Z is for Zorro

One of the rituals of growing up in California is the fourth grade mission project. Every fourth grader in California learns the history of the twenty-one missions built by the Spanish in Alta California. In our school, we each built a model of a mission - the building materials of choice were sugar cubes and popsicle sticks - and we went on a field trip to Mission San Fernando Rey de España, where we learned about life at the mission, or at least its material culture and subsistence practices - instruction on the forced conversions of the disease-ravaged indigenous Tongva by the Franciscans was notably absent in hindsight.

The missions are frequent tourist destinations, to break up long drives up and down the state. We visited Mission San Juan Capistrano on a camping trip to Mission Bay in San Diego, and Mission Santa Barbara on another camping trip to Morro Bay. Our church youth group visited Mission San Gabriel Archangel on an outing. It's a pretty common experience for anyone growing up near the California coast.

The missions are California's most significant architectural vestige of our colonial history, as a part of New Spain. Nearly all of them have been restored to one degree or another - in a land of wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, buildings made of mud bricks tend to be ephemeral. Adobes from the Spanish era in California are vanishingly rare.

Perhaps that's why I so strongly associate the missions with Zorro.

I saw Tyrone Power's The Mark of Zorro for the first time around the same time as our mission projects - either the autumn before or the autumn after - on a Saturday tee-vee matinee. Up to then, swashbucklers were musketeers in Paris or pirates in the Caribbean, but now here were dueling swordsmen right here in California! Even to a guero from the suburbs - unless you grew up here, you'll never really understand "Mexican Radio" - it was filled with names and places that were intimately, immediately familiar in a way that The Three Musketeers or Captain Blood couldn't be.

I eventually found The Curse of Capistrano in either my school or community library, but though Johnston McCulley wrote scores of Zoro stories, most were buried and largely forgotten in the magazines where they were first published. Still, Zorro remains my swashbuckler.

One of these days I'll show my kids The Mark of Zorro on dvd. They'll get to see two great movie swordsmen - Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone - in a classic duel, and hear all those names that were new and yet familiar to me.

But first I'll take them to Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Read More

Y is for Yurt

The setting sun was casting its level rays across the steppe grass as the last of the beaters brought in their game on the back of pack horses. The game was piled by the shores of the lake where Khlit, the Cossack of the Curved Saber and Kha Khan of the Jun-gar Tatars, had ordered the night's encampment. Through the ranks of the hunters spurred a powerful man with a scarred face, who reined his horse to a halt before the kibitka of Khlit.

"Our outriders, lord," he cried to the Cossack, who was standing before his tent, "have come upon the one who says that he is from the Holy City. He wears the orange robe of a Chutuku lama, and his name is Dongkor Gelong."

Khlit raised his gray head and scanned the messenger keenly. Although his costume of furred coat with wide sash and horse-hide boots was similar to those of his companions, the Cossack was taller. His hard gray eyes were not aslant like those of the Tatars. He had taken off his heavy woolen cap and his gray hair hung to his powerful stooped shoulders. A veined hand tugged thoughtfully at his dropping white mustache. The deep lines of his browned face alone showed his age.

I discovered Khlit the Cossack about six years ago through the auspices of the tireless software at Amazon. I purchased Robert E Howard's The Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient, and Recommended for Me was wolf of the Steppes, the first of four volumes collecting Harold Lamb's tales of the aged cossack.

As a boy I'd read Mr Lamb's Durandal, about the Crusader, Sir Hugh of Taranto, who joins the Golden Horde of Ghengis Khan. Since I was a boy I was fascinated by the tales of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights. The Silk Road was the pathway of my dreams, its cities - Khiva, Tashkent, Samarkand, Kashgar - their citadels. Even now there is nothing more exotic to me than the lands in the shadow of the Roof of the World.

But though I'd read, and loved, Durandal, I'd never heard of Khlit, the old warrior cast out of the Cossack sietch who wandered East, across Tartary, to Ming Dynasty China and Moghul India, and through those cities and along those paths which lay at the heart of my imagination.

Khlit is both a conventional and unconventional hero, a great swordsman and brilliant general, but clever first and foremost. Harold Lamb manages to tread the fine line between the furious action his pulp readers demanded and complex tales of intrigue and mystery in an artfully rendered ancient land.

