Boogeymen

by on October 20, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

By this point in the TNG novel series, we’re up to about fourth season, and the line is settling down into some actual competence. (The next one, #18, is one of the few TNG novels I truly recommend, thank you Peter David for Q In Law.)

Not to say I didn’t have my doubts when starting this novel, as it seemed determined to go into some well-worn, unworthy tropes. After some initial scene setting that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, we end up with another ‘holodeck is malfunctioning’ episode. And it’s Westley’s fault.

Well, at least the fault of a program to try and give him an unpredictable foe for some personal command training that was written for him. And the program goes out of control, giving us something of a repeat of Moriarty in “Elementary, Dear Data” (apparently, the original idea was to re-use him, but had to be changed to keep room for the series to reuse Moriarty without trouble, which they eventually did). Still, it was well done, complete with the holodeck generating a simulated exit to a simulated Enterprise instead of the real one, and I was happy enough to go with this story instead of the one we’d gotten so far.

And it does take over the novel… for a time, but when we come out, and this starts connecting with everything else in a much stronger plot than we started with. However, we are still in reruns, as we recycle a different early episode plot, and the connection is more than obvious enough for the characters to bring it up.

In the end, its more of a mediocre book, but far above the 1st season set, and it did move well past my initial low expectations from a bumpy start.

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Waterloo: The Campaign of 1815 Part 1

by on October 12, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

John Hussey’s two volumes are on the the Waterloo campaign as a whole, with this one stopping two days before with the twin battles of Ligne and Quarte Bras. It goes after everything, starting with peace process of 1814.

He doesn’t go into a lot of detail there, but does go into the problems of the Congress of Vienna, and points up that Napoleon was watching the emerging factionalism with interest. From there, we get a recounting of the flight from Elba, and then the allied planning at stopping Napoleon.

And that planning takes up the bulk of the book. The general allied plan was to line four large armies up on the German border, and advance into France in something of a repeat of the 1814 campaign. The northernmost armies, British and Prussian (plus a number of minor German contingents which caused a new round of wrangling) were ready first, while Austrian and Russian armies assembled and made their way towards the border.

Napoleon needs to smash each of these armies, at least enough to put the fear of a large French victory into the allies and cause the internal tensions to tear them apart. However, the immediate reaction to his reappearance was to unite once again, putting a strain on his ability to militarily prepare in a hurry. Wellington ends up as the leader on the spot for the allies, and apparently is entranced enough by the allied planning for an offensive to not consider just how offensively-minded Napoleon really is.

Therefore both allied armies on the spot only have the loosest idea of how to handle a French offensive, even as Wellington and Blücher contemplate their coming offensive moves. This helps lead to confusion and a slow reaction on 15 and 16 June from both allied armies.

In fact, breakdowns of communication are the running theme of the last part of the book, as Napoleon tries for a dramatic victory to eliminate the Prussian army as threat, while Ney is involved in an ever-escalating battle against the British. There is a lot of study of dispatch times, and the likely interval for them to get to destinations, which does a lot to show just how fragmented views of these two battles were.

I think on occasion Hussey isn’t quite up to juggling all the balls involved here, but its a really big ask, as there is a lot that he is endeavoring to handle, and in general he does it very well, despite me getting lost on occasion. This is a very good study overall, with a lot of awareness and reference to previous serious histories and the controversies they’ve engendered. Even more than these important elements, the study of the preparations on both sides leading up to the campaign are very important, if you want to read up on more than just a period of three days in June (Ligny/Quarte Bras to Waterloo) at all, get these books.

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The Witchwood Crown

by on September 22, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The start of epic fantasy stories often have a pacing problem. The desire to provide lots of background, and root you in an unfamiliar world mean that the plot moves like a freight train. It has a lot of momentum, and won’t stop for anything, and the start of the story is all about getting the wheels to start turning at all.

Meanwhile, space opera is capable of starting with a firefight, pausing just long enough to pull a farm-boy out of his dead-end life, and giving you a roller coaster for the rest of the ride.

To an extent, the prologue of The Witchwood Crown lives in the epic fantasy mode. A character is ambushed and killed; this is a signal that something is very wrong, but the rest of the book moves on without that scene impacting the plot at all. But, our mysterious victim, Tanahaya is not dead, and it’s something of a shock when she shows up halfway through the novel. Not that we get to know her or anything, as she’s at death’s door for the rest of the book.

Meanwhile, instead of the traditional single, or at least limited, viewpoint of epic fantasy, we see fragments of stories from a bewildering array of viewpoints. There is a lot going on, and we get to see a fair chunk of it. This means the plot is going at a fairly good clip the entire time. Now, it’s hard to say just what a lot of it means, and where the central plot really is, but it is easy to have confidence that they all have a bearing on what is going on, and this is all part of one cohesive whole, instead of say, three completely separate stories that happen to be packaged together like Game of Thrones.

Some parts do seem disconnected; I don’t see any connection in them to what’s going on in Nakkiga, the decided source of the big threat, which presumably the action will end up revolving around. But, characters do connect between these plotlines, there is motion from one to another, and so it is part of the whole. And one part got me thinking about series title, “The Last King of Osten Ard”. This may be bigger than a mere metaphysical threat.

