The Busybody

Quote for the Day: On "Playing Safe" with Biblical Metaphors

2012-03-08T04:37:00.002-08:00

"There are many today who would prefer to dispense altogether with the language of sacrifice and of warfare, the first because of squeamishness and unfamiliarity, the second because it is all too familiar and demonstrably too easy to take with a literlness that negates its true intention. But religion and morality are not best served by those who play safe, particularly when playing safe entails the disregard of powerful human impulses which by a bold use of metaphor may be tamed and harnessed." (George Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, p 18)

Star Wars Rethought: The Order of Darkness

2012-02-29T02:17:00.007-08:00

On Facebook, Stephen Carlson links to a brilliant analysis of the Star Wars films by Rod Hilton. This critic suggests the proper viewing order for the films -- which he calls the "Machete Order" -- is IV, V, II, III, VI. Meaning that Phantom Menace doesn't exist, and that Clones and Sith get wedged in between Empire and Jedi. Hilton's reasoning:

"This creates a lot of tension after the cliffhanger ending of Episode V. It also uses the original trilogy as a framing device for the prequel trilogy. Vader drops this huge bomb that he's Luke's father, then we spend two movies proving he's telling the truth, then we see how it gets resolved. The Star Wars watching experience gets to start with the film that does the best job of establishing the Star Wars universe, Episode IV, and it ends with the most satisfying ending, Episode VI. It also starts the series off with the two strongest films, and allows you to never have to either start or end your viewing experience with a shitty movie. Two films of Luke's story, two films of Anakin's story, then a single film that intertwines and ends both stories."

This "Machete order" not only keeps the grand reveal in Empire that Vader is Luke's father a surprise, but also that Luke and Leia are siblings -- by moving the surprise to Episode III instead of VI, when Padme announces her daughter's name. Hilton also sees a dramatic payoff to Jedi when preceded by Sith:

"When watching Jedi immediately after watching Sith, the message is clear: Luke Skywalker is on the path to the Dark Side. Why does this matter? Because at the end of Jedi, Luke confronts the Emperor. The Emperor explains that the assault on the new Death Star is a trap and that his friends are going to die, and he keeps taunting Luke, telling him to grab his lightsaber and fight him. The film is trying to create a tension that Luke might embrace the Dark Side, but it was never really believable. However, within the context of him following in his father's footsteps and his father using the power of the dark side to save people, with Luke's friends being killed just outside the Death Star window, this is much more believable... Watching Revenge of the Sith makes Return of the Jedi a better, more effective film. Considering it's the weakest of the original trilogy films, this improvement is welcome."

Unfortunately, Return of the Jedi is so weak, that Hilton's repositioning episodes around it amounts to little more than polishing a mound of feces. His "Machete Order", brilliant as it is, remains far too generous. It must be said that episode VI is almost as bad as I, and II is only a slightly above those two. If I had to use the amazon 5-star rating system:

(IV) A New Hope -- 4 stars
(V) The Empire Stikes Back -- 4 stars
(VI) Return of the Jedi -- 1 star

(I) Phantom Menace -- 1 star
(II) Attack of the Clones -- 1 ½ stars
(III) Revenge of the Sith -- 2 ½ stars

Revenge of the Sith is no prize, but it's light-years ahead of I, II, and VI. Jedi is a lot worse than just the "weakest of the original trilogy"; its tone, direction, dialogue -- everything -- contrasts so embarrassingly with IV and V it's as if George Lucas became James Bobin. I'd even watch Attack of the Clones before Jedi.

So if there is any decent trilogy to be salvaged out of this mess, it is what I call the Order of Darkness: III, IV, and V:

(III) The Rise of Vader. Evil triumphs.

(IV) A New Hope. Good defeats evil temporarily, teasing us with false hope.

(V) The Empire Kicks Ass. Evil comes out ahead again, end of story.

Now this is quite beautiful, indeed almost Shakespearean in its tragedy. There is no ridiculous muppet show we need to suffer through after the fine development of IV and V; no hollow victories which trivialize the Empire's malignancy. The real and suffocating power of evil frames and defines the trilogy.

Alternatively, one could take Hilton's five-episode Machete Order, add it to my three-stage Order of Darkness, divide in half, and use the following quartet as a compromise: IV, V, II, III. This is basically the Machete Order which scraps the ludicrous Jedi ending, and still goes out (as I insist) on a note of doom. Whether it's Han Solo imprisoned, or Padme dying in childbirth and Vader wailing like the damned -- and in some ways that latter makes for the best ending of all -- the space epic concludes with a wonderfully inspiring uncertainty, and anguish unblemished.

The Best of RPG Artistry

2012-02-23T01:58:00.011-08:00

Over on Grognardia, James Maliszewski asks after inspiring illustrations from published RPG adventures. Having just finished my series of retrospectives on ICE's Middle-Earth modules, artwork has been my mind quite a lot. The adage "never judge a book by its cover" doesn't hold up well in the RPG world. For novels it's absolute: while I love good covers (and abhor bad ones) on works of fiction, they never factor in my assessment of the novel's literary value. But there's something about role-playing, maybe the shared group experience behind it all, that leans heavily on the inspiration fired by cover artists. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that cover art can weigh in anywhere between 10%-20% in rating a module's success or failure. That's a huge amount of weight to attach to a single page, but there you have it.

The only two RPGs I invested serious amounts of time in were MERP and D&D, and so I'm doing two lists: my ten favorite covers of ICE's Tolkien modules and my ten favorite illustrations (most covers, but not all) from TSR's D&D products. This will amount to a heavy bit of enshrining Angus McBride and Erol Otus, but that's as it should be. They were the art-gods of their respective turf, McBride the solid historicist, Otus the psychedelic surrealist, and in Maliszewski's terms they "fired my imagination" more than any other RPG artists. Be sure to click on each of these illustrations for the larger image.

The Middle-Earth Role Playing System

1. Riders of Rohan, Angus McBride. This is my favorite piece of cover art of any RPG product. In its Tolkien context, it spotlights a bleak culture in an amazing freeze-frame. The Rohirrim are closest to the Anglo-Saxons or even Norse in Middle-Earth, courageous yet hopeless, "riding to ruin" to embrace that Ragnarok-like annihilation of all that's good. The long defeat runs in their blood like all of the free peoples, but the horse-lords seem to thrive on it, as if their history of repeated migrations and awful-odds warfare forged a culture of exultant fatalism. Peter Jackson nailed this perfectly at Dunharrow, when Theoden calmly tells his men they can't possibly prevail against Mordor's armies: "But we will meet them in battle nonetheless." That's three millennia of the long defeat talking, and captures the essence of the Rohirrim almost as good as this illustration.

