Trying to Rekindle a Work Ethic...

Between work, brower sluggishness (effin' Firefox- how does it work? Honestly, I love the search engine, but my laptop hates it- I've been uninstalling and reinstalling the damn thing on a serial basis). I have also fallen into the Wesnoth trap- for fans of fantasy and strategy gaming, this free download is more addictive than opiates. The gameplay is simple, yet sophisticated, the plots of the campaigns form an interesting narrative which clearly partakes of the traditions of fantasy literature while avoiding some of the more egregious cliches, and the game is beautiful... the unit icons are well animated, the maps are colorful and nicely detailed, and the illustrations of unit types are among the most beautiful fantasy illustrations I've ever seen. The art is classy too- no chainmail bikinis, or oiled steroidal types. I cannot say enough about the art- it's incredible (I am especially impressed by the renderings of that rarest of creatures in fantasy art, a fully clothed, accomplished, middle aged woman). I cannot recommend this game highly enough, though, being fun, it is a timekiller.

My Own Private Idaho Glacial Rift

The New York metro area is currently experiencing a blizzard characterized by gale force winds and expected snow accumulations of up to two feet. Having been scheduled to work a graveyard shift, I decided to come to work early to avoid the worst road conditions (and to get my car off the street and into a deserted parking lot). I have had to shovel the area immediately outside the doors to the building a couple of times so I'll be able to exit the building.

The howling storm outside reminds me of the first time I played through Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, while a middle schooler- a blizzard had dumped about a foot of snow in the area, and classes were canceled for the day. A family friend trekked across town so he could play a marathon D&D session with my siblings and I (broken only by an epic assault on the snow in the driveway so mom could drive to work). The session went on until well after nightfall, and our friend stayed over so he wouldn't need a ride home on icy streets. Never have I experienced a gaming session that was so appropriate to the prevailing conditions outside.

G2 is perhaps my favorite in the "Giants" series, due to its unusual setting. The glacial rift, bordered by translucent ice caverns conjures up some unforgettable imagery, and provides a good showcase for those woefully under-utilized arctic monsters. It's also the only module in the series that wasn't directly inspired by DeCamp and Pratt's The Roaring Trumpet. The Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is pretty much "nicked" whole cloth from DeCamp and Pratt's novella (a retelling of the tale of Thor's journey to the garth of Utgard-Loki), even down to the feast being held in the giant chief's steading:

After a good hour of climbing, Shea began to get glimpses of a shape looming from the bare crest, intermittently blotted out by the eddies of mist. When they were close enough to see it plainly, it became clearly a house, not unlike that of the bonder Sverre. But it was cruder, made of logs with the bark on, and vastly bigger — as big as a metropolitan railroad terminal.

Thjalfi said into his ear: "That will be Utgard Castle. Ye’ll need whatever mite of courage ye have here, friend Harald." The young man’s teeth were chattering from something other than cold.

Skrymir lurched up to the door and pounded on it with his fist. He stood there for a long minute, the wind flapping his furs. A rectangular hole opened in the door. The door swung open. The chariot riders climbed down, stretching their stiff muscles as they followed their guide. The door banged shut behind them. They were in a dark vestibule like that in Sverre’s house but larger and foul with the odor of unwashed giant. A huge arm pushed the leather curtain aside, revealing through the triangular opening a view of roaring yellow flame and thronging, shouting giants.

Thjalfi murmured: "Keep your eyes open, Harald. As Thjodolf of Hvin says:

All the gateways Ere one goes out

Thoughtfully should a man scan;

Uncertain it is Where sits the unfriendly

Upon the bench before thee."

Within, the place was a disorderly parody of Sverre’s. Of the same general form, with the same benches, its tables were all uneven, filthy, and littered with fragments of food. The fire in the center hung a pall of smoke under the rafters. The dirty straw on the floor was thick about the ankles.

The benches and the passageway behind them were filled with giants, drinking, eating, shouting at the tops of their voices. Before him a group of six, with iron-grey topknots and patchy beards like Skrymir’s, were wrangling. One drew back his arm in anger. His elbow struck a mug of mead borne by a harassed-looking man who was evidently a thrall. The mead splashed onto another giant, who instantly snatched up a bowl of stew from the table and slammed it on the man’s head.

Hall of the Fire Giant King is heavily inspired by a journey to Muspelheim in The Roaring Trumpet, even down to the troll servants of the fire giant monarch (Surt in the case of the novella), and the cameo appearance of some familiar evil genii:

They turned from the ledge into another tunnel. This sloped up then leveled again where side tunnels branched in from several directions. Snögg picked his way unerringly through the maze. A tremendous banging grew on them, and they were passing the entrance of some kind of armory. The limits of the place were invisible in the flickering red glare, through which scuttled naked black things, like licorice dolls. Heimdall whispered: "These would be dark dwarfs from Svartalfheim, where no man nor As has ever been."

While it borrows liberally from the novella, I'd have to say that I prefer Against the Giants, because it ditches the cutesy-poo elements of DeCamp and Pratt's work. The substitution of a party of mortals for the largely divine cast of characters in the novella is also an improvement- the dramatic tension is much greater in Against the Giants than it is in The Roaring Trumpet because the outcome is unclear- the divine protagonists of The Roaring Trumpet will survive until Ragnarok, while the fates of the all-too-mortal Frush, Fonkin, Gleep Wurp and the gang are anything but certain.

Merry Christmas!

