Reading Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was a fairly fascinating experience. Taken on its own merits, the novel is a perfectly acceptable piece of light fluffery. On the other hand, the Percy Jackson series is clearly a calculated effort to cash-in on the success of Harry Potter, and reading the novel from that point of view gives a great deal of insight into not only Riordan’s creative process, but also the elements that made Rowling’s work so successful.

Basically, Riordan seeks to invert the structure of Harry Potter in every part. Thus, Potter’s magical school becomes Jackson’s magical summer camp. Potter hates his mundane home life, so Jackson loves his. The friendly headmaster Dumbledore becomes the hostile camp master Dionysus. And so forth.

You can also see this inversion being carried out on the larger structural level of the plot: Potter generally stays at his school and adventure must seek him out. Jackson, on the other hand, must venture forth on grand quests.

In general, this model of wholesale inversion is probably more effective at keeping the series fresh than if Riordan had decided to simply ape Rowling. But once you’ve spotted the trick, it becomes depressingly predictable. It also creates deeper problems for Riordan.

For example, one of the really beautiful things about Hogwarts was the irony of a kid who wanted to go to school. It’s an inversion of the natural order, and thus – on a subtle yet fundamental level – reinforces the otherworldliness of Rowling’s milieu. But a kid who hates school and wants to go to a summer camp? It’s bland vanilla even before you get to the random grab-bag of camp activities that make Quidditch look like a reasonable sporting event. (Riordan tends to tell rather than show. He wants the summer camp to be really cool, but he never spends the narrative time there necessary to invest the reader as deeply as Percy himself is apparently vested.)

The Lightning Thief also calls attention to another aspect of Harry Potter that sets it apart from the great bulk of fantasy fiction: Harry Potter is utterly humble in his origins. He is not born with any special powers. The only prophecy which applies to him is essentially exhausted before he hits his first birthday. Everything we see him accomplish, he accomplishes through hard work, determination, study, and the assistance of friends well-earned. (In this he shares much in common with Bilbo and Frodo.)

Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is Born Awesome. He’s the son of one of the most powerful gods, and so he’s inherently more powerful than everyone else around him. Ta da! And whereas Potter has his one small advantage stripped from him midway through the series, Jackson simply continues to accumulate power through divine fiat. We never see him work for anything. Or earn anything. At most he occasionally digs deep to find his hero genes and then unleashes the raw potential of his authorially-granted I’m So Special status.

Ultimately, the Percy Jackson series is to Harry Potter what The Sword of Shannara is to The Lord of the Rings: Riordan mugged Rowling in a dark alley, rifled her pockets, and shuffled the stuff he found into a slightly different order while scraping off the serial numbers. In the process quite a bit of the original’s charm and depth has been lost, which is perhaps only to be expected when you’re dealing with a knock-off.

On the other hand, Riordan’s writing, despite its shortcomings, is better than early Terry Brooks. And he also finds his own unique sense of grandeur and mystery (whereas Brooks only managed to turn everything he touched to mediocrity in The Sword of Shannara). So while the comparison may be apt, it is not entirely fair.

So while I can’t strongly recommend The Lightning Thief, I also wouldn’t dissuade you from it. It’s a bit of light fun, and the series as a whole tends to improve as it runs its course.

GRADE: C

Rick Riordan
Published: 2005
Publisher: Hyperion
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 1423139494X
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So I watched the first few episodes of The Cape on Hulu. The show has some half decent pulp coolness going for it, but the scripts suck. A lot.

CHESS: “I’m going to frame you for being Chess and then kill you! The world will think Chess is dead and my public persona will take the credit for eliminating his threat!”

Clever plan. Explain to me why Chess immediately resumes the Chess identity?

Then we have the super-secretive Orwell who insists that no one can be allowed to see her face… and yet she is constantly going out into the field and having public chats with the Cape.

CAIN: “I am a member of a secret order of assassins so totally secret that it’s a really big deal that our existence has just now been confirmed with completely circumstantial evidence! Our modus operandi? Well, we have massive identifying tattoos on our forearms and we also leave calling cards at all of our assassinations.”

