Many moons ago I was talking with a guy online who claimed that, by the year 2017, computer games would exist which would allow GMs to create off the cuff in real-time just like they can currently do at the table. And I said, “Bullshit.” (For obvious reasons.) In the process of calling bullshit, however, I ended up creating an example of off-the-cuff design that would be virtually impossible to replicate in a computer game engine even with procedural content generators vastly superior to anything we have available to us today.

It’s nothing particularly spectacular, but it’s got a few touches of the fantastical that I think are rather evocative and worth sharing.

VALLEY OF THE SAPPHIRE WAVES

The Valley of the Sapphire Waves is filled with rolling fields of vibrant blue grass. Anyone standing in the waters of the valley will perceive the sun as eclipsed because Helios mourns the loss of his first wife (the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers, see hex 1).

HEX 1: The Falls of the Ur-Goddess. The 300 foot tall waterfall at the end of the valley flows up because it is the place where the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers was slain millennia ago.

HEX 2: Obelisk of Moonstone. Raised as a holy site by the Heresy Cult of the Ur-Goddess. The moonstone will heal anyone touching it at night, but under the rays of the sun it is cursed. (Anyone touching it suffers as per a bestow curse spell.)

HEX 3: The Stirge Mires. 1 in 3 chance of encounteing 1-6 stirges.

HEX 4: Goblin Moonstone Scavengers. Small tribe of goblins scavenging the moonstones scattered in rocky crevasses here.

HEX 5: Vale of the Dryad. This forestland is protected by a dryad whose spirit is bound to a treant. All the squirrels here can talk, many spontaneously forming acting troupes performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

HEX 6: Graveyard of the Moonstone Cults. 1 in 3 chance per turn of encountering 1-3 wights.

HEX 7: Medusa’s Vale. A medusa makes her home in the Sinkhole of Statuary.

HEX 8: Sphinx Guardians. Once a great tribe of sphinxes guarded the entrance to the valley (they were placed there by Helios), but their numbers are depleted. 1 in 3 chance of encountering a sphinx, which 75% of the time will be an undead skeleton. Remaining sphinxes will ask sun-oriented riddles before attacking.

Valley of the Sapphire Waves – Update 2023

Meh.

The primary arc of Hoard of the Dragon Queen is disappointingly linear. Disappointing because the concept is so delightfully ripe for a non-linear approach: The Cult of the Dragon has abandoned its previous plans of turning dragons into dracoliches and has allied itself with a variety of living dragons and their half-breed offspring to free Tiamat from her infernal prison. In order to do this, feuding factions within the cult are seeking out five powerful artifacts which take the form of dragon masks (one for each of Tiamat’s chromatic heads).

Five masks lost in disparate locations? Multiple cult factions simultaneously pursuing semi-compatible goals?! When I first read the background I was absolutely convinced I was about to read the D&D equivalent of Masks of Nyarlathotep and have my brain blown at the prospect of node-based scenario design being used as the introductory campaign for an entire generation of gamers.

Sadly, not to be.

Instead, the campaign is a pretty rigid “go to X, then go to Y, then go to Z” affair. Hoard of the Dragon Queen makes up for this, however, by designing most of the individual scenarios along its path in a delightfully non-linear fashion: Enemy strongholds are set up to reward frontal assaults, physical stealth, and clever infiltration. Fractious factions can be turned against each other using a variety of methods. Alliances can be forged and broken in myriad ways. Enemies surrendering and being questioned (instead of fighting bloodily to the death) is gloriously well-supported. Token guidance is even given for PCs who go wandering off the intended path on wild goose chases. And all of this goes hand-in-hand with a very utilitarian presentation which is starkly at odds with the overwritten-to-useless style which has afflicted a lot of published adventures in the last decade.

Which makes the scenarios where this liberal and refreshing approach is supplanted by a rigid railroad all the more puzzling.

