The Hunters of Vermin

by on July 29, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The second prequel novella is sadly the last so far. It’s obvious there should be a third story, but after nine years, all we have is an independent side story, so I am worried that we will never get the final(?) story here, much less the sequel to the original set of stories.

I can imagine a number of problems that may have led to this situation. But, I’ll stick with what’s in front of me.

Hunter of Vermin is a direct sequel to Deadly Nightshade, and starts with the usual action-oriented death-defying antics.

This is also the start of things going a bit wrong from my point of view. Max isn’t really in charge of his destiny here, and it’s fairly obvious this is a test by the Vaach (the latest in a series). Max is doing everything he can for himself, but is also just getting pushed around by aliens with extremely high levels of technology.

The worst part is that while Honsinger is generally on the wordy side, and it’s turned up to twelve here. Max’s internal thoughts are the bulk of the content, because for much of the novella there’s no one else around, and they get interminable in many places. The Vaach themselves, while saying that humans talk too much spend way too many words to say so. There’s another alien who is extremely loquacious, and the word count goes up even further, but this part is much more entertaining, and more enjoyable.

Finally, for me, I signed up for military SF featuring ship-to-ship battles, and this moves to ground pounding, which I found I didn’t appreciate nearly as much. If you’ve been reading Honsinger’s military SF space operas and enjoying them, keep going, but this is the weakest of the stories so far, and I really hope we get to see more of Max as an adult, in charge of a full destroyer again, and I recommend the original three far more than these prequels.

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Off-Panel Dragon

by on July 23, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the eleventh in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Crusader Kings II. See the previous reviews here:
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
The Old Gods: That Old-Time Religion
Sons of Abraham: A Little of Everything
Rajas of India: My Elephant for a Kingdom
Charlemagne: Back in Time
Way of Life: The Short Way
Horse Lords: For the Horde
Conclave: Lords of the Realm
The Reaper’s Due: Crusader Kings: Pandemic
Monks and Mystics: Secret Mystic

Over half a year after the previous expansion, CK II returned with yet more scope extension. This time the game would look at the subject of China (which had recently gotten a look from the EU IV team in Mandate of Heaven). Jade Dragon was announced on August 24, 2017, and released on November 16, alongside patch 2.8.

Tibet

While China stayed off-map, Tibet was already in the area of the current map, but was largely unusuable wasteland. This was now developed into a playable region.

The area is generally under monastic feudal government, with four related cultures. Two of the smaller cultures can have Absolute Cognatic inheritance, allowing female rulers. Most of the area is Buddhist, But Bön is a defensive pagan religion, and there’s a couple of reasonably powerful rulers in the 867 start for that religion (the rest of the time, there is a dominant Buddhist empire).

The rulers of the area are generally playable with the Jade Dragon expansion, or with either The Old Gods or Rajas of India (depending on religion). It’s a fairly stable region, with tough terrain… and direct access to one branch of the Silk Road.

China

The main goal was for the eastern edge of the map to feel like China is close and involved with affairs on the map. Considering that China was generally unified in ways the rest of Eurasia wasn’t during this period, I think not directly representing China was the best option. It would distort the game way too much to accurately represent what was going on there while not losing the feel for Europe, and the existing Holy Roman Emperor already causes problems by being too capable.

At the personal/realm level, the main interaction is grace. Imperial grace is akin to the Pope’s opinion of Catholic characters, as it can be used to ask for favors. However, it is tracked by dynasty, instead of personal opinion, so the death of the Emperor won’t remove accumulated grace, but civil wars can cause a change of dynasty, which will.

Of course, the easiest way to gain grace is to become a tributary of China. But that requires giving up much of your income and levy reinforcement, as well as being called into wars. On the other hand, you can request military support from China if you are attacked.

Past that, you can send various gifts to the emperor, who will have things he likes and dislikes. In addition to the obvious money, you can send eunuchs and concubines, and in special circumstances, physicians, commanders, or famine relief.

Getting favors tends to be expensive, so getting anything out of deals with China will take a while. At the high end, you can get the Emperor to dismantle a rival state (after a war, of course), or get an imperial marriage, but the more modest requests are guarantees of peace with China, and medical help.