Winner of the Least Secretive Secret Society Award for three years running.

NEWS REPORTER: “Mr. Portman is the only city councilor willing to deny the Big Bad Evil Corporation control over the city’s prisons! The vote is tomorrow!”

Okay, well, I guess if he’s the only vote against it then ARC doesn’t have much to worry about… So why is ARC trying to assassinate him?

MR. PORTMAN: “I’ve just been told that Mr. Fleming is trying to kill me with poison. I think I’ll go have dinner with him… At the restaurant that he owns…”

Really? Really?

TEACHER: “Here’s a new student. His last name is Faraday.”

KIDS: “Faraday? That’s the same last name as a criminal who was killed several weeks ago! This must be his kid!”

Wow… That’s quite the leap of logic there. I mean, it’s true. But that doesn’t make it any more absurd for the kids to immediately make that association. It’s as if some kid in the Marvel universe had the last name “Richards” and everyone assumed he must be the fifth member of the Fantastic Four.

There’s quite a bit of low-level nonsense in the dialogue, too.

As a roleplaying game, 4th Edition sure makes a great boardgame.

… Zing!

But in all seriousness, I’ve been looking forward to getting my grubby paws on a copy of the new Castle Ravenloft game for awhile now. For the better part of two decades now, I’ve been looking for a boardgame that could be played when you were in the mood for a little dungeon-crawling but didn’t have anyone to DM.

(Over the years I’ve dabbled with dungeon-crawling boardgames that require DMs, but I’ve pretty much sworn off them at this point. Descent is a decent game, for example, but I can’t imagine a scenario when I would ever play it: Since it requires a DM, I might as well just grab my copy of Dungeons & Dragons off the shelf. The full-fledged RPG is a richer and more rewarding experience in almost every way, and with the speed of OD&D character creation you can actually get the game set-up and start playing much quicker, too.)

Most recently, Munchkin Quest looked like it might fill that slot for me. It had some pacing issues, but after fixing those problems the game saw a couple months of intense use. But after that, the game started collecitng dust: The competitive aspect meant it still wasn’t quite scratching that dungeon-crawling itch. And it was too long (3-5 hours) given the relative shallowness of its gameplay. Way too many sessions ended with all of us wishing that the game would just end already.

Castle Ravenloft is pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum: The prepackaged adventure scenarios all feel lightning fast and can easily be completed in 60 minutes or less. I’ve played it more than a dozen times already (having gotten it only a week ago). The real test, of course, will be whether or not the game endures after the first flush of excitement. But for the moment I wanted to talk about some of my first impressions.

RANDOM DUNGEON, BUT SHALLOW EXPLORATION

TACTICS, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW THEM

Although Castle Ravenloft offers a setup superficially similar to 4th Edition, this can actually be quite deceptive. As a result, I’ve seen quite a few reviews complain that Castle Ravenloft doesn’t have any tactical depth.

This is not, strictly speaking, true: Castle Ravenloft does have tactical depth; it’s just a tactical depth that looks absolutely nothing like 4th Edition’s tactics.

The primary tactical crux of Castle Ravenloft lies in the fact that heroes move by spaces but monsters by tile. (For example, a typical hero might move 5 spaces on their turn. A typical monster, on the other hand, will move 1 or 2 tiles.) Thus, the core tactics of the game revolve around managing the placement of monsters and heroes around the tile borders.

These basic tactics are complicated by the necessity to manage the monster’s control sequences; the panoply of variable hero abilities; and the random crises generated by a fair-sized chunk of the game’s encounter cards.

(The game may also suffer in the opinion of some because it’s very easy to brute-force your way through the early, introductory scenarios. It’s thus possible to completely ignore the tactics and strategy of the game and still pull out early victories, leading one to the false conclusion that the game has no strategy. In that respect it’s kind of the inverse of Settlers of Catan — a game which you think has a strategy when you first start playing it and then eventually realize is dominated completely by dumb luck.)