This really only afflicts a couple of the scenarios, but unfortunately one of them is the first scenario and it’s laughably atrocious: There’s a lengthy sequence where the PCs are besieged in a castle (after getting railroaded into it, of course). The PCs are then supposed to go to the local duke (who basically has a yellow exclamation mark over his head) and get a quest to fight their way out of the besieged castle and accomplish some goal in the town. Then they fight their way back through the respawning kobolds on the drawbridge, return to the duke (who the adventure literally says waits for them in the same spot on the castle battlements), get their next quest, and then fight their way out again.

And if they do that two or three times, they’ll unlock a dialogue option where the duke tells them about a secret passage leading out of the castle so that they can bypass the respawning drawbridge encounter going forward.

It’s kind of astonishing that I kept reading the adventure after that.

Can I also take a moment here to point out that the campaign hook for Hoard of the Dragon Queen is absolutely ridiculous? The PCs are approaching a random town, crest a hill, and discover that it is being attacked by a dragon. Okay. That’s fine. But then the campaign assumes that the 1^st level PCs are likely, when confronted with that sight, to decide that their best course of action is to walk into the town.

(Did I mention that the dragon is also accompanied by an entire army?)

Maybe I’m just spoiled by having players who aren’t seriously brain damaged, but I literally cannot imagine a scenario in which that hook would work.

But what kills Hoard of the Dragon Queen is not its inconsistent design. Nor its occasional absurdities. Nor the plentiful continuity errors. Nor the horrific editorial shortcomings. Nor the completely inadequate maps (some of which appear to be missing entirely, some of which don’t match the text, and many of which lack keyed entries they’re supposed to have).

No. What kills Hoard of the Dragon Queen is that it’s so incredibly boring.

And I’m not talking about one of those adventures that’s just boring to read on the page. I mean that the contents of this adventure, basically from top to bottom, are generic and dull and trite and uninteresting: There is no kobold that isn’t a generic kobold. There is no bedroom that isn’t a generic bedroom. There is no swamp which isn’t a generic swamp. And there is absolutely nothing fantastical or wonderful or unique or memorable.

(The obvious rejoinder here is that a good GM could still take this material, work miracles upon it, and make it totally awesome during actual play. Of course they could. But a good GM would also know better than to use such a flat and uninspiring foundation in the first place.)

To be fair, there are a couple of exceptions to this general dullness. (Flying stolen wyverns to intercept the flying castle of a giant is the most notable one.) But for a campaign which I’m assuming will take at least 40-60 hours of table time to complete, those slim exceptions are wholly inadequate.

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the reaction I had most consistently and finally to Hoard of the Dragon Queen:

Meh.

Outside of a few truly awful sequences in the first scenario, there’s nothing here that’s really terrible. But there’s also nothing to be found between these covers to justify spending $30 on it (let alone another $30 on the essentially mandatory second volume). Most damning, however, is that Hoard of the Dragon Queen also lacks anything which will reward the countless hours of ponderous and forgettable playing time that you would languish upon it.

Grade: D

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Go to Remixing the Hoard of the Dragon Queen

An idea that I’ve toyed around with for years is creating a hex map for the Underdark. I still haven’t done it. But recently I’ve been running a huge technological complex for Numenera with a hex map that shares a lot of similarities with the Underdark. If the idea of running a hexcrawl through the Underdark is something you’d like to try,  I think there are a few key points to consider:

(1) What makes a hex map work is that it abstracts the actual terrain of the game world. If you’re doing a wilderness hexcrawl, you shouldn’t try to map every tree… or even every single country lane. If you do that, you’re defeating the entire point of the hex map. Similarly, if you’re designing your Underdark with a hex map you should not try to map every individual tunnel. (You might map major thoroughfares, the same way that major highways or rivers would be indicated on your wilderness hex map.)