All of this depends on China being stable (which is most of the time). Random events can send China into civil war, unrest, famine, and other problems, or start a golden age. Usually, when times are tough, China will be “open” with the silk routes operating normally. When times are good, China can go expansionist, trying to increase the on-map holdings of the Western Protectorate. And at times, China will close the borders, going isolationist, and closing down the Silk Road completely.

On the other hand, someone on the extreme east side of the map can go off map to trouble China itself. This can be merely to try to force the Silk Road open, but you can pillage or try to invade. I can’t say I’m anywhere near ambitious or skilled enough to give it a try, as China will spawn bigger and better armies than any other event in the game (actually, the Aztecs from Sunset Invasion can have bigger armies, but they have low quality, while China will have a high quality army).

Overall, it all makes sense, but I do find there are still odd problems. In my experience, even an open China is too likely to go after odd targets, like southern India. Chinese concerns were generally ruled by the dangers of neighboring tribes, and I don’t know of any serious desires to extend control along sea lanes, and certainly not past the (off-map) SE Asia area, so the AI needs reigning in here.

Religion

Bön starts as an organized defensive pagan religion, but borrows mechanics from the Indian Dharmic religions, and a couple of other places. Like most pagans, their power wanes throughout the timeline, though some provinces stay Bön during the entire period.

As well, a new heresy was added to Zoroastrianism, Khurmazta. It is also more eastern in flavor, with a patron deity mechanic akin to Hindus.

And Taoism was added to the game, with such characters being playable with either Jade Dragon or Rajas of India. Taoist realms tend to be stable, with no ‘short reign’ penalties, and an automatic +2 to stewardship to encourage larger demesnes. On the other hand, they are more restricted on declaring war. Also, China is usually Han and Taoist, and a ruler who is also both gets a bonus to imperial grace.

Trade

The Silk Road was enhanced in the patch. First the number of different routes was enhanced, more looking at what is known of overall major trade patterns, rather than just the famous route through the steppes.

Many of the provinces trade flows through can now have trade posts built. This is the same secondary holding as introduced in The Republic, but anyone who holds the proper provinces can build them.

All Silk Road provinces still get a status that regulates the value of trade, and it is more responsive now. Between the revamped mechanics and new trade posts, life on the Silk Road can be very profitable, but there is more to do than before.

To War

There were a number of changes to warfare in the patch. First, sieges were tweaked to go faster overall, but fort levels became more important (which means late game sieges drag out to the same time scale as before). Also, the ‘ticking warscore’ for a successful attacker was increased.

It was also decided to let just about anyone always go to war over a neighboring county-level title with the expansion. The new “border dispute” causus belli doesn’t completely replace the old method of fabricating claims, as there is a high up front cost to do it. It also causes a relationship penalty with all the members of the religion on both sides of the war, so declaring war on (say) a fellow Catholic will cause quite the relations hit with all other Catholic rulers.

Conclusion

Various properties have found, often after the fact, that it can be more effective to keep certain things permanently off-screen. And China is an excellent choice for that effect.

At the same time, China should have a massive effect on regions that are on the map, and the expansion does just that. The expansion comes with four new rules, allowing the new causus belli and setting the requirements for Chinese interactions.

Not mentioned in the review is the fact that Paradox also reworked the map of Persia and Arabia for this patch. I don’t know those areas well, but they were much better developed, and helped play in that area as well.

Overall, its a much-needed addition to CK II, though not worth a lot to people who stick with the game’s Western European roots. Its kind of a cross between an expansion in scope, and event package, and recommended to anyone playing in the eastern half of the map just to make thing feel more “real”.

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Arguing About Slavery

by on July 19, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

There’s a few things Miller’s book is about.

Most centrally, it is about the Gag Rule, or really, the series of Gag Rules about slavery in the US House of Representatives in the 1830s. It is also about the birth of the abolition movement in the North, and is about President John Quincy Adams’ later tenure as a Massachusetts representative.

There’s also a number of more minor themes of course. An interesting one is the fact that the fight centered around the right to petition. It’s not something we really pay attention to these days, but it is actually the right with the longest recognition in English use. Miller also spends time going into the points of view clashing in these fights, and the impossibility of making a subject go away by refusing to talk about it.