2. Mount Gundabad, Angus McBride. This one actually gave me a nightmare, though I can barely recall details beyond being yanked down that hellish maw in chains. I must have repressed what happened to me inside the mountain, and given the module's contents that's not surprising. Mount Gundabad is more than just a beehive of 13,000 orcs; it's a taloned organ of malignancy. There's sadism, sacrifice, and bloodthirsty rage; the orc warlords hate each other more than elves. All of this owes to the First-Age artifact as deadly as the One Ring, bathing the place in spiritual blackness. This is, simply, the best orc dungeon ever designed -- in or outside of Middle-Earth -- and I'm glad the cover could do it justice.

3. The Lost Realm of Cardolan, Angus McBride. In some ways I consider this piece the most emblematic of McBride's talents. It grabs your attention right away with the action, and holds it with the hulking, meaty figure of the Barrow-wight. McBride was always able to nail down the solid reality demanded by Tolkien's world, which for all its myth served as a pre-history to our own, and an illustration like this could make me believe Middle-Earth actually existed. Every part of it shouts verisimilitude, from gritty melee to skull-adorned chain mail to rock pillars marking hallowed ground.

4. Gorgoroth, Angus McBride. And here's another flawless rendering of Tolkien's undead. It portrays the Nazgul beyond Halloween cloaks and hoods, in kingly gear, but also without any mystical shrouding as if we were Frodo observing them through the filter of the One Ring. Seeing them this way in Mordor is somehow just right, as if there's no room for vague phantoms in the heart of Sauron's territory. And the yellow background, and Mount Doom, evoke a mood as thunderous as those galloping steeds. I wish the cover of the Angmar module had been this powerful.

5. Havens of Gondor, Julek Keller. The best cover of these Tolkien modules not done by Angus McBride is saturated in enough loss that it may as well be the Grey Havens. The module itself was scorned in the '80s as an empty product, but one I fell instantly in love with, though I admit the cover carries more that the usual 10%-20% weight value -- close to 30% in this case. There's something surpassing about it in a way that's hard to put my finger on, but easy enough to convey my feelings for. To this day I have fantasies of growing old by the Belfalas coastline, mixing with men and elves, and staring out to sea where that immortal elven king drowned searching his lost love.

6. Ents of Fangorn, Angus McBride. Even if this module doesn't deliver as it should on the inside, it redeems by the outside, depicting the two best things about Middle-Earth: hobbits and ents. This cherished scene from The Two Towers is rather exceptional for McBride, whose comfort zone was the dramatic portraits of evil or battle action, and it's all the more potent for it. In fact, I'd put this depiction of Treebeard almost on the same level as John Howe's. By rights there should be more treeish traits (branches and leaves eeking through the physique, as in the films), but I like this interpretation all the same.

7. Southern Mirkwood, Chris White. I'm not the biggest fan of Chris White. He did the covers for Goblin-Gate and Shelob's Lair, and I thought her majesty the spider in particular deserved better. But tell me this picture doesn't rattle you after staring at it for a while. It may be leagues away from Angus McBride's Nazgul (see 4, above), but it's compelling in its own way. It actually puts me in mind of Erol Otus' well-known sketch of the spectre in the D&D Expert Rules manual. And the forest has a weird psychedelic vibe to it, as if it's noxiously alive and would close in on you if you blink.

8. Greater Harad, Angus McBride. The ruins of Charnesra inspired me to design the most complex campaign of my gaming career, and the result was a complete overhaul of this module that makes ICE's "Greater Harad" now almost unrecognizable to me. All because of this cover: I looked at it and saw -- like the way visionaries have epiphanies -- an underground cult launching suicidal sting operations across a sun-baked land; disaffected remnants of a cruel dynasty wanting to resurrect the "glory" of an old age; grim sophisticated cultures where you can find peace or freedom, but never both; and an evil plot on such a monstrous scale that would require the best out of the most experienced PCs to expose and bring down.

9. The Court of Ardor, Gail McIntosh. McIntosh did a lot of cover art reminiscent of old-school D&D, sketchy and rough around the edges, which is much preferable, in my view, to the excessively polished look of today's D&D products. Still, I wouldn't call McIntosh a favorite; she was hit-or-miss; for every Ardor there was an Umbar. But Ardor is her very best, capturing a land of exotic peril in a frame that shouts action. We're used to seeing demons on other planes, in evil temples, or subterranean tombs, but this one (Lesh-Y) is an actual court noble, and those lethal cobras fit perfectly. This module on whole fired my imagination more than any other ICE product, and McIntosh's illustration had a part in that.

10. Thieves of Tharbad, Angus McBride. When I first saw this cover I instantly thought Lankhmar. It hints at a sordid cesspit so unlike the grand cities of Annuminas, Minas Anor, and Minas Ithil we associate with Middle-Earth. You can practically see extortion rings, prostitution networks, and cutthroat thieves at work behind the shadows. I always thought of Tharbad as rather anti-Tolkien in terms of the kind of things the professor would actually depict in works of fiction, and it gives lie to Gary Gygax's strident claim that "it is well nigh impossible to recreate any Tolkien-based fantasy while remaining within the boundaries of the D&D gaming system". The pulp influences of Robert Howard, Fletcher Pratt, and Fritz Leiber aren't so necessarily at odds with Tolkien's highbrow mythic backdrop as often thought. And that offers a perfect segue into the gritty, amoral world of D&D...

Old-School Dungeons & Dragons

1. The Dungeon Master's Guide, David Sutherland. There is no illustration I associate more with the world of classic D&D than the cover of the DM's Guide. It even felt unholy when I first bought it, which in hindsight surprises me. My upbringing was mainstream religious -- raised Episcopalian, educated in Catholic schools -- and I always had the full support of family and teachers to pursue D&D as a hobby. But there were those few family acquaintances of a more fundamentalist bent, and I recall one in particular who was convinced that the game could only be Satanic based on this cover. In any case, the cover sums up D&D nicely, pitting a fighter, mage, and thief up against an avatar of hell (or so I first thought of efreeti, before I realized they were fire-genies), and I was always amused by the absence of a cleric, as if the efreet had the wisdom to kill the party's healer right off the bat.