(2) One key distinction between a wilderness hex map and an Underdark hex map is that, generally speaking, travel is always assumed to be possible through the side of a wilderness hex. This is not necessarily the case in the Underdark and one thing you’ll want to develop is a key indicating a minimum of three states for each side of the hex:

• Open (there are lots of tunnels leading from this hex to that hex)
• Closed (there are no tunnels leading from this hex to that hex)
• Chokepoint (you can get from this hex to that hex, but only by passing through a specific keyed location)

Note that the existence of a given chokepoint could also be a secret that needs to be discovered (by either obtaining the information elsewhere or perhaps by performing a detailed survey of the area).

(3) The RPG industry has developed a fairly standard “vocabulary” of wilderness terrain types. (These actually predate D&D and were inherited from Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival when Arneson used it as a template.) These terrain types also have the benefit of being familiar to us in our every day lives: We know what forests are. We know what mountains are. And so forth. IMO, you’re going to want to develop a similarly interesting vocabulary of at least 4-5 different Underdark terrain types. And you’re going to have to figure out how to clearly communicate those differences to a group that probably doesn’t contain spelunkers (and certainly no fantasy spelunkers). The point of this, obviously, is to make the map more interesting: This both rewards exploration (a key component of any hexcrawl), but also to make the actual description of the PCs’ journey more engaging.

(4) The Underdark is fundamentally three dimensional in a way that the surface of the world is not. Keep that in mind, but don’t worry about it too much: The surface of our planet varies from 1,400 feet below sea level to 29,000 feet above sea level but we still successfully visualize it as a flat plane. Consider the minor elevation shifts I discussed in Xandering the Dungeon and apply the same logic at a macro-scale here: You can probably make your Underdark more interesting by saying “you have to go down and then over and then up to get to there”, but vast slopes and slants and descents and climbs can be abstracted onto a two-dimensional map. So go back to Point #1 above and remember to embrace the abstraction of the hex!

Go to Part 1

2. Max Gladstone – Three Parts Dead / Two Serpents Rise

As I type this, I am once again second-guessing the order of my top two picks for the John W. Campbell Award. But I’m just going to stick with what I put on my ballot while simultaneously encouraging you to check out both of these authors.

The central conceit of Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead is that (a) the performance of magic is a matter of manipulating certain laws; (b) it often involves a contract (or pact) between two parties of power; and (c) therefore the first thing any respectable sorceress is going to learn is contract law.

That feels like half a gimmick, but then Gladstone rapidly develops that simple idea into an infinitely clever universe.

An idea that I’ve heard ascribed to John Campbell, Frederick Pohl, and Connie Willis is that, given the idea of an automobile, pretty much anybody can imagine a highway. But the good science fiction writers will imagine the traffic jam. And that’s what Gladstone does here: Not in the sense of “magic is technology”, but rather building an entire society and culture and all the complex modes of life around the derivative consequences of a single, clever conceit.

And then Gladstone doubles down by hooking a literally epic murder mystery onto the glorious edifice he’s constructed: A god has been murdered.

Gladstone’s herorine — Tara Abernathy — is one part of insurance investigator, one part district attorney, and one part Merlin. She’s also a brilliantly realized and well-rounded character, joining a wide panoply of similar characters who populate the steampunk-infused metropolis of Alt Coulumb.

Frankly, this book is just fabulous. And while it mixes a lot of your favorite things, it also manages to infuse everything with a fresh breath of innovation that’s really exciting to see in a new author. I didn’t hesitate to add Gladstone to my “automatically buy his next book” list and I don’t hesitate to recommend him thoroughly and completely to you.

1. Ramez Naam – Nexus

I had very similar reactions to Nexus, but what pushed it to the top of my ballot is how deeply intrigued I was by Naam’s unique vision of the transhuman cusp: A drug (the titular Nexus) has appeared seemingly out of nowhere. It has a nanotech component that, basically, wires up the brain to receive and send wi-fi signals. The early iterations of the drug just produce a weird and unique high, but then computer scientists (i.e., our main characters) realize that they can hack the thing and basically perform a bootstrap installation of a custom-built OS.

And that’s when all hell breaks loose.

(Where did this drug originally come from? Good question. The mystery behind that question is one of the things that really intrigued me about the book.)