I was inspired to run Flashing Blades after reading Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow of the Vulture," about the 1529 siege of Vienna by Suleiman the Great, from Lord of Samarcand. The stories of Khlit take place in the first decades of the 17th century, little more than a decade before the start of our campaign, and I've drawn inspiration both from the tales themselves and his amazingly evocative setting. There are rumors and legends in Le Ballet de l'Acier which may lure the adventurers east, to the Levant, to Persia and Tartary, and to the Roof of the World itself, in search of fortune and glory. Will our swashbuckling adventurers trade the palaces of Paris and Turin for a felt yurt or a dusty caravanserai, their Andalusians for shaggy Tatar ponies? Will their rapiers clash with Mongol sabres someday? That will be for the players to decide, of course - such is the nature of sandboxes - but among the tales of Khlit are those of his friend, the Afghan mansabdar Abdul Dost, and the English trader, Sir Ralph Weyand.

Swashbucklers on the Silk Road? That's got an helluva ring to it, doesn't it?

Read More

Cinematic: Royal Flash

Read More

X is for Xiphos

Courtesy of Knight's Edge, an online retailer of medieval arms and trinkets:

The xiphos is a sword that was used by the ancient Greeks. The sword featured a double-edged, leaf-shaped blade that was perfect for cutting, slashing and thrusting. Xiphos was a short and thus, single-handed sword. The sword was used as a secondary, close combat weapon and it was used when the primary weapon, the spear was discarded. The very early Xiphos swords were made of bronze. Similarly shaped swords were in existence throughout the Europe under various different names.

The description of the xiphos makes an intersting point - for millenia, swords were secondary weapons, for close combat. Spears and lances were the primary weapons of warriors, both on foot and on horseback.

The long straight stick with the pointy bit at the end would endure a dizzying array of variations, but it would remain the basic weapon until firearms dominated the battlefield in the latter half of the 17th century, and bayonets - pointy bits affixed to the end of the firearm - would carry on the tradition for at least another three centuries.

It's interesting that swords represent martial puissance more than spears. There are a slew of reasons why: swords were often restricted to certain social classes, particularly in the post-Roman world; they required additional training and skill to use effectively; they were much more expensive to produce and therefore dearer to the owner; swords could be more durable than spears and lances, and pass through generations. One sees swords in heraldry far more often than the spear or lance, reinforcing the notion that swords are exclusive relative to the common man's spear. In romances, the sword is the weapon most likely associated with a champion rather than his lance.

The sword captures the popular imagination, but it is the spear upon which empires were built.

Read More

W is for Wacky

And I've noticed the same phenomenon in the A to Z Blogging Challenge, the blogs with the quirky titles tend to have the quirky content. There are some very strange people out there…and some very funny ones too.

Really Bad Eggs Wacky.

So the 2012 A to Z Blogger Challenge winds down.

Early impression? I'm glad I tried this, and I doubt I'll do it again next year.

As of the time I write this, I've only managed to visit about a score of other blogs. April has been an insanely busy month - holidays, birthday parties, anniversary, vacation, baseball and football games, all on top of work and family routines - and it's been a challenge just keeping up with my own posts. Exploring other blogs has taken a back seat, unfortunately, but I do hope to visit many more, and offer a comment or three, in the coming months. Even just reading through that score or so, I'm left with an unmistakable impression: wow, there are a lot of authors out there.

I've received a number of interesting comments over the past few weeks. I imagine that to many, like Fiona Maddock quoted above, this all must seem rather strange. Roleplaying games are a niche hobby, and cape-and-sword roleplaying games are a tiny niche within that niche. A grown man writing about the finer points of pretending to be a pirate or musketeer must seem very wacky indeed.

One of the reasons I enjoy roleplaying games is that they are an avenue for me to scratch a creative itch in a distinctive, perhaps unique way. Writing a story holds little appeal for me - and acting in a play even less - but creating a vast web of characters linked by intrigue, and playing them out in real-time, with actions resolved by the rules of the game, hits me like an endorphin rush. Most of all, I like roleplaying games for the ways in which they are not like writing or performing. There's nothing else quite like it.

Wacky it may be, but my muse carries dice in her hand.

