Tag: books

An excerpt from the definitive Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson. Now in hardcover too.

Now… the thief class takes a lot of flak in spite of the enduring appeal of characters like Robin Hood and Bilbo Baggins. Yet not only was it a latecomer that wasn’t even in the original three “little brown books” that made up the original “White Box” rule set, but its system of skills and abilities was seen as taking away from actions that everyone tended to try during the earliest game sessions.2 For instance, fighting-men might take a stab at being stealthy by removing their armor and then scouting ahead for the party. When the thief class came along with an explicit chance to “move silently,” a lot of people leaped to the conclusion the other classes couldn’t attempt such a thing anymore. This made for some hard feelings, and fixing the design issues implied by this class’s existence is such a hassle that maybe it’s best to just drop it altogether!

In the same vein, the cleric class comes in for a good deal of grief in spite of the fact that it was one of the original three classes in the game. In more recent editions, people don’t mind having one in the party, but they can’t always find someone willing to play one. (Few people want to be relegated to the role of a glorified medic; they want to get out front and do stuff, not just play a support role!) But really, the original class is downright odd. They can’t use edged weapons for some reason, and they have a bizarre adaption of the Vancian magic system with the effects drawn largely from biblical accounts. They’re just weird, and the archetype doesn’t turn up in fantasy literature in anywhere near the same frequency as the other classes. For a lot of people, the cleric is the obvious choice for the odd man out.

Reading Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, however, it quickly becomes apparent that, if you’re going to be faithful to the game’s medieval roots, then the two core classes would have to be the fighting-man and the cleric—a stark difference from Steve Jackson’s The Fantasy Trip. This just isn’t in line with how most people view the game though. This is ironic given that the earliest iterations of what would become Dungeons & Dragons were actually a fantasy supplement to the medieval miniatures rule set Chainmail. It was an explicit goal of those rules to inspire people to gain a greater familiarity with the actual history of the Middle Ages.3 This aspect of the hobby gradually faded into obscurity when fantasy gaming took on a life of its own. Of course, the fewer medieval elements you incorporate into your game setting, the less sense the cleric is going to make.

Fans of the oft-maligned class will be gratified to discover that The High Crusade is actually narrated by a cleric. Purists, on the other hand, will be disappointed to see that he wields a battleaxe during the first chapter. At first glance, it’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that this title made Gary Gygax’s “Appendix N” book list because of its likely part in inspiring the game’s tendency to fuse science-fiction and fantasy elements together. Indeed, the cover looks like something straight out of “Expedition to Barrier Peaks.” But Poul Anderson has done much more than provide an unusual theme for a dungeon adventure. He’s turned the standard alien invasion on its head by having the humans thwart the would-be oppressors on first contact. An alien scout vessel is quickly overrun… by medieval Englishmen! When they get their hands on high-tech weaponry and figure out what they can do with it, their first thought is to gather up the entire village, board the spacecraft, and take an extended vacation that would include invading France and taking back the Holy Land!

When the narrator is tasked with teaching the sole surviving alien Latin so that they can force him to explain how to properly “sail” the ship, hilarity ensues:

“You brought this on yourself,” I told him. “You should have known better than to make an unprovoked attack on Christians.” “What are Christians?” he asked. Dumbfounded, I thought he must be feigning ignorance. As a test, I led him through the Paternoster. He did not go up in smoke, which puzzled me. “I think I understand,” he said. “You refer to some primitive tribal pantheon.” “It is no such heathen thing!” I said indignantly. I started to explain the Trinity to him, but had scarcely gotten to transubstantiation when he waved an impatient blue hand. It was much like a human hand otherwise, save for the thick, sharp nails. “No matter,” he said, “Are all Christians as ferocious as your people?” “You would have had better luck with the French,” I admitted. “Your misfortune was landing among Englishmen.”

This is some seriously funny stuff, very nearly in the same vein as the best material of Douglas Adams. The fact that it is a straightforward science-fiction story with realistic medieval characters only makes it funnier. While one might expect this sort of tongue-in-cheek delivery to get tiresome after a while, the plot moves along quickly enough that it gradually fades into the background. The Englishmen are soon (and inadvertently) deep in the process of taking over the alien empire that would have otherwise subjugated humanity. And while the reader naturally identifies with the humans as he reads, it gradually becomes clear that there is an additional angle to Poul Anderson’s handiwork:

Actually, the Wersgor domain was like nothing at home. Most wealthy, important persons dwelt on their vast estates with a retinue of blueface hirelings. They communicated on the far-speaker and visited in swift aircraft of spaceships. Then there were other classes I have mentioned elsewhere, such as warriors, merchants, and politicians. But no one was born to his place in life. Under the law, all were equal, all free to strive as best they might for money or position. Indeed, they had even abandoned the idea of families. Each Wersgor lacked a surname, being identified by a number instead in a central registry. Male and female seldom lived together more than a few years. Children were sent at an early age to schools, where they dwelt until mature, for their parents oftener thought them an encumbrance than a blessing. Yet this realm, in theory a republic of freemen, was in practice a worse tyranny than mankind has known, even in Nero’s infamous day. The Wersgorix had no special affection for their birthplace; they acknowledged no immediate ties of kinship or duty. As a result, each individual had no one to stand between him and the all-powerful central government. In England, when King John grew overweening, he clashed both with ancient law and with vested local interests; so the barons curbed him and thereby wrote another word or two of liberty for all Englishmen. The Wersgor were a lickspittle race, unable to protest any arbitrary decree of a superior. “Promotion according to merit” meant only “promotion according to one’s usefulness to the imperial ministers.”

Yes, after being the butt of so many jokes and tongue-in-cheek remarks, our “primitive” narrator has a few observations to make about the culture of the alien people he is so cheerfully invading. The shortcomings of the alien society are in fact almost painfully familiar to the typical reader of the twentieth century. Poul Anderson has deftly turned the tables on us: we are the punch line. It is thought provoking, to say the least, but it’s a mere prelude to the coming knockout blow:

“Well?” demanded Sir Roger. “What ails you now?” “If they have not yet gone to war,” I said weakly, “why should the advent of a few backward savages like us make them do so?” “Hearken, Brother Parvus,” said Sir Roger. “I’m weary of this whining about our own ignorance and feebleness. We’re not ignorant of the true Faith, are we? Somewhat more to the point, maybe, while the engines of war may change through the centuries, rivalry and intrigue look no subtler out here than at home. Just because we use a different sort of weapons, we aren’t savages.”

Granted, the tale depends on a great many implausibilities, but the fact that there’s an element of truth here is the key to what makes it so funny. You see, it’s not just that medieval people can be interesting if they are portrayed a little more faithfully to their real-life character and attitudes. It’s that they may even have been better than us in ways we rarely contemplate. And maybe the things that seem the strangest about them now were actually perfectly reasonable cultural adaptions that addressed the essential problems of their time! Whether you agree or not, it’s certainly an audacious premise—exactly the sort of mind-blowing concept I look for in a good science-fiction novel.

This is an excerpt from one of my two favorite stories from THERE WILL BE WAR VOL. VIII. It’s a very clever explanation for one of the great mysteries of history.

Dinosaurs
by Geoffrey A. Landis

When the call came in at 2 A.M. I wasn’t surprised. Timmy had warned me it was coming. “Today or tomorrow, Mr. Sanderson,” he’d said. “Today or tomorrow for sure.” His voice was serious, far too serious for his age. I’ve learned to accept his prognostications, at least when he was sure, so I had my people ready. When the colonel called, I was already reviewing what we could do.

Timmy has a gift for time. He can, sometimes, see into the future, and a few days into the past as well. Perhaps because of his particular talent, he has a passion for paleontology. He’s got quite a collection of fossils: trilobites and fossilized ferns and even one almost-intact dinosaur skull. He’s particularly interested in dinosaurs, but perhaps that’s not so unusual. After all, Timmy was only eleven.

He has one other talent as well. I hoped we wouldn’t have to depend on it.

I found Timmy in his room. He was already awake, passing the time sorting his collections of fossils. We’ll be joining them soon enough, I thought. Maybe in a million years the next species will be digging up our bones and wondering what made us extinct. We walked in silence to the conference room. Sarah and January were already there. Sarah was still in her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Jan had managed to throw on a pair of rather tight jeans and a faded Coors T-shirt. A moment later, Jason, our hypnotist, arrived. There was no need to brief them. They already knew.

Sarah was my number two talent. We found her while testing people who claimed to be able to locate subs underwater. We didn’t find any, but we found her. She’d been one of the controls. Instrumentation for the control group had failed a lot more often than for the test subjects. Perhaps another project team might have ignored this, but I’d instructed my team to investigate the inexplicable—in any form. So we investigated the controls and finally came up with the cause: Sarah. She was a feisty, forty-year-old divorced housewife who had the Murphy talent, an ability to make complex equipment screw up. After some training, she’d even gotten to the point where she could control it. Some.

My third talent was January. She’d shown an ability to enhance the rate at which things burn. With a little more training, she might be the most dangerous one of all. Now, though, she was just a college student with an untrained talent.

I had a handful of other people, with an erratic smattering of other talents. Nothing that might be useful against what was coming, though.