2. Castle Amber, Erol Otus. This one was continually on my mind when I was put through the module as a player. I expected that colossus to appear at any moment and crush our entire party, and this is what I mean when I talk about gaming artwork being a shared experience; it really set the tone for our adventure. It's Erol Otus' best piece, and like the cover of the DM's Guide shook my imagination in the way that these evil giantish-figures, for whatever reason, did so well. I could see myself on the top story of a building being crushed like cardboard, under the glare of those hugely insane eyes which regarded me about as significant as a gnat.

3. The Lost City, Jim Holloway. This cover is so bloody inspired it makes me lament, more than any other art piece, the passing of D&D's Golden Age. Everything about it shouts the pulp fantasies of Howard and Leiber, from the masked Cynidicean, to the noxious-looking green mist circling his feet, to the general feel of a decadent society. Somehow both Holloway and Otus (above) hit artistic home runs for the two best D&D modules (aside from Tomb of Horrors) ever designed. And Holloway's fired me up in a way that led me to flesh out the underground city in much more staggering detail for subsequent campaigns. It was truly a sandbox of endless opportunity.

4. The Tomb of Horrors (Back), Erol Otus. Even today this image scares the be-Jesus out of me. I want to shout at the poor fool poking his torch around the death mouth, "GET AWAY FROM THAT THING!" And I can't help thinking about sex-change looking at the misty archway, even if that brutal enchantment is many rooms away. The green devil mouth remains for me the most iconic symbol of evil in D&D, and summons a world of outrageous unfairness, irrevocable death, and sadistic DM'ing that made the hobby so fun.

5. Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Jim Roslof. As a teen my favorite Roslof piece was the cover of Ghost Tower of Inverness, which I used to stare at for long periods of time. However, Maliszewski got me rethinking with his enthusiasm for D1-D2. The shrine of the Kuo-Toa is of course a very good dungeon, but one I tend to forget about alongside its mightier sequels, especially Vault of the Drow which even broadcasts a memorable Erol Otus cover. But I have to agree that this clash at the foot of the kuo-toan altar deserves high mention. I love the way the blues and greens and yellows mix, and bathe the lobster-goddess statue in a weird spiritual candor.

6. In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, Erol Otus. I was never a fan of the slaver's quartet, but this final chapter is admittedly good, and the cover is an absolute gem. There's something dreadfully intimate about these poor naked PCs (loincloths included for form's sake, no doubt) stripped of all their possessions, spellbooks, weapons, relying on whatever they can find on the floor to escape these horrible caves. At the very least, the module is a serious test of players' resources when they're literally stripped to the bone. Otus' illustration conveys the unfairness brilliantly, and his myconids (fungus-men) are as creepy as any medusa.

7. The Player's Handbook, Dave Trampier. James Maliszewski makes a fascinating case for this being the "best cover ever" of any D&D accessory, and while I wouldn't go that far, his feelings for the piece do square with some of my own. It depicts a dungeon in the broadest sense, with PCs "fighting evil in its very lair". It snapshots a planned expedition, moreover, as evidenced by the body count of the lizard men. Most importantly (from my point of view), these PCs aren't necessarily heroes, indeed they rather have the look of venal mercenaries ("the two thieves prying the gems from the demonic idols eyes are looking down on their companions as if they hope no one notices their theft"). D&D is as much about anti-heroes as it is heroes, and Trampier's cover breathes this world of amoral pulp fantasy in a very primal way. While I insist the DM's Guide cover holds pride of place, I suspect more gamers would agree with Maliszewski's prioritizing that of the Player's Handbook.

8. Return to the Tomb of Horrors (Inside), Arnie Swekel. The boxed sets of the '90s tended to have artwork as disappointing as their contents, but the demi-lich sequel was exceptional in every way. This drawing kicks ass in portraying an ultimate showdown between PCs and Acerak -- a showdown, frankly, that's so unlikely it serves as a kind of Platonic ideal or goal, ever approached, never reached. For this is a module where the entire party can die on any page. But it's fun to fantasize about actually making it to the last room of the Fortress of Conclusion, and going down desperately trying to liberate the 2,692 souls trapped in Acerak's phylactery, souls he needs for his outrageous ambition to become the god of (and one with) the Negative Material Plane.

9. Ravenloft (Inside), Clyde Caldwell. I never cared for the cover of Ravenloft, but the inside illustrations score big time, and this one in particular is as iconic as the video frame of the taxi cab pulling up in front of the MacNeil house in The Exorcist. That shot was inspired by a Magritte painting ("Empire of Light"), and this one has the same kind of look to it, as if Caldwell had been mining a museum of gothic classics and wanted to capture something unelaborately elemental. Caldwell was never a favorite of mine, mind you, for all the Dragonlance stuff, but with Ravenloft he tapped into something powerful. It remains the best undead module of all time, and his artistry did it justice.

10. Oriental Adventures, Jeff Easley. I was an avid fan of early-'80s ninja films (they're so embarrassing by today's standards), and here, finally, was an entire alternate D&D world for the Asian cultures. The cover is airy and exotic as the western player's handbook is earthy and subterranean, and pits two essential character classes against each other, samurai and ninja. Many westerns would say that symbolizes "honor" vs. "shame", but of course every class operates out of its own code of honor and shame, so the duality isn't quite that simple. Whatever that white beast is, it meshes brilliantly with the background of the clouds and "Japanese" castle.

Dragon Magazine

By way of epilogue, I'm going to include three cover pieces of Dragon which I loved to no end: Denis Beauvais' "chess series".

1. Dragon #83, Denis Beauvais. I wasn't yet a subscriber of Dragon when this issue was published. I back-ordered it around a year later, after my friend put me through the deathly awesome Dancing Hut module, which is arguably the most outstanding contribution ever made to the magazine (or at least, from the stretch of issues I'm familiar with). I had no idea that its cover was a chess piece, and so that was a double-orgasm when it arrived in the mail. And while Jeff Easley's cover for the official Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga published later in the '90s is unforgettable, to this day I think of this chess-cover whenever thinking of the old crone who terrorized countrysides and kidnapped and ate people.

2. Dragon #86, Denis Beauvais. This was my first issue of Dragon by paid subscription, and I thought I'd gone to heaven. Role-playing and chess -- my two favorite hobbies -- fused in one. And it was a good issue too. It jump-started the Suel pantheon series, from which Norebo (god of luck and gambling) instantly became the new deity for my thief character. There were even dragon clerics detailed, a concept I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around, though I suppose Tiamat and Bahamut exist to be glorified by at least some of their scaled kin. And an article on familiars redressed a balance by playing fair ball with wizards of all alignments. But for me, the chess cover was the best part of the whole package.