Read More

V is for Vikings

A furore normannorum libera nos domine.

Read More

U is for Unbuilt

For the July 2000 issue of Dragon magazine, Robin Laws wrote an article entitled "Swashbuckling Essentials," containing, ". . . twelve tips for the prospective swashbuckler," aimed at referees and players of Dungeons and Dragons specifically, and other games generally. Mr Laws' tips include such nuggets as "Panache Your Middle Name," "Chivalry to the Point of Idiocy," "Gentlemen Prefer Rapiers," and, "Armor is for the Weak."

Mr Laws then advises how to integrate these tips into the rules of the game. Here's a sample.

So when you're in a tight spot, when the bloodthirsty pirates have you cornered in the colonial governor's kitchen, look around for items that are waiting to help you. In swashbuckler mode, a found item almost always makes as effective a weapon as the cutlass in your scabbard or the dagger in your boot. Expect your [dungeon master] to assign you a big bonus for flinging a handy meat cleaver at the lead pirate. Expect an even bigger one for lifting a roasting boar from its spit and hurling it at him.

And another.

Wit is crucial component of your Charisma-based arsenal. It is not enough to defeat an opponent - you must prove yourself his master in the fine art of the cutting remark. Swashbuckling villains stand united in their reslolute lack of a sense of humor, especially regarding their own faults. Your DM should reward you for wittiness above and beyond the call of duty. For example, each time you successfully infuriate a foe with a cutting remark, your DM might reward you [experience points] equal to 10% of amount you'd get for defeating him outright.

Advice like Mr Laws' is pretty common for cape-and-sword roleplaying games, reflecting perhaps the most widely held perceptions of what swashbuckling adventure is all about. There's a lot to like here, particularly about the importance of romance and honor.

But "Swashbuckling Essentials" also falls into the familiar trap of failing to understand its sources, and as a result it ends up defining the genre as parody. He also gets some things flat wrong; for example, Mr Laws writes, "If your campaign draws inspiration from The Three Musketeers, don't expect to find treasure all over the place. . . . They get their equipment from the king's armory, their horses from his livery, and so on," whereas M. Dumas devotes whole chapters in his tale to the Musketeers figuring out how to pay for their equipment before going on campaign.

TV Tropes, that inestimable trove of "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations," includes a page on swashbuckling. Among the "devices and conventions" associated with the cape-and-sword genre is the Unbuilt Trope.

The Unbuilt Trope "is a work that seems like a Deconstruction but is actually the Trope Maker itself. This is often because later appearances of the trope have decayed compared to the original, defining appearance." As TV Tropes explains, this can happen for a number of reasons, from conscious choice to lack of understanding to just plain hackery by later writers. In fact, TV Tropes specifically calls out Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda as examples of the Unbuilt Trope in swashbuckling.

In the case of the cape-and-sword genre, I expect that the tropes decayed with the transition of swashbuckling stories to the medium of film. Many fans of the various movie versions of The Three Musketeers might be quite surprised by M Dumas' concise treatment of d'Artagnan's duels in his books. The Alatriste novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, written at the tail-end of the twentieth century, are in fact much closer in feel to the works by M Dumas and Mr Hope than they are Rafael Sabatini or Johnston McCulley.

Overemphasizing comically light-hearted action, as I feel Mr Laws does in "Swashbuckling Essentials," limits the range of experiences available through cape-and-sword roleplaying. Showering a player with bonuses that make using improvised weapons better than the sword is one way to encourage swashbuckling action; another is to make fights desperate enough that there is a pressing need for creative solutions, such that using an cleaver unbalanced for throwing to slow down a rush of attackers is preferable to relying on the sword alone, even if it entails a penalty to perform successfully.

When I set out to develop my own cape-and-sword campaign, Le Ballet de l'Acier, I knew I wanted the action in actual play to feel more like the Musketeers and Alatriste novels. I hadn't heard of the Unbuilt Trope at the time; I just knew that I wanted a game that felt more like the Richard Lester Musketeers movies and less like The Crimson Pirate. Swashbuckling can be a dirty business as well as a funny one, and focusing on the latter at the expense of the former, as "Swashbuckling Essentials" does, would result in a much shallower roleplaying experience.

Read More