“Sarah, how you feeling?”

“Burned out, Danny boy, feeling burned out. Never was good for much after midnight.”

“That’s not so good. Let’s see, you work best awake. Jan, how about you?”

“I think I’d better go under, Dan. I’m too nervous to do any good awake.”

“Right.’’ I nodded to Jason, and he went over to put her to sleep. “How about you, Timmy? Ready to go under?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling really hot tonight, Mr. Sanderson.” He grinned at me. “Real good.”

If so, he was the only one.

Once I’d thought that being assigned to Project Popgun was the last stop in a one-way journey to obscurity, a dead-end directorship of a make-work project. But even if I was relegated to a dead-end project, I resolved to make it the best-run dead-end project in the government.

Maybe I should explain what Project Popgun is. Popgun is a tiny government agency set up to study what the military euphemistically call “long shot” projects. What they mean is “crackpot.” Psychic assassins, voodoo priests, astrologers, tea leaf readers, people who claimed to be able to contact UFOs. Nobody really thought any of these would pan out, but they were each carefully investigated, just in case. Dogs who could foretell the future, children who could bend spoons, gamblers who could influence the fall of dice. There were always new crackpots to investigate as fast as the old ones were dismissed. After all, with the defense budget numbering hundreds of billions, a few million to check out crackpots is considered a bargain.

The psychics, the palm readers and fortune tellers, none of them turned out to be worth the investigation. But here and there, in odd nooks and by-ways across the nation, I’d found a few genuine talents. I’d begged, bribed, coerced, and flat-out hired them to come work for me here in Alexandria, where we could study them, train them to use their talents, and maybe even figure out what they were good for.

Strangely enough, as long as I had reported negative results, I was commended for rigorous work and carefully controlled test procedures. Once I started to report something worthwhile, though, we were accused of sloppy research and even downright falsification. The investigating committee, although not going so far as to actually endorse our results, finally suggested that our findings “might have legitimate defense applications,” and recommended that I be given limited scope to implement near-term applications. So I’d asked for—and received—a hardwire link to the threat evaluation center at NORAD, the North American Air Defense command. Voice plus video images of the main NORAD radar screen, carried on EMP-proof fiber-optic cables.

This is an excerpt from Young Man’s War by Rod Walker

The man in charge of my first combat patrol was named Captain Jonas Howard.

Captain Howard had been in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he was willing to talk about, and some other places that he was not. He spoke in a slow Alabama drawl, rarely raising his voice, and constantly chewed sunflower seeds as a means of keeping nicotine addiction at bay. He had learned the truth about the Dark the same way that so many others in Black Division had—on patrol outside Kandahar, a hole ripping itself in the air, and then a horde of giant stinking alien bug-things swarming out to kill everything in sight.

Or so Captain Howard put it. He had bit of a flair for the dramatic.

Bull and I reported to Captain Howard’s HQ as ordered at 0500 one dark, dry morning. Howard’s HQ was a large tent with a space heater, since Castle Base had gotten a bit crowded since Invasion Day. I had heard rumors that Black Division had facilities elsewhere, and that General Culver was taking in more regular Army bases under his command, but I hadn’t visited any of them yet.

Howard stood outside his tent, watching as his men loaded up their armored troop carriers. There were already a dozen sunflower seed shells around his boots. If he wasn’t careful he was going to need dentures by the time he turned fifty, assuming any of us lived that long.

“Sir!” I said. “Corporal Roland Kane and Corporal Rufus Bullock reporting for duty, sir!”

We saluted. Howard sized us up, then saluted back after a moment.

I should have mentioned that. Listeners started at corporal rank, since in the heat of combat we sometimes had to tell privates to move quickly to avoid a Darkside attack.

“You two look too young to be corporals,” grunted Howard. He pointed at me. “You don’t look old enough to drive.”

“I am seventeen years old, sir!” I announced. My birthday had passed while in basic training. Maggie had scraped together enough flour to make me a cupcake, which had been nice.

“Don’t shout unless I tell you,” said Howard. “Some of those drones have ears like bats. Let me guess. You got bit by a zombie, the Division found you in time, and now you’re a Listener?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Howard’s gaze shifted to Bull. “And you. You’re a big fellow, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir!” said Bull with enthusiasm. “I am excited for the opportunity to bring destruction upon the Dark, sir!”

“You’re not bringing destruction to anyone,” said Howard. “You’re staying in the vehicles. The General himself will rip me a new one if I get one of his Listeners killed.”

“Yes, sir!” said Bull. “Then I am excited for the opportunity to bring destruction to the Dark vicariously, sir!”

