The DWJ Project: Unexpected Magic

Last of the collections, both in terms of my (totally random) reading order, and publication date. It's also the largest, and contains a number of stories not found in the others; on the other hand, it reprints a lot of the weakest stories from Warlock at the Wheel, and I have no idea why.

Things that are new:

"The Girl Jones" -- non-fantasy story about a girl who ends up looking after a bunch of younger children, and screws it up in a way that ensures nobody will ask her to do that again. Not much to this one, and I'm really not sure why it was chosen to open the collection.

"The Green Stone" -- sort of proto-Derkholm, from the perspective of the "recording cleric" for a Quest that's about to begin. Unfortunately, because the cleric doesn't know much about what's going on, the plot kind of comes out of nowhere, and doesn't get fleshed out very well.

"The Fat Wizard" -- an iteration of the "unpleasant person gets their just desserts" trope. Better-written than most of the iterations in Warlock at the Wheel or Stopping for a Spell, but still not all that great, and (as the title suggests) it's likely to bother people offended by her treatment of weight issues.

"Little Dot" -- this, however, is fabulous. (And I don't just say that because it involves cats.) I want, as I usually do, more background for the threat, but this story excellently displays one of Jones' great talents, which is characterization. Henry's six cats -- sorry, let me correct that; the six cats that own Henry -- all have highly vivid personalities, from the brave and resourceful Dot to the gorgeous and deeply stupid Madame Dalrymple. Watching them go to town on the woman who invades Henry's house is a thing of horrifying beauty. :-)

The main reason to own this book, though, is for Everard's Ride, which was published by NESFA Press in 1995, but is almost impossible to find for a reasonable price.

The thing that fascinates me about it that to the best of my knowledge, it's actually the earliest thing of Jones' that has been published. Changeover came out in 1970, but the publication notes at the end of this collection say that Everard's Ride was written in 1966. fjm said in the comments on Witch's Business that her first couple of novels were meddled with by editorial influence, and reading this makes that quite apparent. Granted, I don't know how much (if at all) Jones revised Everard's Ride before its publication, but this feels far more like her style than her first couple of published fantasy novels do.

And there's enough meat to it that I need a spoiler-cut.

( Read more... )

Looking back over the collections, it turns out you can get almost all of her short fiction if you buy this and Mixed Magics. The stories in Stopping for a Spell aren't worth it, Warlock at the Wheel and Believing Is Seeing are all duplicated in one or the other of these two, and Minor Arcana has only The True State of Affairs that isn't included elsewhere. So if you want to be more efficient about this than I've been, that's how to do it. <g>

(Me, what I really want is a leaner, meaner version of this book to go with Mixed Magics: something with "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight," "Little Dot," "Enna Hittims," "What the Cat Told Me," "The Girl Who Loved the Sun," and then both Everard's Ride and The True State of Affairs, if you want to go ahead and have it be a big collection. Maybe a couple more, like "Nad and Dan adn Quaffy," that I'm not so fond of, but other readers are. Anyway, just her good work, and not the weaker stuff.)

Three books left: her first, her last, and the one that's half-autobiography. And -- crap, I meant to check this sooner -- a couple of short stories NOT in the collections I discussed above. Ack! Must get those, stat!

homebrew system for Dragon Age

Tossing this out there for the gaming geeks to play with: I think you could run a Dragon Age tabletop using the Pathfinder system.

(I know there's a DA-specific system out there. I haven't heard very good things about it, and particularly object to the way each book only covers five levels, requiring you to buy four books to have a "complete" game. True, Scion did something similar -- but they also did a remarkably good job of putting other worthwhile content in all of their books. Very few companies pull that off.)

I figure that, at its core, you make warriors into fighters, rogues into . . . uh, rogues, and mages into sorcerers. A spells-per-day system is rather different from the mana-based system of the video game, but on the other hand, the video game is wall-to-wall combat, which a tabletop game wouldn't be. (And this opens up the potential for mages to have spells useful for any purpose other than nuking people. Seriously, one of the great flaws in DA worldbuilding is that as near as I can tell, mages are only good at killing and destruction -- there's no peacetime use for their magic, with the lone exception of healing, that would allow them to be anything other than a threat to society. And how often do you see them out in public, healing people?)

The nice thing about Pathfinder is its (relative) adaptability: if somebody wants to play a Dalish hunter, say, they could play a skirmisher -- a ranger without the spellcasting abilities. You can customize the differences between a Dalish Keeper and a Circle mage by using the sorcerer mechanics, but letting them pick from different spell lists (like druid and cleric), and also by picking different bloodlines. You can toss in some Traits to vary things a bit more, too. And then specializations you model with prestige classes: borrow the barbarian rage mechanic for berserkers, maybe some paladin mechanics for templars, cook up something for blood mages, and so on.

You'd have to tack on a few additional rules, like something to handle demonic possession or action in the Fade. But I think this would strike a decent balance between accuracy and simplicity: it comes vaguely close to the feel of the actual game (with level-based advancement, feats as talent equivalents, etc), while not requiring vast amounts of untested modding to make work. (I originally thought of modding it a lot further -- replace Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom with Magic, Cunning, and Willpower; make d20-style mechanics for the talents in the game -- but that rapidly became a nightmare of effort.)

I haven't played Pathfinder very much yet, though, so I don't know if there are improvements or problems I ought to think about. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?