3. Dragon #89, Denis Beauvais. I don't know that this issue is especially memorable aside from its cover. There was an article on six special magical shields that I got use out of, a fantastic article for Gamma World on how to develop PC characters who are mutant animals, some other stuff. But some days this is my favorite chess cover for the encased brain; on others I prefer the barely visible cadavers of issues #83 and #86 staring out at the reader. But there's a twisted omnipotence at work here, where every piece on the board is a virtual pawn, from the actual pawns to the kings and queens -- a sly commentary, perhaps, on the nature of killer dungeon masters.

Retrospective: Shadow in the South

2012-02-14T00:29:00.000-08:00

And so, after all these retrospectives I come to Shadow in the South. It turns out to be a fitting exit point, because here I don't feel like I'm in Middle-Earth anymore. From me that's significant: it should be clear by now that I'm anything but a Tolkien purist. But there has to be a Tolkien "feel" to everything. For all the dramatic creativity displayed in frontiers like The Northern Waste and The Court of Ardor, and even the Harad modules, that strong Tolkien feel has been there. In Shadow in the South, the resonance collapses. I won't deny I had a blast going through it as a player, and even now I can see why: there are evil temples, vile tombs, and enchanted mazes to keep the boldest PCs occupied for many gaming sessions. But the land is fleshed out so artificially that it feels like Greyhawk -- as if someone thew a bunch of hastily concocted cultures at the map and let them fall where they may.

There's also a certain laziness in vision by this point. The peninsula is called The Dominions of the Seven, ruled by lords of Numenorean descent who do their best to keep the shadow of the Storm King at bay. The number "seven" has been obsessed in these southern modules to the point of irritation: Far Harad ruled by a Council of Seven Regents; Greater Harad the Land of the Seven Cities; and now this. It only underscores how ICE is operating outside the geographical canon in a rather cheap way. The territories aren't even clearly defined, the three major cities unremarkable, and the cultural milieus a hodgepodge. Something about these Pel and Drel mannish groups, the Fuina elves, the Mablad dwarves, the Chaialla barbarians... they're all terribly uninspired and I forget the details as soon as I stop reading.

The "shadow" over this peninsula, to be sure, serves up plenty of nasty fun. Evil minions operate everywhere, some openly, others from under rocks, most at cross-purposes with each other. The Army of the Southern Dragon maintains a heavy presence, promising an invasion by the Nazgul Storm King; the Cult of the Dark Overlord, led by four liches, holds the lowest profile and plots (with Ardana from The Court of Ardor) to bring about Endor's destruction; the Priesthood of the Black Hand preaches openly for Sauron, based in a northeastern city which protects dangerous religions on grounds of diversity; the Eyes of Malezar are an army of wights commanded by a vampiric sorcerer; the Slayers a coalition of crude assassins flying fell beasts; and finally (my favorite), the Cult of the Real Fire holds Aluva (Eru) and Malkora (Melkor) in equal reverance, evangelizing every corner of the Dominions with obnoxious dualistic fervor. As a player I was subjected to a lot of this business, and will never forget my ordeal in the House of the Black Hand, where I had to rescue of a woman going under the knife, on an altar below steaming dragon sculptures, and in front of hundreds of brainwashed converts. The tomb of Malezar left scars on my characers too. I did have fun tormenting the Real-Fire prophets and ridiculing the impossible Balance they strive for. All of these minions are given strongholds of impressive design, and if you can forget you're supposed to be in Middle-Earth, you can have a great time with this stuff.

So that's it. From Rangers of the North to Shadow in the South. Thirty-seven modules, about half of ICE's output over a 17-year period ('82-'99). It's been a fun ride, and I honestly wasn't sure where I was going. But my nostalgia is vindicated. On whole, these modules hold up supremely well. They gave me endless enjoyment in my formative years, and still do as I reread them and relive wild memories. I can only hope they are still being used by today's generation of gamers. Even if Tolkien would cringe at a lot of ICE's liberties, I'd like to think he'd be pleased by the ambition -- at very least, by the underlying reverence for his work.

History & Culture Rating: 1
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Retrospective: The Court of Ardor

2012-02-13T00:08:00.000-08:00

More than any other ICE module, The Court of Ardor had a profound impact on my imagination. From page one I was living southern Middle-Earth in daily fantasies -- riding the Mumakani elephants, taking in the republic of Korlan, having passionate love affairs with elves as evil as drow. One thing was clear to me at the time: this sort of thing would never be repeated. The gazeteer displays regions as rich as anything Tolkien ever developed: savage Mumakan, democratic Korononde, imperial Tanturak, reckless Hathor, aloof Taaliraan. All of which would be more than enough, but this entire sandbox is used as a platform for a quest, where the stakes are as high as in The Lord of the Rings: a group of evil Noldor have been trying to destroy the sun and moon since the First Age, and now, in TA 1703, are ready to enact a ritual that will do exactly that; a group of PCs must band together and prevent the ritual, and also ensure that the ringleader of this evil court, Lady Ardana, is killed by the son Morgoth fathered on her.

The ritual that will bring about eternal darkness is the stuff of gonzo pulp fantasy, but it also mines some of Tolkien's best myths.

"On that dark day when Ungoliant and Morgoth destroyed the Two Trees, and Ungoliant had consumed all of the gems of Feanor she later belched forth many -- but they were changed. Instead of the radiant crystals of light they had been, they were dark, in fact they consumed light; they were of unlight. The eight largest of these (each about the size of a clenched fist) Morgoth gave for his cause, and Morthaur conceived a plan: a design which would focus the light-consuming powers of the eight gems in one great burst to drain both sun and moon of light. But the sacrifice of one of the blood of the Valar would be necessary to trigger the gems. Ardana would bear a daughter fathered by Morgoth."

It turns out, however, that Ardana had not only one child from Morgoth, but twins, and the boy was stolen and raised in secret by a guild determined to bring down the Court; he is "fated" to kill Ardana (much like Eowyn was the Witch-King), and the PCs must protect him at all costs.

The mission to save Middle-Earth -- to keep the sun and moon alive, to destroy the gems of unlight, to procure the death of an elven lady who will keep resurrecting the same diabolical plot as long as she goes on living -- is the module's focus, making The Court of Ardor unique. There are always suggested adventures at the end of ICE's campaign products, but here it's a single epic quest, and it interprets the sandbox rather than the other way around. The Court members are some of the most colorful NPCs I've seen in any gaming product, two of them actual demons, and I like the recurring theme of repentant male twins versus their evil sisters. Ardana's children have already been mentioned, and there are also the two Featurs -- the female member of the Court, and her brother whom most believe dead, but is working against the Court from behind shadows, perhaps even with the PCs.