HORRIFIC RULEBOOK

The Castle Ravenloft rulebook is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever read. It’s poorly organized, fails to explain basic terminology, establishes other terminology which it then proceeds to use inconsistently, and then compounds all of these problems with an atrocious (lack of) organization. And given the relative simplicity of the rules, the experience of the designers, and the fact that the game is built on the back of a fairly well-established ruleset… well, it’s completely inexcusable.

It’s also disappointing that WotC failed to leverage their existing stock of high quality fantasy art to spice up the cards. The lack is particularly felt, in my opinion, when it comes to the treasure cards.

MONSTERS & SCENARIOS

The argument could certainly be made that it’s worth buying the game just for the 42 miniatures that come with it. I don’t think I’d disagree: Amazon is selling the game for $50 right now, so the price per mini comes out to about $1.20. Since that includes a Huge Dracolich, I’m pretty happy with it. (And that’s ignoring the general utility of the interlocking dungeon tiles.)

Laying that aside, I do wish the game had a bit more variety when it came to monsters. There are basically ten varieties of “grunt” in the game (zombie, skeleton, blazing skeleton, wraith, ghoul, wolf, kobold, spider, rat swarm, gargoyle) and you’ll see a lot of them all. While the varied scenarios are keeping much of the game fresh for me right now, the monsters have all become rather hum-drum.

Fortunately, this is an aspect of the game which is surprisingly easy to customize. Although game balance probably requires that you keep 10 different types of creature for each adventure, swapping them out for equally challenging monsters isn’t a problem. There’s a ton of fan-created monsters already available, and there are cheap D&D mini singles available all over the place.

Speaking of scenarios, the game comes with 12 (including two solo scenarios) and 2 more have been released through Wizard’s website. The scenarios are varied (often completely changing your strategic approach to the game) and have been easily supporting multiple play-thrus for me. For example, in this scenario:

The heroes start play having been randomly teleported to different corners of the dungeon. You have to reunite with each other and shut down a demonic summoning while the villain of the piece continues to assault the heroes with teleportetic assaults.

(In the image above you can see where we’ve set off an Alarm trap — which summons additional monsters each round — in a section of the dungeon we were subsequently teleported out of. One of the (blue) heroes has been abandoned in a dead end corridor. And both of the heroes are dreading the possibility that the villain is going to teleport them back up to where all those monsters are waiting to devour them.)

But I do wish there were more of them. When I compare the relatively anemic number of scenarios offered by Castle Ravenloft to the dozens of scenarios offered by Betrayal at House on the Hill (another game I received this Christmas which features variable scenarios of roughly equivalent complexity), I do feel this was an opportunity missed by the designers.

FINAL WORD (FOR NOW)

Castle Ravenloft is fun.

I’m enjoying it a lot, and I keep roping in more and more people who all seem to agree.

It’s not perfect, but its only egregious flaw (the atrocious rulebook) is relatively easy to overcome.

Having just reviewed my early thoughts on Munchkin Quest, I realize that initial success may not translate into a permanent or even long-term success. But as I write this I’ve already gotten more than a dozen plays out of the game, and I’ve only touched half the scenarios it shipped with. A couple scenarios have already seen 4+ plays. Even if that’s where the game tops out, I’ll still get 40+ plays out of it. That’s pretty good compared to most of the games I own.

Go to Castle Ravenloft: Rulebook Woes

Studying the lost authors of early fantasy and science fiction is often a humbling lesson in the fickleness of fate. Authors who were just as talented and creative as Robert E. Howard, Isaac Asimov, H.P. Lovecraft, or Ray Bradbury have been largely forgotten by later generations. Nor can their modern anonymity be explained due to a lack of influence or popularity — in many cases they were more influential and popular during their publishing careers than contemporaries who remain well-known today.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in the mid ’90s when Kurt Busiek pointed me towards Mutant, a collection of stories written by Henry Kuttner that had played a major influence in the creation of the X-Men by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Kuttner, I discovered, had influenced an entire generation of science fiction authors. In 1946, at the height of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, fans were asked to choose between Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. Van Vogt, and a dozen others to name one of them as the World’s Best SF Author. They chose Kuttner. Kuttner married C.L. Moore, who had already become known as the First Lady of Science Fiction. The two of them writing together created an amazing corpus of work at such an incomprehensible pace that it required more than twenty pseudonyms to publish it all.

