I recently became aware of the Sarajevo Roses: Deep scars in the concrete of Sarajevo created by the thousands of mortar rounds fired there during the intense urban warfare of the Bosnian War. Where these explosions resulted in casualties, the scars have been filled with a red resin.

I was touched by the sad, serene beauty of these enduring monuments.

But since I’m the creator of fantasy worlds, my mind was also inspired. Taking the familiar and twisting it to the fantastic is nice. Taking something culturally unfamiliar and then, on top of that, giving it an extra twist of fantasy can often result in some really memorable touchstones.

The Sarajevo Roses exist as both an artifact and a memorial of a specific, historic event. More importantly they’re an unintended side effect that, to my American eyes, testifies that something outside of my normal experience happened in this place. What sort of fantastical equivalents could we hypothesize?

Direct fantasy parallels, for example, aren’t too hard to conjure up: The long, blackened scars in the fields around a village where the blight-breath of an elder dragon prevent anything from growing. The effervescent green sands driven into the eastern walls of an adobe village by the sandstorm thrust up by the execution of the Seven Gods. And so forth.

Going a bit further afield, what examples of fantastical side-effects could we postulate from non-destructive events? Are there oil slicks in the street from the fad for armor golems among the city’s mages? Are the skies above the city filled with long twists of multi-colored thread because magic carpets have a tendency to unravel? (And once a year is there a Skein Day when the magical thread is gathered for some purpose either practical or festive?) Does the casting of a time stop spell leave little temporal schisms?

I saw Conan the Barbarian a couple nights ago. Quick thoughts:

1. It’s a much better movie than its box office.
2. In fact, I’m comfortable saying that I think it’s a better movie than the Schwarznegger version from ’82.
3. It is not, however, a great movie. It may not even be a good one. But it’s not a bad one, either. It’s a fun flick: It doesn’t insult your intelligence. The plot makes sense. The action sequences are dynamic. The script doesn’t carry much of the load, but it gets out of the way and lets the actors carry the load for making us care about the characters and the SFX guys carry the load for getting us immersed into the world.
4. The biggest failing of the movie is the conclusion. It falls very flat and concentrates a lot of problems that were scattered throughout the rest of the film.
5. It’s literally wall-to-wall action. It’s pretty much ACTION-breath-ACTION-breath-ACTION-breath-ACTION for the duration. I’d like to say that the movie would be better if it was 10 minutes longer and took a minute or two to catch its breath, but that would really only be true if they brought somebody in to punch up the dialogue.
6. Momoa is a fantastic Conan.

The film has also forced me to revise my understanding of effective fight choreography. I used to break it down into basically two parts:

First, the choreography itself. Is it exciting? Clever? Compelling? Well-paced? The whole nine yards. Plenty of films, of course, don’t clear this basic hurdle.

Second, how the choreography is filmed. Effective cinematography will focus your attention, showcasing and even improving the choreography. But this is where a lot of films have recently been falling down: They get too tight on the action. They cut too rapidly between shots. And the result is that, regardless of how effective the choreography is, you cant see it. It’s as if someone filmed a drama by pumping up the soundtrack so that you can’t hear large chunks of the dialogue while panning away from the actor’s faces. Or like watching ballet in a strobe light performed behind a wall with some random holes punched in it.

Conan the Barbarian, however, manages to achieve both of these elements and yet still frequently fail. It’s forced me to add:

Three, conveying the geography of the scene.

This may really be just a subset of how the choreography is filmed. But I was really struck in Conan by how often I was completely enthralled by the actual, specific choreography of a given fight… only to be confused by how two simultaneous fights were relating to each other; or where the fight was in relationship to the person Conan was trying to save; and so forth.

My current layout project is taking much longer than I anticipated. (It always does.) I should have some more recycled material posted to cover the next few days and then hopefully it will be done.

For today, I’m going to just briefly reflect on just how powerful and effective re-skinning can be. It’s an important part of the DM’s toolkit. And although it’s often talked about in terms of saving prep time, I think it’s arguably more important that re-skinning can so trivially take something familiar and recast it as something mysterious, enigmatic, and evocative.

Although re-skinning has become something of a hot fad over the past couple of years, I first encountered it way back in 1990 when I read an article in Dragon Magazine that dealt with re-skinning spells. (Magic missiles are great for this: You can describe them as pretty much anything.) I think it was issue #162, which would have been my very first issue, but I won’t swear to it and I’m away from my Dragon collection at the moment.

What brought this particularly to mind today was a recent re-skinning I did in my Ptolus campaign:

The creature rears up, plunging its clawed hand into its own chest. It rips out a gob of flesh and hurls it down the length of the chamber. It strikes the wall and spatters. Small globules of white, turgid flesh writhe and bound up into blasphemous creatures of lumbering, squelching flesh…

That’s an osyluth summoning 2d10 lemures. My players were so distressed by this unfamiliar ability that I actually had difficulty finishing the description due to the outcries emanating from the table.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got for today. More tomorrow. And lots more in the near future. (I hope.)

Collected from the web: There are over 200 bodies on Mt. Everest.

Because it is so difficult (if not impossible) to retrieve those bodies, they are simply left in situ. Grisly, but fascinating monuments to those who have attempted the most famous of climbs.

(For the record, if this were to be the way I died, I would actually prefer to have my body left there and remembered. A fleeting touch of immortality.)

What’s interesting is that many of these bodies have become actual landmarks. Some have earned nicknames. They have become part of the mountain and part of the experience of climbing the mountain.

Turning this to our most prevalent topic here at the Alexandrian: When I’m DMing, because I’m forgetful, corpses will frequently end up disappearing as if they were phasing out from a CRPG. This is not a deliberate choice on my part; quite the opposite, in fact. When I remember to account for corpses, some great gaming experiences have come from it: Whether it’s the heads of formers PCs on pikes outside the Caverns of Thracia. Or the murder investigation launched when the PCs irreverently left corpses laying in an alley. Or the mystery posed by disappearing corpses in the labyrinth. Or the sinking, near-poisonous miasma which resulted from the PCs leaving a bloody charnel house of corpses to molder and rot.

At an open game table, of course, this sort of thing will crop up more frequently. (Where the heck did that corpse of a necromancer come from?) But even without an open game table, you can consciously choose to have the environment evolve when the PCs aren’t looking; or evolve as a result of the actions the PCs have taken (or not taken). The typical milieu of a D&D campaign is strewn with corpses. Don’t forget about them.

Work on the Alexandrian has been light of late because I’ve been toiling to wrap up a major project.

The big hitch-up at the moment has been layout. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that Windows 7 won’t run the version of Quark I own, which means I needed to upgrade to a new layout program. After examining the available options, I decided to switch to Adobe inDesign.

While in many ways I’m glad I’ve made the switch, the fact that I’m basically needing to relearn layout from the ground up is definitely complicating the completion of this project. (Which is already far behind schedule.) Things are just similar enough to be confusing. It’s easy to see why lots of people and organizations choose to stick with what they know because it’s what they know.

But if all goes well, I should have a major announcement coming down the pike in the next few days. And starting later today I’ll be posting some of my older professional work to fill the gap.