This particular instantiation of the transhuman and Naam’s exploration of the different ways in which the technology could be used is definitely interesting and basically worth the price of admission here all by itself. But what elevates Nexus to the next level is Naam’s ability to portray characters with radical different opinions about the implications of both transhumanity in general and this technology specifically: Most authors would just give us “good guy transhumanists vs. evil luddites” or (vice versa) “dangerous transhumanists vs. good guy liberators of humanity”. Naam not only dodges that bullet by making both sides of the argument legitimate, he goes one step further and shows us how each side of the argument is actually a panoply of different opinions that are held for different reasons and pursued in different ways.

(This falls apart somewhat in the last twenty pages or so of the book as a couple of the characters kind of dip their toes into the moustache-twirling-villain pool, but this slight stumble at the finish line isn’t enough to detract from the rest of the accomplishment.)

I know quite a few people who follow this blog are fans of Eclipse Phase: This is going to be right up your alley. Check it out.

A FEW CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I really couldn’t be happier about participating in the Hugo Awards this year. Combing through the nominees introduced me to some truly wonderful authors who I will be making a point of paying very close attention to in the future, particularly:

• Alietta de Bodard
• Mary Robinette Kowal
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew
• Max Gladstone
• Ramez Naam

And a number of other delightful and wonderful works (like “Wakulla Springs”, “The Butcher of Khardov”, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, “The Water That Falls on Your From Nowhere”, and “Selkie Stories Are for Losers”) that I would not otherwise have had the pleasure of encountering. I can only hope these reviews will serve to point some of you to exciting and invigorating discoveries of your own.

The 2014 Hugo Awards have been awarded at Loncon, but I wanted to share one last round of reviews for the John W. Campbell Award nominees because there’s some really awesome works among them that I want to share with you.

For those unfamiliar with it, the John W. Campbell Award is given to the Best New Writer whose first work appeared within the last two years. (This means that some of the nominees are in the second year of eligibility, whereas other nominees could be nominated again next year.)

Due to time constraints, I mostly limited myself to the works provided by these authors for the Hugo Voters Packet.

5. Wesley Chu – The Lives of Tao

The Lives of Tao is a perfectly nice piece of pulp fiction.

The central conceit is that an alien spacecraft crash landed on Earth several million years ago. These immortal aliens are wraith-like and find the harsh conditions of Earth’s environment debilitating and deadly. Fortunately, they’re able to merge themselves with higher lifeforms, like humans. While merged they can’t necessarily control their host (without great difficulty), but they can communicate with the host, providing them with superhuman insight, knowledge, and experience.

What makes the book effective pulp fiction is the emotionally satisfying life-transformation experienced by the geek-insert protagonist when he’s possessed by one of these aliens: From an unmotivated blob of nerd fat, he ends up becoming a fairly competent secret agent. Feel-good moments of engaging character development are intermixed effectively with a sequence of well-paced action sequences which slowly reveal more and more of the mythos which Chu has created.

What makes the book fairly forgettable, however, is the general lack of craft displayed in its execution. (As seen, for example, in the sloppy and repetitive prose.) What hurts the book particularly is the lack of real thought given to the world being built: I’m generally skeptical of “every important person in history was actually an alien/vampire/telepath” SF stories, but Chu actually carries off the broad strokes of that conceit better than most. Where he falls down is failing to really appreciate scale and impact: You’ve got a bunch of aliens who can’t talk to each other for millions of years until humans evolve because only humans have vocal cords. (Apparently the aliens forgot how writing works.) Then they all sit around not creating technological societies for several million years because… Umm… Well, actually, I don’t know. Historically that didn’t happen because it took human culture a long time to figure out that sort of thing was possible. But when you’ve got super-intelligent aliens guiding our actions who already know how technological societies work, it feels like it should have happened a lot sooner. It also feels like the holy books in this universe (all written by alien-possessed humans) should be filled with useful advice like “boil your water” and “wash your hands”, instead of random bullshit like “the flesh of a woman during her menstrual cycle is unclean”.