Kuttner died in 1958. Moore retired form writing. And for half a century their works slowly faded into obscurity. Discovering these lost jewels of speculative fiction (including Fury, which remains one of my Top 10 Science Fiction Novels of all-time) was a real wake-up call.

In the past 10 years or so the information-deluge of the Internet coupled with global access to catalogs of used books and small press collections have started to return many of these Lost Authors to the light. Among them is Clark Ashton Smith.

I originally encountered Smith’s writing about a decade ago when I found a collection of his Zothique stories (set on the last continent of a dying Earth). These stories made me want to read more, but it proved devilishly difficult to find more of Smith’s writing in print. (At reasonable prices, anyway.)

So when I heard several years ago that Night Shade Books was planning to publish a five volume series collecting all of his stories, I immediately signed up for a subscription. Unfortunately, the series has proven to be absurdly lethargic in the pace of its releases. In fact, it has yet to be completed (although there is great hope that the last volume will appear later this year).

This has not prevented me, however, from sitting down recently to enjoy Volume 1: The End of the Story.

The series presents Smith’s writing in the chronological order of its composition, starting in 1925 with “The Abominations of Yondo”. This was a story that I had read before, but had no idea that it was Smith’s first stab at speculative fiction. It is a remarkable freshmen work, effortlessly conjuring forth an alien and fantastical environment of an utterly unearthly character. This, in fact, becomes Smith’s defining strength as an author. The alien planets, alternate universes, and ancient epochs in which he sets his stories are not merely distant in time or space; they are utterly alien in their character.

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.

“… the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns.” Could anyone mistake such a place as merely being the analog of some Earthly wasteland?

The strength of “The Abominations of Yondo” aside, however, Smith’s talent did not spring forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus. And this volume, containing as it does Smith’s earliest efforts, has a fair share of formulaic work: “The Ninth Skeleton”, “Phantoms of the Fire”, and “The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake”, for example, are paint-by-number horror “shockers”. “The Last Incantation” and “A Night in Malneant” are thin and predictable morality tales.

But even in these weaker tales there is a vividness of description and a poetic quality of verse which raises them, however slightly, above similar fare. (With the exception of “Phantoms of Fire” which is simply a bad story by any accounting.) The dead streets of Malneant, in particular, continue to echo through the chambers of my mind many long nights after I finished the tale.

There are, similarly, far too many tales starring self-inserted writers of pulp fiction and poverty-stricken poets. But here, again, Smith manages to use this weak conceit to good effect from time to time. For example, “The Monster of the Prophecy” is the tale of a struggling, poverty-stricken poet who is plucked off the street by an alien visitor from a distant planet. Not only does the poet’s writing become famous, but he himself is given the opportunity to adventure among the stars. In synopsis, the tale sounds like ripe fodder for a Mary Sue. But, in practice, Smith sidesteps the abyss and produces a memorable (if somewhat flawed) tale.

If Smith suffers from a consistent flaw throughout this volume, it is the weakness of his plots and the forgettable quality of his characters. In some ways, however, this flaw stands in complement to his strengths: His tales often read as travelogues of the bizarre, featuring cipherous everymen who serve as the readers’ empty avatars as they wander through the alien vistas.

In many ways, the stories reveal Smith’s true passion as a poet: Many read like tone poems, and I found the book most enjoyable when I chose to sample its contents instead of trying to barge from one tale to the next from front cover to back.

I am curious to see, as I continue to work my way through Smith’s oeuvre, whether his poetic mastery of language and his mind-blowing descriptions of fantastical landscapes will become wedded to plots of substance and characters that you can care about.