It's worth mentioning the Ardan Decks of Cards. Each Court member owns a pack, which consists of 21 special cards on top of the usual 52. The decks have quite a few magical side-benefits, but are primarily used by the High Lords to communicate with each other far away. The special cards bear the images of the Court members (plus some "dummy" celestial images), and when wishing to speak to a colleague, one focuses on the card with the appropriate image. The male Featur, however, has managed to sabotage the decks by implanting his own image on one of the "dummy" cards which sometimes resembles a mirror, other times showing the same image of his sister's card (the female Featur) -- which allows him to spy on the Court members both ways. The decks can be put to extraordinarily good use, but are also quite perilous in careless hands.

I can't stress enough how effected I was by this module when I first read it. The Mumakan region is so inspired, and while its cultures lie outside the Tolkien canon, they feel not in the least bit forced or contrived. And what's brilliant about the quest is how pliable it is. The very year Ardor was published (1983), Dungeons & Dragons was taking its first steps out of the Golden Age and into the dreaded Silver, where modules began railroading PCs into pre-packaged narratives and foreordained outcomes. Ardor doesn't do that. It lays down the framework, but nothing beyond bare-bones essentials. For instance, the eight strongholds of the High Lords could be necessary stopping points for the PCs, or some of them could, or they could all be irrelevant and just bypassed. If they are used, it's a splendid excuse for touring 340 x 440 square-miles of Southern Middle-Earth and tasting exotic cultures. PCs can visit Middle-Earth's only republic (Korononde), get involved in the lethal politics of Tanturak (whose emperor is an unwitting puppet of the Court of Ardor), mix with the insular elves of Taaliraan, or land in major trouble with the barbaric hordes of Mumakan. The fact is, this module can be used like any of ICE's campaigns, with or without regard for the suggested adventure; DMs can set up camp and get loads and loads of mileage.

History & Culture Rating: 5+
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Last up: Shadow in the South.

Retrospective: Greater Harad

2012-02-12T01:16:00.000-08:00

Greater Harad has become impossible for me to distinguish from the overhaul I gave it. I poured more ambition into this module than any other, and was immensely pleased by the result, but the resulting animal is something a bit different from ICE's "Greater Harad". To put this in context, the year of publication was 1990, toward the tail end of my gaming years -- the last year you could say I was really invested in RPGs in a serious way. As a DM I remember wanting to design a complex campaign, and to push myself into places I hadn't gone. Greater Harad turned out to be just the sandbox I needed for an epic plot involving prostitution cartels, demon-trees taking over a sunbaked land, and a sorceress with ambitions to resurrect the "glory" of an old age. Not only did the exotic cultures feel just right for what I needed, this southern region was outside the canon; so I didn't have to worry too much about slaughtering Tolkien with my wild ideas.

Greater Harad, or the Seven Cities of the Sirayn, is set up as

"... the intellectual and economic hub of Southern Middle-Earth. Although Near Harad boasts the magnificent naval port of Umbar, and Far Harad shelters the dazzling trade center of Bozisha-Dar, Greater Harad eclipses them both with the size of its population, the extent of its lands, and the rigors of its history. Many dynasties have risen and fallen as kings attempted to control this verdant strip of earth... The breadbasket of the south, the lands of Sirayn are a prize worth holding. Even the Dark Lord and his minions scheme to control the area."

The culture of the seven cities is surpassed only by the elves and Numenoreans, and resembles somewhat of a cross between the Umayyad dynasty of Spain and imperial China (the geography, meanwhile, evoking northern Africa and the Middle-East). For all its sophistication, however, it's a grim land where the proverb "one may have peace or freedom but not both" is proven time and again. The eastern port city of Tul Harar is the only place where citizens are truly free, a melting pot governed by a Gathering of Speakers; the other six cities are each ruled by a dictatorial Tarb, and at intervals throughout Harad's history, the Tarb of Tul Isra actually rules all the cities (except Tul Harar). By far the most compelling city (to me) is the one in ruins after TA 1457, and displayed on the module's cover: Charnesra, built from marble and sandstone, brought down by treacherous ambition, and now a base for underground cults launching suicidal sting operations across the land.

So inspiring was Angus McBride's cover piece (I love the serpent-head on the Tayb's visor's helmet), in fact, that I knew instantly it would be the focal point of my campaign. I came up with a sprawl situated in TA 2856, that started PCs in Tul Harar and ended them in Charnesra and the surrounding forest of the Sara Bask. I won't get too self-indulgent with the details, but to outline: A prostitution network is being run in Tul Harar by a priestess of the Tayb (the "Silent One") in the Charnesra ruins. Women have been disappearing in Tul Harar, most of them sold into prostitution, but one out of four going to the underground temple to be transformed into demon-trees that are taking over the Sara Bask. The PCs start in the free city at the behest of the Gathering of Speakers, until evidence leads them to race to the Mogholy Dask (a tomb on the coastal cliffs) to obtain an artifact being used to accelerate the perverse transformation. If they survive the tomb, they could be apprehended as they leave, or the artifact could at least be taken from them; or they could escape wholly intact if they're really shrewd, but in any case, they are afterwards diverted to Tul Isra, the lethal capital of the Seven Cities, and where the demon "child" of a sorcerer that died back in the 1600s serves as advisor to the Tarb. After convoluted to-and-fro involving an assassination plot and confused identities, the PCs (if they're still alive; if they've put 2 and 7 and 19 together correctly) backpedal to the ruins of Charnesra, and to an obscene showdown deep in the Sara Bask forest.

All of these sites -- the Mogholy Dask, the palace of Tul Isra, the ruins of Charnesra -- are to me completely unrecognizable as they stand in the module. Especially the Mogholy Dask, which I turned into a five-times fatal cousin of The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, where every bloody room counts. For instance, the six statues in the Hall of Might actually animate into high-level spellcasters, whose replicas are in the next room being healed by a daemon as their counterparts take damage from the PCs; there's also the Chamber of the Mindless Orgy (best left to the imagination); a triple-agent NPC imprisoned in suspended animation; a chapel almost impossible to leave without the benefit of a talisman in another room; etc. As for my version of Tul Isra, it's like being on another planet; the NPCs are outrageous; allies more dangerous than enemies; the city's palace a floral death zone to any member of the animal kingdom.