Part of the reason for the format is that Tad Williams is coming back to a world that already got that very slow start. All the fragmentary pieces are picking up threads of a world that has already been developed, and he is endeavoring to get new readers up to speed as well as entertain return visitors to Osten Ard. It’s been a bit since the last time I read Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, so the help was appreciated here too, and I have some confidence in saying that this series stands fairly well on it’s own. If you haven’t read the original, I do recommend going back to it, as it is one of the best epic fantasy stories out there. But, you can start here, and may well enjoy this more….

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The Lake Erie Campaign of 1813

by on September 14, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is intended as a short book for the National Parks service to sell as part of their memorial to the Battle of Lake Erie. The author was originally intending a much longer, definitive, work on the battle, which I think helped make this book much more solid.

This is a short book (just over a hundred pages without the appendixes), largely aimed at the general public, and it does a good job with the subject. It starts with a fair background to the War of 1812, its general course, and how the strategic frontier extended all the way out along the length of Lake Erie and into Michigan. Most of the book is from the American viewpoint, though there is of course time spent on British activities.

Along the way, there’s talk about the general design and construction of the ships involved, including recreations of the Niagara. There’s a denouement about a fight Perry and Elliot’s post battle fight over credit and actions during the climatic battle.

It’s a very short book, but serves its subject very well. The writing is clear, and goes through some very introductory material well. I’d like to see a much more comprehensive book on the campaigns around the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, but this is a great primer on the main part of that.

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Box of Mystery

by on September 6, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: D&D

TSR’s eighth FR-series module was odd even by the standards of the odder entries in the series. It was a slim boxed set, containing a booklet of advice about how to run city adventures, four sheets of miniatures-scale maps (meant to be cut down into a total of 12 segments), and several cardstock sheets of TSR’s latest round of paper props (like pretty much all of the others, done by Dennis Kauth).

Despite it’s position in the FR series, and the branding on the cover, this supplement has nothing to do with the Forgotten Realms at all. Well, other than the fact that there are cities in it that haven’t been detailed yet that a DM might want to work up. The bulk of the 64-page booklet is an introductory treatise on cities (very introductory at the beginning), starting with likely locations, sizes, governments, and so on. A pair of adventurers discuss the topics themselves (in boxed text), which doesn’t help the presentation. More usefully, an example city is fleshed out during the course of the booklet. One might expect it to serve as an obligatory tie-in to the Forgotten Realms, but it’s an entirely new location, in its own world (in fact, it is described as being on the northern coast of its continent, a location that wouldn’t work with any of TSR’s settings of the time).

It’s obvious that the main target of this package was new DMs, who are just expanding their campaigns out of the dungeons, and starting to explore the world around. The middle part of the book starts getting into some good advice, encouraging thought about what the city leaders (who, in a small city, adventurers could easily encounter) are like, encouraging some actual fantasy elements to crop up, and of course providing random tables for leaders, businesses and encounters. There’s a very basic form provided to write up all these notes, but it’s not well organized.

The map sheets are marked in 1-inch square grid, much like the 3D-Adventure products (such as AC3 and AC8), but are double-sided color sheets and meant to be put together in any number of ways as geomorphic boards. The ideas there are probably the highlight of the product, even though all the maps are fairly dense with buildings. The buildings marked on the map are in standard sizes, that can take the various papercraft buildings in the set. Some of these are flat topped, and designed so they can be stacked together to create taller buildings.

Interestingly, the buildings only anchor to the roofs on two sides, and are scored down the middle of the unattached sides so they fold flat and don’t take much room to store. However, this leaves buildings that will want to return to their flat configuration as you stand them up. Still, long-term storage is better in this set. Getting some removable tape and bracing the insides will do a lot to solve the problems, though even that will damage what is always a transient prop in the long run.

The last section of the booklet are five example mini adventures, and then a dozen plot hooks for adventures. The plot hooks are generally good, and are all urban-based. The mini-adventures all have bare-bones suggestions for a street layout, and do generally happen in/around more than one building, so there is motivation to set things up and show the local scenery. They’re all short (the module suggests most of them will go an hour or two except for the longest, which should go a fair bit longer), generally getting two page writeups. The good news, is they’re all fairly well described for their length, with the main background, the main encounters, and descriptions of the people involved. I wouldn’t want to run all of them (“The Horrible Haunting of Mycky Fynn’s” seems problematic to me, though “A Grand Illusion” looks well worth the effort), but they are good examples of in-city adventuring.

I can only assume that the Forgotten Realms branding on the cover gained TSR more sales than they lost from people who were skipping the line who might have been interested in a general city adventures product. However, there was never a sequel (one is discussed in the booklet), and I imagine positioning this one in the FR series only hurt the chances of that happening. If you want some easy-to-use buildings for miniatures, this isn’t a bad set (if you can find an intact copy, or print out the sheets from PDF onto good cardstock). Past that, there are much better (longer) sourcebooks for city adventuring, though this is a good start, and could have fit well into the DMGR line (assuming a willingness to play with its format, which leads me to wonder if this started as a proposed City Guide for that series). A final irony is that while the slim boxes TSR was moving to at this time look much better than the old fold-up style ones, the partly-assembled buildings inevitably need more space, and the slim box has trouble holding it all, while the older ones would be a much more comfortable fit.

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