region.

The line was beautifully produced, with a consistent art ethos throughout the entire series, as well as the signature golden lining on the pages. Running only for three years, the line remains popular with a small subset of gamers who have converted the setting to third and even fifth edition D&D.

While the line is complete, there are a couple of sub-settings that could have used more detail. The first is the Cities of the Pantheon, which were given only a little detail in the Land of Fate boxed set. These cities, full of moralist priests, would have made an interesting place to visit. And the Land of the Yak-Men, one of the setting's more intriguing villains, are virtually left alone in the official material. If there had been two more adventure boxed sets with these settings as the base, the setting would be as complete as it could possibly need to be. Still, they covered a lot, and it's good material.

Since I'm still reading the Arabian Nights, and I've always been a fan of this setting since it came out in 1992, I'm going to do some retrospectives on each of the products. Not one page at a time like I did with Traveller; I'm crazy, not stupid. But I'll give each product a look-through, and talk about some of the interesting bits that can be found within.

Evaluating Books on their Merritts

I've been slowly doing a read-through of the Appendix N authors (gamers know what I mean by that). Since I'm an obsessive completist, I'm not just reading a few titles by each author; I'm going all-in. I'm reading just about everything they wrote. It's taken me a while, but I've finally reached the 1920s. I've read a bunch of Burroughs, including a lot of Tarzan books; some Lord Dunsany, and I've just dabbled in some early Lovecraft.

But I've also encountered the king of fantasy fiction from the first half of the 20th century: Abraham Merritt. I just finished a read of The Metal Monster, originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920, in eight parts. Fortunately, I was able to find online copies of all eight magazines where the story originally appeared, so I got the full book rather than the edited, truncated version that was later published (and which became the 'standard' text for Merritt readers in subsequent decades).

It's a hefty read, coming in at just over 100,000 words, which seems like a lot for a pulp novel. The Conquest of the Moon Pool was similarly large, published the year before. Merritt was a prolific writer when he wanted to be.

The book marks the return of Dr. Goodwin, the narrator of the Moon Pool and Conquest. In this one, he's back in the thick of the action, by which I mean that he basically stands around watching things happen. Merritt certainly has incredible imagination, but so far, his heroes, or at least the narrators, are more passive observers than men of action. Perhaps that's why characters like John Carter and Conan resonate more strongly with readers; we want to be the guy doing stuff, not the guy watching the other guy do stuff. It would be like playing a D&D game and watching the DM's favorite character do all the heroic stuff while the PCs are relegated to sidekick status.

In The Metal Monster, Goodwin is joined by Dick Drake, son of an old science acquaintance, and the Ventnor siblings, Martin and Ruth. Like Conquest, Goodwin doesn't get the girl; the other guy does. In this case, Drake and Ruth fall in love, while Goodwin stands by admiringly. Again, watching the other guy do stuff. Can you imagine John Carter watching while Kantos Kan put the moves on a reciprocating Dejah Thoris? I think not.

But really, the presence of the small group is incidental to what's going on in the story; in fact, they simply stand and watch the entirety of both climactic battles, having no participation whatsoever, save as prisoners in the first one. The story is a showcase of Merritt's astounding imagination; he's got self-replicating robots that feed off the sun's energy (by what is essentially a solar core tap, sucking the sun's energy from 93,000,000 miles away), living in a hidden valley next to a city of descendants of Xerxes' Persian army from twenty-five centuries ago.

His descriptions are gorgeous, and the action is intense...but passive. Goodwin and his companions spend most of their time worrying about how they're going to get out of the situation they're in, and how to stop the Persians from ravishing Ruth. But it's Norhala, the human 'queen' of the intelligent metal creatures, who does all the work. In fact, the power of the metal beings is so utterly beyond human capacity even today, that there is literally no way for humanity to avoid destruction if these creatures so choose.

There are only a couple of ways to end this story without humanity getting wiped out like victims of the Borg, and Merritt picks one of them. It's a majestic scene, one that Hollywood would spend a lot of money recreating on the screen, but again, it's bystander time. And that is a bit disappointing; the 'heroes' have zero agency in the story. It's almost like a D&D adventure from the 1990s, where the entire plot is laid out, and your characters end up watching the rest of the world act around them, rather than being the agents of change. In fact, the only real reason for them to be present is to incite the conflict between Norhala and the Persians.

Still, the real star of the book is, as mentioned, Merritt's imagination. There is a literal robot nursery where baby robots are raised. The robots are not at all humanoid; they are polygons. Cubes, pyramids, hexagons, spheres...lots of them. They are a precursor of D&D's modrons, actually, although their numbers are significantly higher.