Howard blinked and his lips twitched. I suspect he almost laughed. “Let’s hope you can retain that enthusiasm, Corporal. Both of you, report to Sergeant Mendez and do whatever he tells you.”

“Yes, sir,” Bull and I chorused in unison.

Sergeant Mendez turned out to be a Hispanic man in his middle thirties with a scarred face and tattoos that were occasionally visible when he took off his jacket. He looked like an enforcer for a drug gang, but he ran a tight ship. I suspect the fact that he looked like he could murder you with his bare hands without blinking helped him keep order.

“All right, you two,” said Mendez. “You’ll be with me in the second carrier.” He pointed at the second of the six M200 armored personnel carriers that would make up our patrol. “You’re new, so shut up, keep your ears peeled, and do your thing. You detect even a hint of Darksiders, you speak up right away, got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Bull and I said in unison.

“There’s going to be trouble on this patrol, so stay sharp,” said Mendez.

“How do you know there will be trouble, Sergeant?” I said.

“General said so,” said Mendez.

By now I had realized that most of the men of Black Division regarded General Culver as something like a prophet. It was well-known within the Division that Culver had been trying to warn Washington and the Pentagon about the Dark for years, and that he had been warning them something like Invasion Day was going to happen sooner or later. The Pentagon had ignored his warning, save for occasional demands to increase the number of female combat troops in the Division.

Well, General Culver had been proven right. It also helped that he seemed to be one of the few powerful people left with an actual plan other than hiding in a bunker someplace and hoping that his canned soup didn’t run out.

An excerpt from The Heretics of St. Possenti, a novel by Rolf Nelson.

“Prophet or not, Mohammad had a good grasp of the psychology of what motivates young men—and people in general—and structured things accordingly. Praying five times a day is a powerful psychological conditioning tool. Saying all your sins are forgiven if you die for the cause is a powerful motivation when they are constantly harping on all the sins people commit. They have the sword on their flags, and they are martyrs for their cause of taking over the world!”

“They are deluded fools,” replied Thomas sadly.

“Any more so than a third-century Christian choosing to get thrown to the lions rather than recant? You call them martyrs, too, do you not?”

“But that’s different!”

“Is it? You don’t arm yourself, you preach peace, and theirs is the way of the sword. If you were a testosterone-filled young man, which symbol would attract you more, a gun, or a lamb? I mean, unless you wanted to shag the lamb, slaughter it, and roast some kebabs afterward? Same for gang-bangers. They see the cops don’t let the good guys pack heat and tell folks to not fight the bad guys. Let the cops go after them. Let the insurance cover the losses. The guys in the hood see the law-abiding as weak, chumps, nothing but chumps or—if you’ll excuse the expression—sheep to be shorn.”

“But nonviolence works in the long run. I mean, look at Gandhi. His nonviolence worked very well—within his lifetime!—and freed India from England.”

“But he also said… Wait. Just a second. Got the quote… right… here.” He found it on the screen of his tablet. “He who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by nonviolently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live forever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully. Even your number-two hero knew that some people can’t be reasoned with, only dealt with at their own level.”

Finnegan added, “He also said that nonviolence would only work with a just and moral people like the English, and The sword makes men equal. Clearly nonviolent protest and letter-writing didn’t help the kulaks against Stalin.”

“But that isn’t Jesus’ way.”

“Hey, I didn’t bring up Gandhi.”

“Well, yes. But that isn’t the path of the Bible.”

“Truth isn’t always comfortable, Padre. It is what it is.”

“But guns are a symbol of violence,” said Cranberry firmly.

“No, they are not,” shot back Finnegan, just as firmly.

“Sure they are.”

“No, they are a symbol of worldly power. An amplifier of the intent of the user. In the hands of a nongovernment employee with a good heart, a symbol of freedom. In the hands of a good government, they represent law and order. In the hands of an evil man, a symbol of oppression and crime.”

Thomas had never considered that particular distinction. The vast majority of the previous conversations he’d listened in on had been of much more technical nature. “Possibly, but that doesn’t feel right. Far too many murders, wars, robberies, and suicides happen with them.”

“All of which happened before gunpowder showed up. Jaw of an ass sound familiar? The fact that… Wait. Let me get Old Testament here, I know I’ve got that quote somewhere…. Ah, here. Maimonides. Truth does not become truer by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”

“Maimonides wasn’t Old Testament. He was Middle Ages,” Cranberry pointed out. “And Jewish.”

“Ah, whatever. So was Jesus. Exact year is irrelevant. He’s an old-time scholarly dude. And he’s right. Doesn’t make a tinker’s fart in a tornado how the truth makes you feel. True is true. It may be inconvenient that three plus three is six, but there it is. Lifeboat math and figuring out who gets tossed over or fished out is never easy for a sane man.”