In retrospect, does the actual Greater Harad measure up to everything I gave it? I'm not sure. I glance through it today and I see my own product; on closer examination, I think to myself, "That's all ICE could do with this place?" Then on other pages I see the same loaded potential I evidently saw back in 1990. The seven cities compel even as they cry for more flare. The layouts have a wonderfully inspiring aesthetic, but a lot of their contents (before I got to them) are woefully stale. It's a module I have a hard time being objective about; in the end I follow my gut feeling for high marks.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: The Court of Ardor.

Retrospective: Far Harad

2012-02-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

I have a complicated relationship with the quartet of modules set in Southern Middle-Earth. The Court of Ardor is truly outstanding, and Greater Harad is something I made outstanding (or so I like to think), while the other two dance around the lackluster: Far Harad is just there, and Shadow in the South, for all its muscle, a jumble of artificiality. Yet if you had asked me back in the day, I would have rhapsodized about all of them almost as much as Ardor, and quite sincerely. In retrospect, I was more inspired by the ideas behind them than their actual content. My friend and I got good use out of them, but it's painfully clear now that the best parts came from us.

Far Harad, in particular, is surprisingly barren for an exotic region. It could have easily been the MERP equivalent of TSR's Oriental Adventures, standing on the vision of a distant alien culture with harsh codes of honor and shame. But none of this is fleshed out significantly beyond the impact of religious myths. There is the sun god Vatra, not warmly received by Harad's people, who scorched the lands into desert. This was in fury over his wife, the moon goddess Ladnoca, who had turned against him for slaying her father. She is the common object of worship, and the coastal capital of Bozisha-Dar is named after her ("Gift of the Goddess"), despite its cosmopolitan outlook which pits it against the tent-city of Tresti leagues away. Aside from this dynamic, there isn't much meat on the backbone of Far Harad; almost nothing about the desert nomads outside urban areas.

I do appreciate the module's base value. It's almost an archetypal sandbox (and literally), with little plot to it; the Council of Regents has been ruling stably in Bozisha-Dar for the first half of the Third Age (the time period is 1640), and will continue doing so until the savage Sun-Lord dynasty takes control (2194-3019). There's no conflict outside vague tensions between the capital and Tresti, but it's a perfect set-up. I can think of many TSR classics I'd use in Far Harad -- The Lost City, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and certainly Tomb of Horrors, to name a few. There's something about deserts that lend to pulpy D&D scenarious; I also approve the catalog of native wilderness creatures: sand devils, ghoul-like lesinas, sand drakes, and best of all, the Razarac ("Destroyer") which is basically a desert Balrog.

The mapwork delivers with about as much enthusiasm as the rest. Detail focuses on the city of Bozisha-Dar, particularly the mansions held by the seven regents which have some admittedly eye-catching design: the House of the River's Breeze (built of white marble pillars and no solid walls) run by the Lord of the Port; the Mansion of the Moon (with windows barely translucent by day, but funnel moon- and starlight perfectly), held by the Ambassador to Tresti; the Palace of Water (a popular site of entertainment) for the Water Minister; the House of Warcraft (resembling a desert fortress) where the Commander of the City Guard resides; the cleverly constructed Nomad's home (stone overhangs being fashioned in the shape of desert tents) supervised by the Watcher of the Caravan Grounds; the Palace of the Wood (mirroring the exotic flora of the Forest of Tears) run by the prestigious Ambassador to the Foreign Powers; and the Soul of the Desert (a microcosm of the Harad territory) for the Ambassador to the Nomads. For campaigns involving political intrigue these areas can be put to aesthetic use. But beyond this, and an overview of the sacred tent-city of Tresti, few areas are sketched out. All in all, Far Harad sits like an unfinished product; either the author lost interest, or he just didn't know what to do with it.

History & Culture Rating: 2
Maps & Layouts Rating: 3

Next up: Greater Harad.

Retrospective: Corsairs of Umbar

2012-02-11T00:08:00.000-08:00

If I were grading these modules purely on the basis of aesthetic, Umbar would go down worst. The cover art is primitive, the inner work crudely presented, and the writing lazy; there are even entire paragraphs copied verbatim in different sections. I realize this was ICE's first stab at Middle-Earth, but you'd think results would have been better for it: first impressions count. Ironically it was a late purchase for me; I had trouble tracking it down, and finally located a used copy around the time Dunland and Fangorn were hitting the stores. Its age couldn't have been more plain, though there's something profoundly nostalgic about these old modules from '82-'83. Maybe it's the miniscule type requiring bi-focals or a magnifying glass. Anyway...

In my retrospective of Havens of Gondor, I said that Dol Amroth was the closest thing the Dunedain had on the Grey Havens, and in Sea-Lords of Gondor I floated the benefits of a Pelargir-centered empire. Umbar requires some backpedaling on both fronts. As offensive as it sounds, it is the Corsair state, more than Belfalas, that parallels the Grey Havens. The key to understanding this is the fall from grace, a subject about which Tolkien wasn't fooling around, and made plain that elves were just as guilty as men. The elves shunned the paradise they should have returned to (Valinor) and made their own with the elven rings; men craved that paradise they couldn't have and thus made war on it. Men, in other words, wanted immortality just as elves wanted to be gods of their own creations, and Umbar tows the line of fallen Numenor in the same way that the Grey Havens (and Rivendell and Lothlorien) extend the Silmarillion tragedy. Umbar is nothing less than a microcosm of Ar-Pharazon's "victory" over Sauron, which was in fact the opposite, and molded Elros' people into Black Numenoreans.

By the time of the module's setting (TA 1607), the fallen Numenoreans have absorbed the Corsairs -- some would say that Castamir's legions represent a Third-Age fall, but that's inaccurate -- and this returns me to Sea-Lords. Though I sincerely maintain that a southern Kin-Strife victory might have been best for Gondor, the question is at what cost. More Pelargir means more Umbar, and thus the latter's invidious influences. ICE does a good job avoiding political caricatures, particularly in the oligarchy of six, the Captains of the Havens who rule. I was half-expecting the module to portray the Corsair state as a tyranny of Castamir-monarchs, but it goes a wiser and more complex route. Bitter memory of the Kin-Strife is precisely what keeps an even balance of power in Umbar. The Captains are largely decent, if driven by various passions -- one obsessing a lost wife, another a bon vivant, a female captain with royal ambitions, an effective crusader against dark worship -- and certainly not evil in any Angmarian sense. Yet for all this, there's something subterranean about Umbar. There's bad religion; slavery; a dangerous wizard's guild; amoral merchant families; nobles who would sell their own mother for a greater good; all as if Numenor's legacy has become genetic to the city itself.