It's been mentioned elsewhere that Merritt popularized the idea of the adventuring party as gamers know it, where a group of disparate people with varying skills come together to fend off a terrible menace. This is very noticeable in Conquest, where Goodwin is joined by Larry O'Keefe and Olaf Huldricksson in his quest to find Dr. Throckmartin and his party. In this one, the Ventnors, Drake and Goodwin have different skills and purposes in the story; Goodwin speaks Persian, which is a useful skill since that's the language Norhala knows. Drake is a good shot and has a keen scientific mind (he figures out what happened at the end from observation and his scientific knowledge of electricity). Ventnor doesn't have much to do except exposition when he is nearly fried by the metal beings, and somehow gets in touch with their robotic consciousness. Otherwise, he spends a good chunk of his time being unconscious. And Ruth...well, this was written a century ago. Women weren't action heroes, and I'll leave it at that.

Overall, it's still a good book, thanks to Merritt's fantastic visual writing, but it leaves something wanting in the end. It's nowhere near the level of Conquest, but it's certainly a good way to stretch your own mind as to what you can expect from fantasy fiction. Because it is fantasy, despite the robots (which are never named as such, since the word didn't exist in English yet). It might not be magic, and Drake provides a scientific explanation at the end, but make no mistake, this is fantasy. And Merritt is still the King.

As for my own writing, I've plugged my fantasy and science fiction books many times here. I would like to bring some attention to my anthology, which covers a bunch of different genres, A Universe of Possibilities, available in ebook format at an Amazon location near you. Support indie publishing, because it's the wave of the future!

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Yes, I know, it's not exactly an original movie to review; it's been done to death, in fact. But that's because it's such a fantastic and awesome movie, that it deserves massive praise and fawning reviews. So, spoiler alert, here's another one.

Let's start with the actors. Without looking them up, I don't remember any of their names, nor do any performances stand out as exceptional or noteworthy. These people know who the real stars of the movie are, and their job is mostly to stand around in awe of the special effects, much as the viewers did. Todd Armstrong, who plays the manly and heroic Jason, is a bit wooden in his performance, almost like he's a Harryhausen creation himself. He does an adequate job, but there's a spark missing that would put Jason into the pantheon of great fantasy movie leads.

Nancy Kovack as Medea gets second billing, but her role is quite limited; she only appears in the last third of the movie, and doesn't have a whole lot to do. But she does set into motion the events that will lead to the movie's most memorable scene.

The only other name in the cast that stands out is Honor Blackman as Hera, who would become much better known the following year, playing Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. She spends part of the movie doing voiceover for the Argo's figurehead, which is sculpted to look like Hera. Again, the performance isn't meant to be Oscar-worthy; nor does it ever threaten to be so.

Alright, on to the main event and the real star of the movie: Ray Harryhausen. I'm going to review other Harryhausen movies over the next little while as I watch them, just because they are so fantastic. He didn't pioneer stop-motion animation, but he certainly perfected it as much as humanly possible. There are plenty of other blogs and websites that gush over Harryhausen and have a lot more detail about him than I can possibly give, so I'll just move on to the special effects he did here.

Interestingly, one of the earlier special effects in the film that tends to get overlooked is the discus competition between Hylus and Hercules on the beach. Hylus challenges Hercules in order to earn a place on the Argo, and Hercules accepts with a discus challenge. Hercules throws it like an Olympian would; Hylus skips it like a rock. The effect really isn't very well done; the effect is more like old 50s movies spaceships dangling on a string. It's certainly the most disappointing effect in the film. But it's a minor one and, as I said, it generally gets overlooked.

With that out of the way, the first Harryhausen creation of the movie is one of his most famous: Talos, the bronze giant statue that comes to life and threatens the Argo and its crew. The sound effects of this scene are particularly eerie, and really bring a depth to Talos' actions. You can hear the bronze limbs grinding as the statue stiffly moves across the landscape and reaches down to grab the helpless Argo out of the water. It's very effective, far more so than many CGI creations today. I think it might have been even more effective than if they had just put someone in a Talos suit; this Talos feels like a bronze statue come to life, something that CGI and motion-capture just can't emulate as well.

After Talos is defeated, the Argo is repaired and the crew continue on their journey, where they...do I really need to recap the plot? No, I don't; you've seen it anyway, haven't you? Let's stick to the effects instead. The next creatures encountered are the harpies, who torment the blind Phineas, stealing his food and leaving him with crumbs. I really like this scene, because it seems like it was a more challenging effect to create: The harpies, after all, are flying. And there's real interaction between them and Phineas as one of them grabs a piece of his toga and unwraps it while flying upward, sending Phineas rolling across the ground. The Argonauts are successful in trapping them in a clever net-trap. The fight is, again, interactive, which couldn't have been easy to do. But it works, and that's what matters.

Then there are the Clashing Rocks, reminiscent of Scylla and Charybdis, the monsters that threatened Odysseus and his crew. Yes, I read old stuff. Anyway, Jason and his crew escape these thanks to a magical token that, when dropped in the sea, summons Neptune, or (according to Wikipedia) Triton, to hold the rocks apart long enough for the Argo to slip through. The effects of the gigantic Triton, with his merman-tail, holding the rocks apart are integrated almost seamlessly with the footage of Jason and his crew rowing frantically to get past the deadly rocks as quickly as possible. It's a tense scene, and it works really well.