“But good men of Christian faith should not murder.”

“Agreed. But killing isn’t necessarily the same as murder. The commandment is Thou Shall Not Murder, not Kill. One is not just. The other is. Do cops and soldiers, even Christian ones, carry guns?”

“But soldiers and police are different!”

“Nope. They are people, too. Same rights, same commandments. Did the Knights Templar and the other chivalric orders carry swords much as the Saracen did or rely only on prayer while blessed by the Church and fighting to keep the Holy Lands safe for Christians? Did William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke and pinnacle of the chivalric ideals, carry only words when asked by the pope to protect the young heir to the English throne to prevent war? He was so bad-ass even into his 70s that nobody was willing to challenge him to combat, so he secured the life of the future king of England and the Magna Carta. He was even offered a plenary indulgence for any sin he might ever commit in the future in exchange, for God’s sake! A spiritual blank check to do anything he wanted. But he turned it down. He was a good man and carried a sword doing his knightly duty for many long years.”

“But that was a long time ago!”

“So was Jesus. Does that make his words any less true?”

“Point taken.”

“Is the Church of today exactly the same as it was fifteen hundred years ago? Any new developments in that time?” Mickey asked.

“Well, yes, of course! Benedictine Monks and the Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and the various nuns’ orders. We adopted local languages in place of Latin. Other practical things like that. Times change, but the Word does not.”

“Not to mention some guy named Martin Luther…. But let’s not go there right now. So why were the monastic orders founded?”

“Monastic history is not my strong suit,” the bishop said, “but as I recall, once Christianity became the more-or-less official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, it wasn’t a great act of courage to be Christian. Some sought the hard life of a desert hermit to prove their devotion to God. Early Benedictines attempted to recreate that ascetic life, at least to a degree, and imitated Christ, who fasted in the desert before he started his ministry.”

“So a new order was founded to meet an unmet need?”

“Yes, I guess that is one way to look at it.”

“And the Templars?”

“To keep Pilgrims to the Holy Land safe, as you said, and retake it from the Islamic conquest. But this is totally different.”

“Maybe so. Maybe not.”

Bishop Thomas Cranberry finds himself at a loss when he is confronted by a thief and realizes some disturbing truths about himself. The experience sends him in search of the men who are increasingly absent from the Church, who find themselves at a loss in a world that has gone increasingly feral, and who feel that they have nowhere to go and no one to whom they can turn for support. In listening to them and attempting to understand their plight, he finds an unexpected mission.

THE HERETICS OF ST. POSSENTI is for readers who want the backstory of the story and for those who want to know how one inspired man can make a difference in a fallen world. It is a novel for those who need inspiration to get them though the day and those who look for unusual ways to accomplish the mission. It is for people who understand and respect the old ways but know that sometimes a seed cannot grow without splitting the pavement.

Rolf Nelson is the author of BACK FROM THE DEAD, the first book in The Stars Came Back series. This is how Rolf described the connection between the two books.

The first book written in this series of related stories was The Stars Came Back. It had a small but important part played by a somewhat mysterious order of monks, the Order of St. Possenti. It was also said they had a small but significant role in the past as they helped save, metaphorically and physically, the fully self-aware AI aboard the warship Armadillo. It was an unusual order of monks, and it raised more than a few reader questions. It also piqued my own interest: how could such an order of rifle-toting Christian monks come into existence? A fascinating plot device to use as a fully developed entity, but… How?

So I set about exploring the idea. I learned much in the process about Christianity, Catholicism, popes, monks, schisms, and more. I hope you enjoy the results of that labor.

What’s extremely exciting, at least to me, is that someone I very much respect recently informed me that he has picked up both books and intends to read them. I don’t know what he’ll make of them, but I do hope he’ll at least find some of the information in them to be useful.

From the reviews of SJWs Always Double Down:

• An improvement over the groundbreaking first. Where the examples in SJW’s Always Lie were a little inside-baseball, these are literally ripped from today’s headlines. Anyone who does not live in a cave who reads this book will instantly recognize the goings on. I have several people in organizations I’ll be buying this book for instantly.
• A worthy follow up to the first volume. After reading SJWs Always Lie I started noticing the patterns from the book in the news. I would not have noticed them without reading the book. Forewarned is forearmed. I recommend this book to individuals who may be attacked by SJWs and for executives who may be apolitical but who do not want to see their businesses ruined.
• The insight into the SJW psychological breakdown is probably the most important part, something SJWs Always Lie did not cover. Once you know your enemy, you can better predict them.