Aside from the four-page color detachable of the city (one side) and the region around it (the other), the cartography of Umbar is crude as hell. The six tower holds of the Captains are laid out, as well as their castles outside the city -- all very hard on the eye. The Lair of the Dark Worship is also scrawled up, and offers some classic adventure beneath sea caves. A catalog of ship designs leaves the city's naval superiority unquestioned: Corsair raiders, coast patrols, slavers, and merchants; Black Numenorean progs, catamarans, and palanrists; Haradrim galleys, merchants, and "lively winds". (Though it would have been nice to see these drawn.) Umbar is a rather unappetizing product, but one I'm oddly attached to for its seniority, and the way it kaleidoscopes the fall of man.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 2

Next up: Far Harad.

Retrospective: Sea-Lords of Gondor

2012-02-10T00:12:00.000-08:00

At the risk of sounding like a Castamir sympathizer, Sea-Lords defines the character of a nation better than any other Gondor module. There's even a part of me that thinks the Dunedain would have been better off if the south had won, though that's a matter of very ugly debate, and I personally wouldn't support someone like Castamir anyway -- anymore than my characters did. Bigotry in all forms is benighted. Yet there's no denying the Golden Age under Gondor's four ship-kings, and the benefits to a southern capital with a naval focus remains an open question. Sea-Lords of Gondor has the wisdom not to answer it.

In keeping with the spirit of all these modules, it simply presents the facts for DMs and players to mold however they wish. The era of the ship-kings (840-1149) saw Pelargir functioning as the nation's capital in all but name, the home of the royal fleet, and a colonial ambition that ushered in success and peace never again enjoyed by men in the Third Age. What killed Gondor's prosperity was the shift from a seaward focus to a landward one, especially by the 1300s, coupled with a morally enlightened thinking favoring allies over colonial subjects. Minalcar was a good man, but a highly questionable king in sending his son to wed a Northman princess; from that point, racist fears of a polluted line were all it took to cement the more substantive charge that the royal court at Osgiliath was failing its mandate. Which in some ways it was.

The characters I regularly played in Middle-Earth were a product of the Kin-Strife (1432-1447), and one in particular was a fighter from Calenhardon: a rabid Eldacar-zealot who became conflicted after seeing Pelargir for the first time. I wasn't too philosophical about the matter back in those days; I just thought it fun to run a PC with volatile allegiances. But his Castamir complex turned out very believable; we're often attracted to that which repels us. In hindsight I see his sudden affinities with the southern cause similar to the apostle Paul's conversion to the Christian sect he persecuted so violently, or the abrupt 180-degree turns of murderous fanatics like Sadhu Sundar Singh. Pelargir had that weird sentimental effect on him.

As for that City of the Faithful, its four-page display is beautiful, and if the contest between it and Minas Anor were determined by ICE's mapwork in these modules, I'd pronounce Pelargir the capital at once. It's built on a triangular plan at the junction of the Sirith and Anduin, the Sea-Lords' Tower claiming the center on an isle where the Lord of Lebennin (often the Prince of Gondor) resides. In the southern quarter is the Hall of the Faithful, which I had fun designing in more detail, the sacrosanct building containing statues of Numenor's greatest men, Second-Age relics, and the Glass Hall of with an inlay of the White Tree. Then there is Minas Daldor which guards the mouth of the Anduin, ruled by an insane bard believing himself to be a god ("The Dark Fire of Numenor"). This fortress is cleverly designed, with hallways and furniture that get bigger the further one proceeds. To the northwest of Pelargir is a haunted tor infested with semi-aquatic rodents, and the lost treasure of rebels who fought against Castamir during the civil war. It all conveys a feeling that the sea-lord province somehow wears on you after a while, that pride and ambition yield rebellion and madness... and perhaps, in the end, that's the answer to our question.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Corsairs of Umbar.

Retrospective: Havens of Gondor

2012-02-09T00:44:00.000-08:00

This module takes the trophy for Gondor. Not the mightier Sea-Lords boasting the glory of Pelargir, nor the capital Minas Tirith which rightfully holds pride of place; not even the esoterically haunting Minas Ithil. Havens tops them all -- and even its cover is a slam dunk. I can hardly think of an image more saturated in haunting loss. The inside jacket puts Amroth's tragedy into narrative:

"King Amroth turned, his tearful eyes glistening in the diffused moonlight. No one else dared brave the storm, yet he stood there, arms outstretched, at the stern. He looked like he could fly. Cirdur hung on to the ripping sail as the swan ship pitched again. Suddenly, as he desperately screamed to the king, the great bell in the Seaward Tower tolled. Even across the miles of roaring water, the notes drowned out his last pleas. Then a wave blasted him against the rail. The salt water filled his nose and bit at his cheeks, stunning him with punishing force. Cirdur did not know how long he lay there -- it didn't seem long -- but as he rose to his knees, he saw that Amroth had gone. He cried."

Thus the cliff-city of Lond Ernil became Dol Amroth.

But my admiration for Havens of Gondor isn't shared by many -- or at least it wasn't back in the '80s. The sales clerk at my local comic store dismissed it as an empty product, and a college friend opined it was the most disappointing thing ICE had published to date. But I think this sentiment owed, at least in part, to the impatience for Gondor's famous cities (Pelargir was just around the corner, and the two Minases more distant), and I admit I sort of felt this way myself. But I quickly fell in love with the Belfalas region. It was a segment of Tolkien's world I knew so little about at the time, and was awed by ICE's delineation of its elvish heritage, relative independence, and strange aloofness from the dirtier politics of Gondor's other provinces. I read this module and wanted to walk the cliff-heights of Dol Amroth, sail the white ships, and visit the elves of Edhellond. I was intrigued by the half-elven blood of Dol Amroth's princes (from TA 2004 onwards), and by Galadriel's influences resonating from the Second Age. These weren't the Grey Havens, but they did feel surpassing in a way I couldn't put my finger on.

The module is light on layouts and really has no "dungeons" to throw players against, though I was accustomed to designing my own dungeons (or using TSR's) for Middle-Earth sandboxes anyway. Havens of Gondor is a cultural gazeteer, above all, and a compelling one. And the mapwork isn't quite as dire as I heard it decried. Dol Amroth, at least, impressed me enough to make it the one place in Middle-Earth I'd choose to spend my retirement. The Seaward Tower on the city's western cliff is singled out for special treatment, and I like how Galadriel built it to commemorate the Last Alliance, infusing it with the power of Nenya "so that none but the Valar can bring it down". The elf-haven of Edhellond is fairly presented, split in two parts, one above on a hill exposed to tasty sea breezes, the other below in a hidden harbor where its magic swan ships are kept. To this day I still have fantasies of growing old by the Belfalas coastline, frequenting the Lost Elf tavern, mixing with men and elves, and staring out to sea where that immortal king drowned searching his lost love.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 2

Next up: Sea-Lords of Gondor.