Finally, the Argonauts arrive at Colchis, and Medea shows up. The golden fleece, the object of the quest, is guarded by a deadly seven-headed hydra, which Jason ends up fighting alone. He handles it pretty well, as heroes are expected to do. The hydra kills the traitor in Jason's crew (convenient, isn't it?) and lowers his limp corpse to the ground in its tail. I doubt there was an actual person in the hydra's grip for all the time they did the shooting, but it still looks pretty good for a 1963 movie. We even get a perspective shot from behind the hydra as it slithers after Jason, which emphasizes how creepy and dangerous this beast is. Medea is there as well, but she spends the entire fight watching helplessly. Feminism? What's that? If the movie were to be made today, of course, Medea would end up saving Jason's life by ninja-kicking the hydra and knocking its heads off just as it was about to make a meat-snack of the helpless man. This movie is a little more old-school than that.

And now, for the main event of the evening: The skeleton fight. Yes, this is THE Harryhausen scene, the one that cemented his legacy as the greatest special effects wizard in Hollywood. He'd done a single skeleton fight in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad five years earlier; this time, it was SEVEN of the buggers. Against three humans: Jason and the Sacrificial Lambs. Okay, that's not really their names, but they might as well have been.

What can I say about this fight that hasn't been said a thousand times before? It's simply amazing from start to finish. As King Aeëtes raises the skeletons from the ground using the teeth of the hydra, the ground bursts open and they rise up from their graves, weapons in hand and ready to go. One little touch that I really liked is that the skeletons have their own shield emblems and even different weapons; they aren't simply mirror-images of each other. No, these are seven individualized skeletons, all of which move as smoothly as stop-motion animation can do. And they are deadly fighters, taking out Jason's two companions and nearly getting him as well, until he lures them into jumping into the sea. It turns out that skeletons aren't as buoyant as living humans.

From a gamer's perspective, this movie gave us some iconic creatures that would later appear as monsters in the inaugural D&D game: the iron (bronze) golem, the hydra, the harpy, and the skeleton. Not to mention the gigantic merman, but that's not generally seen as an iconic D&D creature. The Argonauts are an early example of a typical D&D party, although it's all fighters until Medea shows up (she's a priestess of Hecate in the movie, and a sorceress in classical Greek mythology). There are the heroes (Hercules, Jason, and Acastus), as well as the hirelings and henchmen, aka the cannon fodder. And it has nautical adventuring, which has always been a favorite theme of mine.

One thing I really wish for is a sequel to this movie; it's clearly set up for one, as the movie ends with Jason and Medea leaving with the Argonauts and the golden fleece on their way back to King Pelias, where Jason is supposed to confront him and avenge his parents' murder when he was a baby. Unfortunately, we never got one. And considering the state of Hollywood today, I wouldn't want one now. No, this movie will have to stand alone as one of the greatest fantasy films of all time, thanks to the magnificent imagination and tireless dedication of one Ray Harryhausen.

So, I'm going to rate this movie seven out of seven skeletons; it's not the kind of movie you watch for the acting, so you know what you're going to get. And you get it, in spades.

To give you an idea of how this movie and others like it have inspired me, please check out my first fantasy novel, The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival, available in ebook and paperback formats at an Amazon website near you. And support indie publishing, because it's the wave of the future!

Man...I Feel Like a Farmer

With apologies to Shania Twain.

It's not exactly harvest time, but some crops do come up early. Way back when we first moved here, I dug a couple of garden beds and planted twenty-five garlic bulbs. Today, we pulled them out of the ground. It was a pretty good feeling.

Yes, that's my lovely wife, who actually gave me permission to put this picture on the blog for everyone edification. Aside from the rhubarb (which we didn't plant, and only harvested by accident), this is the first crop we've grown and harvested on our farm. Technically, we're just in 'garden' mode, since we're not doing mass growing. But still, it's a pretty big moment for us. The city folk have gone country.

We got twenty bulbs out of the ground, plus one that she had pulled earlier, so twenty-one out of twenty-five. That's not a bad ratio. And the bulbs are big, too. The plan, though, is to save most of it for planting again in late October. We're probably going to do something similar with the rest of our first crop of vegetables; saving as much as we can for planting next spring sounds like a good idea. However, if we find they're extra-tasty, we might just buy a bunch of seeds and start over in the spring.

And this is the front of the chicken coop; there was a tractor in the way yesterday, so I didn't get a decent picture of the front. But there it is, along with the additional chickens my wife picked up today after mass. There are now ten chickens in there; we also have the three Cemanis, who are staying in their own hutch for the time being, and the three roosters on death row back in the chicken tractor.

All in all, it's been a pretty busy day. And the weird part is, I'm actually enjoying it. Crazy, I know. But it turns out that while you can take the man out of the city, you can also take the city out of the man, or at least a part of it. Food for thought.