On the other hand, I feel this review will be read as more negative than it perhaps should be. In addition to “The Abominations of Yondo” and “The Monster of the Prophecy”, this collection also contains “The Venus of Azombeii” (in which the characters do explode off of the page with a surprising passion), “Thirteen Phantasms” (in which a morality tale is twisted and turned into something unpredictable and beautiful and special), “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (which could be described as capturing all the vigor and spirit of Howard’s Conan stories and wedding it to Smith’s fantastical vision, except for the fact that it was written three years before Conan appeared), “The Metamorphosis of the World” (which, although flawed in parts, is majestical in its scope), “Marooned in Andromeda” (an excellent entry in the travelogue category), and “The Immeasurable Horror” (featuring one of the most memorable depictions of the jungles of space opera Venus). And these are all excellent tales which anyone might be well-advised to read.

Perhaps more importantly, Smith’s eye for the fantastic is utterly unique. The influence of his writing has been widely felt, but if you haven’t read his own work, then you’ve never read anything quite like Clark Ashton Smith.

GRADE: B+

Clark Ashton Smith
Published: 2007
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Cover Price: $25.00
ISBN: 1597800287
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The Elfish Gene is the story of a sad, pathetic, socially maladjusted boy who suffered from borderline delusions in an effort to escape his sad, pathetic existence. He fell in with a group of assholes and chose to continue hanging out with that group of assholes even when it meant becoming an asshole himself and pissing over the people who were actually his friends. In the process, he grew up to be a sad, pathetic, socially maladjusted adult.

Between those two points on his lifeline, he played Dungeons & Dragons. Ergo, it’s only natural for him to conclude that D&D retroactively caused him to be a sad, pathetic, and socially maladjusted person.

He’d also like you to believe that he got over being an asshole. But even in the controlled narrative of his own book he can’t hide the fact that he spends a great deal of time considering himself “superior” to wide swaths of people. For example, consider his thesis that “fatties are failures”. Or the fact that he considers the moment that he became a responsible adult to be the moment in which he left an injured child in the middle of a park so that he could try to hook up with a cute girl.

And not just any injured child: A child he had actually injured himself.

(I wish I was making that up.)

To the book’s credit, most of Barrowcliffe’s anecdotes regarding a childhood spent playing D&D and other roleplaying games are charming, resonant, and well-written. His struggle to differentiate between delusion and reality is actually quit harrowing (and great material for a memoir). I can even sympathize that, for a man like Barrowcliffe who has difficulty differentiating fantasy from reality on an everyday basis, D&D might be a dangerous addiction that would feed into his inherent predilection for delusion.

The problem I have with Barrowcliffe, however, is that he claims his personal bad experiences to be universal and then uses that claim as a bludgeon to denigrate gamers in general. (Which is, of course, nothing more than Barrowcliffe’s continued proclivity to be an asshole rearing its ugly head.) His entire book is written around the thesis that “D&D makes you a bad person and you should run away from it as fast as you can”. (Which he literally does at the book’s conclusion: “I could hear a noise I couldn’t place. Then I looked down and realized it was coming from my feet; I was running. Something in my subconscious was rushing me back to my wife, the dog, the TV, away from the lands of fantasy and towards reality, the place I can now call home.”)

It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that I would consider this thesis to be grotesquely repulsive and offensive. In no small part because there’s another story of D&D to be told: In my life, D&D was the social venue in which I learned how to interact with fellow human beings in a mature fashion. D&D encouraged my development in both verbal and mathematical skills. D&D is the foundation of the passions which now shape my professional careers. And there are a lot of people like me. People who didn’t suffer from delusional mental instability when they came to the game.

Barrowcliffe writes, “Gary Gygax once pointed out that to talk about a ‘winner’ in D&D is like talking about a winner in real life. If I had to sum D&D up that would be how I’d do it — a game with no winners but lots of losers.” It is perhaps notable that Barrowcliffe feels that real life is populated by losers (there’s his asshole tendency again), but I find it more notable that his summary is the exact inverse of mine. In my world, there are no losers in a roleplaying game. Only winners.

Mark Barrowcliffe is an alcoholic who wrote a book concluding that everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. He is no doubt baffled that wine connouisseurs aren’t amused with the broad brush he’s painted them with.

GRADE: F

Mark Barrowcliffe
Published: 2009
Publisher: Soho Press
Cover Price: $14.00
ISBN: 1569476012
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