There’s also a love for going through the old Congressional records on Miller’s part. There’s a lot of quotes from actual speeches as recorded in the two newspapers that covered the doings of the government. This is accompanied by a lot of commentary; explanations of the wider circumstances, summary of what’s been said leading to the part he quotes, etc. Unfortunately, there is a tendency towards just restating what has been said. Sometimes (often), the other bits involved means this enhances the quote he’s restating, but too often it is just a direct restatement without any purpose.

Other than that last problem, this is a great, well-written book, that is a great study of the US political process relatively early in its life. It deserves to be widely read. However, the Kindle edition deserves to be shunned. It is obvious that someone scanned the book, ran it through OCR, and poured it into ebook format, and never even looked at the result. The table of contents is a disaster, there’s a number of graphics present that are just the spine of the book from the scan, year references such as “I8 3 r” are common, the page header (title and chapter names) are left in (along with page numbers), and the start of each subchapter is a jumbled out-of-order mess.

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King of Bloodstone

by on July 15, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: D&D

The ninth FR-series supplement returned to the geographic format of the bulk of the series, this time heading northeast and covering the two countries that had been introduced through the four H-series adventures. The usual major editing goof this time occurs in the back cover blurb which states that this is the area featuring Icewind Dale, as well as Bloodstone Pass.

Icewind Dale had already been covered in FR5 The Frozen North. This product was, however, written by R.A. Salvatore, the author of the Icewind Dale books, which is where the confusion came from.

The introduction fixes the H-series position in Realms history; the four modules take place across two years, which are given to be 1357-8 DR (the boxed set was effectively set at the start of 1358, and FR5 and this module are explicitly set in 1359). So, the supplement assumes that the Bloodstone Pass series is over, and that the pregenerated characters for those modules are the ones that did it. This has the very good side effect of not needing to actually run those adventures to use this, and the less-desirable side effect of if you did run them, you may need to adjust quite a few things. But that last is the nature of making the world your own, and the book ends up making a lot of good suggestions about where to take veterans of the series next.

Physically, it is the typical 68-page book printed sepia-tone with a faux-parchment pattern, with detached cover, and a 30-mile/inch poster map of the region. The interior cover has a more detailed map of Damara itself showing its former constituent duchies/counties/baronies (the terms get thrown around a bit interchangeably here; perhaps in Damara they’re more a sign of seniority than rank). The introduction also explains the focus of the book—despite the area of the full map, attention is largely on the (former) countries of Vaasa and Damara, with secondary interest given to Narfell and Impiltur. The rest of the map is nearly ignored in the text. Since these books generally need more focus, this is good for the product, but since Ashanath didn’t even get a mention in FR6 Dreams of the Red Wizards, and Thesk got two-thirds of a page, these countries have been virtually ignored twice now.


Region the FR9 map covers, showing the overlap with the original boxed set and FR6.

You might also ignore the 2nd Edition logo on the cover. Obviously, a project like this takes time to write, and the big map to be drawn up. The NPCs section (9 pages) has magic-users running around, despite the recent name change to ‘mage’. (You might think it’d be easy to just find-and-replace that, but in the days of manual layout, those parts could have been physically done well before 2e came out….) Also, monks didn’t reappear in 2e until PHBR3 The Complete Priest’s Handbook came out the next year, and the Monastery of the Yellow Rose is an important location, that naturally, is an order of monks running under all the extra-special 1e rules, including limited access to higher levels. An interesting note is the book states that the land is harsh and dangerous, and anticipating Dark Sun a bit, anyone not otherwise classed is a 1st level fighter. (No o-level peasants, or just o-level characters from Unearthed Arcana, in this howling wilderness.)

Of course, as a setting supplement, rules hooks are pretty rare to begin with. There’s no new spells, monsters, or items to muddy the waters with. Characters are given with class/level, alignment, deity, and notable attributes (16+). Given the shifts seen in characters elsewhere, it’s a little surprising that there seem to be no attribute shifts in the Bloodstone Pass cast (presumably because they are adventure characters instead of novel characters…), though they’ve mostly gone up two levels since their appearance in H4 The Throne of Bloodstone.