One of the most unusual traditional Christmas decorations is the Catalonian caganer, a small figurine of a person in traditional peasant dress answering the call of nature. The figurines are typically hidden in the elaborate Spanish nativity scenes, discreetly going about their business. It's a funny reminder that the sacred and the profane mingle in everyday life, and that the swaddling clothes of the babe in the manger eventually needed laundering. Perhaps the greatest lesson of the caganer is that one should never lose one's sense of humor, because, as St Ita noted, a scowling countenance is detestable to God.

Merry Christmas to all.

Rogue Taxidermy and Obscure Chimerae

Last week, a friend persuaded me to attend the fifth annual "Carnivorous Nights" rogue taxidermy contest in Brooklyn. It was a night of two-headed squirrels, and other taxonomic oddities, including a wolpertinger. This tiny teratological terror was the subject of a comic riff on Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare watercolor:





One can clearly see that the jackalope is a descendent of this wee little chimera.

Appendix Nu

Reading the ambitious "inspirational reading" list at Huge Ruined Pile led me to believe that an "Appendix Nu" would be a useful addition to the canon. Appendix Nu would include the body of myth, legendry, historical narratives, and early works of fiction that inspired modern fantastists. The assembly of Appendix Nu would have to be a group effort in order to close any lacunae that would inevitably result from our cultural biases (I am not using this term pejoratively- my own biases are toward Greek and Roman legends, Norse Sagas, Irish and Welsh legends, and the picaresque tales of the Iberian peninsula- with a passing familiarity of the epics of India and some of the Mesoamerican material).

Peryton Put-on

Being a rabid fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I ordered a copy of the latest edition of the previously scarce Book of Imaginary Beings, and found that the entry for the Perytion (sic- the original Spanish name for the beast was peritio reveals some...uh... problems:


The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the city of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons. In the year A.D. 642 the record of the Sibyl's prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria; the grammarians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome. In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition. After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob Ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library of Alexandria was burned by Omar. The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:
"The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird. They have the deer's head and legs. As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage. . . . Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man. From this, some conclude that the Perytons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods. . . . . and have been surprised eating dry earth . . . flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules. . . . they [PerytonsJ are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favor of their gods. . . . and those who crossed the seas with Scipio to conquer Carthage came close to failure, for during the passage a formation of Perytons swooped down on the ships, killing and mangling many. . . . Although our weapons have no effect against it, the animal-if such it be-can kill no more than a single man. . . . wallowing in the gore of its victims and then fleeing upward on its powerful wings. . . . in Ravenna, where they were last seen, telling of their plumage which they described as light blue in color, which greatly suprised me for all that is known of their dark green feathers. Though these excerpts are sufficiently explicit, it is to be lamented that down to our own time no further intelligence about the Perytons has reached us. The rabbi's treatise, which preserved this description for us, had been on deposit until before the last World War in the library of the University of Dresden. It is painful to say that this document has also disappeared, and whether as a consequence of bombardment or of the earlier book burning of the Nazis, it is not known. Let us hope that one day another copy of the work may be discovered and again come to adorn the shelves of some library."


So, the only sources which mention the peritio have been destroyed, and the first mention of it in an extant document is in a work by a known trickster. Yeah, we've been played by a master- the guy who would have us believe that Don Quixote was written by a Frenchman named Pierre Menard.

The Wikipedia entry for the peryton has been corrected to reflect the peryton put-on but other wikis haven't been updated to reflect the circumstantial evidence that Borges punked us. This particular juxtaposition from Monstropedia is unintentionally hilarious:

The Peryton (or winged dear) is a legendary creature combining physical features of a stag and a bird.


The earliest verifiable account of the peryton occurs in Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, in which he refers to a now-lost medieval manuscript as a source. The word is completely unknown in sources from Classical antiquity and from morphological and thematic characteristics one could conclude that if is not a completely modern invention, neither could it be of any origin earlier than the medieval period. The concept of the peryton seems to have become widely known due to its inclusion in the first edition Monster Manual from the popular role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.


Borges dedicated the story There Are More Things to H.P. Lovecraft- it's tempting to picture the perytion as a fictional relative of the Shantak, or perhaps a winged horror, the multi-branching tentacles of which (used for sanguivorous purposes no doubt) were mistaken for antlers.

The Shaddow Kingdom*

*The double "D" is intentional- a viewing of the video will reveal the reason for the unorthodox spelling.

After the usual job-related October ass-kicking, I finally have some leisure time to surf the 'net, and I came across this gem (I'm a sucker for cognitive junk food like the Shaver mystery, von Dänikenism, and the like) of a video:





A more cynical person would say that Ms. Thomas' ample display of cleavage is a crass attempt to garner views, but I am sure that she is just making us aware of her mammalian bona fides, as she warns us of the Reptilian Menace. It's amazing that the basic premise of the Reptilian Invasion conspiracy "theory" has been lifted whole-cloth from Robert E. Howard's The Shadow Kingdom. It boggles my mind to think that now, over eighty years later, the story still has legs.

I think REH had one detail slightly wrong... the one phrase that our hidden Reptilian overlords cannot say is actually "Que tatas aah mammamamma!"

My favorite line in the scrolling text of the video has got to be, "I am fully versed in physics, politics, earth history, and alien affairs." This particular line is the funniest bombast I've read since the infamous ""I am aware of all internet traditions." The title is also a winner- media blits? "Blits" must be a portmanteau word, combining "Blitz" and, oh, why even bother to spell it out?