If the aliens had crash-landed in, say, 1453 AD (or even 157 BC) it would have all made a lot more sense. But it feels like Chu really liked the idea of his aliens remembering the time that they inhabited dinosaurs and he just kind of latched onto that image without really thinking through any of the consequences.

In any case, I don’t want to be too hard on The Lives of Tao. I’m actually being very sincere when I say that it’s enjoyable pulp fiction. In fact, I enjoyed it enough that I’ve got the sequel (The Deaths of Tao) tucked away on my reading list. If you’re looking for some entertaining fiction, this is definitely something you should consider. It’s just that Chu is so clearly outclassed by every other nominee for this award that his placement at the bottom of the list is fairly self-evident.

Grade: D

4. Sofia Samatar – A Stranger in Olondria

I’ll be honest in saying that Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria faced an uphill slog for me because the particular type of fiction she’s aiming to create is not one that I generally find palatable. (It’s not really a specific sub-genre; it’s just the quasi-literary feel of the story.) If your mileage varies, I suspect you could easily love this book. (And clearly the mileage varied for a lot of people because Samatar won the award this year.)

I suspect this book also fared poorly with me because I had so recently read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: A Strange in Olondria is trying to accomplish a lot of the same things that Wolfe did (albeit in a classic fantasy setting instead of a science fantasy setting), but Wolfe just clearly does it better in every single possible way, whether you’re talking about quality of prose; depth of character; pacing; creativity; impact; etc.

More generally, I knew that A Stranger in Olondria had problems when I saw that I was 20% of the way through the book and nothing had happened: The author had guided us through a paint-by-numbers coming-of-age story of a young boy who really loves books (yawn!), but nothing had actually happened in the course of that story.  It was just generic events being reported generically. I decided that I would give the book until 25% completion to actually do something (a luxury I almost certainly would not have given it if not for the award nomination), and it just barely managed to accomplish that by launching the actual plot of the book just before hitting that mark: The character is possessed by a ghost and has to figure out how to get rid of it.

At this point there’s a short flurry of activity and then… nothing happens again. For a very long time. There’s another lengthy gap (this time to the 50% mark) and then there’s another flurry of activity and then… Yeah. The gaps between points of interest shorten and eventually the last tenth or so of the book manages to get some momentum going. But up until that point reading the book felt like watching a drunk lurch somewhat haphazardly down the street.

Grade: C+

3. Benjanun Sriduangkaew – Stories of the Hegemony

Ranking the top 3 positions on my ballot for the John W. Campbell Award was actually quite difficult for me. Sriduangkaew dropped to the third position primarily because she’s in her first year of eligibility, whereas the other two authors were in their final year of eligibility. I suspect she’s likely to get nominated again next year with a more robust body of work.

Sriduangkaew’s work to date has primarily orbited a sequence of stories set in or around the Hegemony, a future society in which humanity’s mind has become so wired up and interconnected that the government is able to retroactively edit not only the records of society but also the memories of society. (If that sounds dystopic to you, that’s because it is.) What makes these stories particularly compelling is that Sriduangkaew uses the wide canopy of the Hegemony to tell a vast variety of stories: A souped up secret agent who can edit memories to insert herself into deep cover situations. A common person struggling to survive. A scientist enmeshed in the maintenance of the system. A resistance fighter trying to turn the empire’s system against itself. Interesting characters and fascinating ideas mix freely with beautiful imagery to create captivating stories.

As some small indication of her quality, I will note that Sriduangkaew was the only Hugo-nominated author I read whose other work I immediately sought out and read. I heartily suggest you do the same. Conveniently, many of her stories can be found on (or linked from) her website. For her Hegemony stories specifically, you can check out (in the order I recommend reading them):

• “Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade”
• “The Bees Her Heart, The Hive Her Belly”
• “Annex”

Also available are:

• “When We Harvested the Nacre-Rice” (in Solaris Rising 3)
• “Elision” (in La Femme)

Go to Part 2