The main hook used for the supplement as a whole is that while the Witch-King Zhengi is dead, Damara is still an ex-kingdom, having been split apart and factionalized by Zhengi when he defeated its armies a bit over two years ago. The best claim to the vacant throne was basically a willing lackey of Zhengi, and is looking to take over now. However, the head of the victorious adventurers who defeated Zhengi is now the Baron of Bloodstone in his own right, and is looking to put together a Kingdom of Bloodstone that would eventually cover most of Damara and Vaasa. This tension defines most of the book, and helps a lot.

The main geographic entry part of the book is fairly well done. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t feel as interesting as the similar parts of FR5, though it does read better than FR3 Empires of the Sands, even though that had the better idea of providing every place with a ‘hook’. It does suffer somewhat from a presentation split up by subject rather than geography, though not nearly to the extent that FR5 did. The other problem is that not all the entries are actually on the main poster map of the module. No, they only show up on the map of Damara from the inside cover.

Other than the main poster map, there’s the mentioned map of Damara on the inside cover. In the book, there’s a map of Bloodstone Valley (reused from the modules, but with a couple new settlements, and new gatehouses that are being constructed to block the pass added). There’s small maps of Impiltur and Vaasa (handier than the poster, but don’t show anything new), and a half-page map showing the distribution of tribes in Narfell. There’s maps of Ostrav (a walled farming village), and of Hillsafar Hall (a fortified dwarven mine entrance). If you want a map of Bloodstone Village itself, you need any of the first three H-modules (and it is growing rapidly now, meaning those maps are obviously out of date, though the major buildings will be the same). The nearby mines are only covered in H2-3, and the Svirfneblin and Duergar caverns are only given in H2. Now, most campaigns shouldn’t need most of that, but an updated Bloodstone Village (Town?) map would have been an intelligent addition. (Oh, and the interior map of the fortified manor in Bloodstone is only in H1, but it’s so awful you should just start over from scratch.)

Thanks to the Bloodstone/Damara tension, this one feels more like a Gazeteer, which always paid attention to the internal problems of the country under study to great effect. Sadly, unlike one of those, we still don’t see a lot of development on the cultural side, leaving it to feel more like anywhere else in the Realms, just a little colder. In theory, it’s a little emptier too, though the maps don’t really give a sense of where cultivated land and the such is, and the prevalence of city-states in much of the Realms tends to give all of it a somewhat empty feel.

Still, it has a basic “hook” for everything, and confines itself to a decently-sized bit of geography. It also avoids the Dreams of the Red Wizards mistake of wandering between presenting it straight as a campaign area, and trying to figure out how to get adventurers to go there. So this makes for one of the better entries of the FR series. Considering that, it is a shame that it seems the area has not been the focus any products since.

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Star of Cursrah

by on July 11, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Doing a story that hops back and forth between two distinct storylines is difficult. It’s done quite well here.

There’s a lot of very deliberate parallels (in fact, this is brought up inside the novel), which help strengthen the structure. We have a privileged female character who goes slumming with her two best lower-class friends.

In the primary arc, this is in current-day Calimshan, where our lead is the daughter of a merchant house, and she is not planning on taking over the family business of dealing in slaves. The trio is very much a set of low-level adventurers, and there is a lot good old-fashioned swords and sorcery feel going on in these parts.

The other part happens thousands of years ago, centering on an extremely spoiled princess of the now-vanished city-state of Cursrah. One of the strong points of the book is that it shows just how spoiled and petty Amenstar is, and yet she is a sympathetic character.

Lore-wise, this is a great dive into the history of Calimshan, which was early established as a region where genies had once ruled, and most of the population still has some of their blood in them. Even by this point, the big ruling genies, including the great Calim himself, are gone, but many of the lesser ones remain, bound to service.

Of course, the two plots intersect because our modern trio stumble across the long-lost ruins of Cursrah, and we end up dealing with the aftermath of its fall….

Its not truly great, but it is well structured, and uses the structure well, and really delivers on mood and feel in important places, so I certainly recommend it.

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