Retrospective: Gorgoroth

2012-02-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

It may not reveal the Barad-dur, but oddly enough, I didn't want another Dol Guldur; I wanted something fresh, and that's what Gorgoroth delivers. Ostigurth is probably the closest ICE ever came to Erelhei-Cinlu, where if you behave yourself and look right (in this case mannish), you can wander about the city without being hunted down like a dog. And just like Vault of the Drow's aching resplendence -- those purple glows and phosphorescent "moon" are burned in the minds of all old-school D&D players -- Ostigurth's Tower of Blood is "a fortress of both spectacular horror and terrible beauty", its crimson skull-shape overlooking the city with burning eyes. No other place in Middle-Earth, not even Minas Morgul, has the deathly ambience of Ostigurth, yet in a disturbingly civilized way. This is a place for DMs to populate with torture parlors and bordellos, and where mannish captains hold forth at expansive banquets, while just down the road hundreds of corpses roast on public pyres. The city teems with life by thriving on death, and offers, I believe, more creative opportunities than a killer-repeat of Dol Guldur. For more standard fare, there are orc and troll complexes outside the city walls.

The Barad Sereg ("Tower of Blood") made a lasting impression starting right away at the entrance. The double doors preserve the remains of the previous Mouth of Sauron, who apparently trespassed where he was forbidden:

"When the doors are opened, the man screams in agony, for he feels the pain of being torn in half and dying. Upon closing the doors, he magically comes back to life, only to wait for the next time the doors are opened. His screams will alert anyone nearby to the presence of guests. While whole, he retains the ability to speak, along with his personality and memory."

Then there are the Nine Thrones of Gorgoroth, on the third-level audience hall, which at the command of their respective Nazgul cause victims to -- turn into a wraith (the Witch-King's), quiver on the floor in terror of a dragon illusion (Khamul's), be cursed with lycanthropy (Dwar's), turn to stone in sunlight (Indur's), be struck with a lightning bolt (Akhorahil's), be struck with an ice-cone (Hoarmurath's), suffer excruciating pain when talking (Adunaphel's), be struck with a fireball (Ren's), and take on the facial features of a mule (Uvatha's). The City of Blood in many ways prefigures Minas Morgul, and even after the move in 2002, one or two Nazgul always remain based here.

Speaking of which, complete histories of the Nine are supplied, showcasing some of ICE's finest scholarship. I always wanted the stories behind these mannish kings, and the 15-page treatment serves as a virtual seminar on the subject. It made me want to see modules set in far-flung places like Waw, Dir, and Chey, where the Ringwraiths carved out kingdoms of brutal terror. I did, however, have reservations about the way some of the Nazgul go back to resume their tyrannies in the late Third Age; they seem to have accomplished their eastern and southern missions by the time the Watch on Mordor is abandoned. But the timelines are easy to modify, and for the most part I kept them clustered around Mordor after 1640. Best of all are the Ringwraiths' personas emerging from the bios; they are all extremely compelling, though my personal favorites are Dwar the Dog-lord (for his impoverished origins, unlike the other eight elites) and Adunaphel the Silent (as I love a woman who knows to keep her mouth shut). And while we're still on the Nazgul, Angus McBride's cover art remains supreme after all these years, especially the volcanic background...

Which brings me to Mount Doom. Sauron's forging complex is more than I expected, and unreachable to all but the most resourceful players. Concealed behind the Crack is, first, a chasm with the illusion of a Balrog extending its tongue all the way over from the other side. Beyond this lies Hojatskatur, "the Hall of Hell", a shrine dedicated to Sauron's achievements, and containing astounding artifacts like the actual Sceptre of Numenor. From this room a stair descends for over 600 feet, interrupted by five platforms every 100 feet or so where a riddle must be answered to continue down. These riddles are the hardest part of the dungeon, difficult for even Tolkien scholars; my friend guessed only the fourth (Carcharoth the werewolf), though came close to the second in a weird way (Glaurung, which was his guess for the first riddle, instead of the correct Thuringwethil). Failure to supply correct answers results in obscenely lethal traps that don't bear repeating... though I'd be remiss in not reliving my sadistic glee at a PC's internal organs exploding into fire for botching riddle #3.

Gorgoroth was a product worth waiting for, and I've only scratched the highlights. Many more sites are mapped out: the Barad-wath tower overlooking Nurn, occupied (from 1640-2000) by the Eighth of the Nine; the Isenmouthe gate complementing the Black, held (from 1652-2000) by the Fourth; Minas Durlith, the only fortress of Mordor to withstand the assault of the Last Alliance. And there are dozens more NPCs besides the Nazgul: the Mouth, old players from Angmar and Dol Guldur, and new ones just as bad.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Havens of Gondor.

Retrospective: The Tower of Cirith Ungol and Shelob's Lair

2012-02-07T02:40:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most striking thing about this module is its advocacy of restraint in deploying the great spider:

"Shelob does not attack everyone venturing into her lair, for if she did, no sane and fresh beings would come. She exacts her ghastly toll on perhaps a quarter of those merely passing through; of course, the longer one roams Torech Ungol scooping up treasures, the more likely is a disastrous encounter with Her Ladyship."

This is a lesson killer dungeon masters like myself needed to heed more often: sometimes the best approach is messing with PCs' minds and allowing them to loot unscathed. For one, they won't believe their luck and be constantly on guard against the worst; two, it pays off in future encounters when they do let their guard down. Shelob's lair pays dividends even when her majesty stays off-stage: there are hatcheries swarming with young spiderlings, refuse pits more nauseating than a Siberian toilet, and larders where live prey are suspended upside down from the ceiling. Half of these victims are just as well destined for spider feed (the orcs and trolls), and all are 80% likely to be awake, accentuating the horror of the place. It's one of those rare dungeons where a tense monstrous presence is felt at all times, however real or imagined.

Anyone sauntering into Shelob's Pit itself, however, is in for the reality of pure hell. It's a 500-foot diameter cavity ringed by a narrow ledge, which her majesty will do her utmost to knock intruders off, and send them bouncing down a quarter-of-a-mile slope to the center of the floor. Where lies "a mass of bones, possessions, rotting flesh and filth so vile as to stagger the imagination and send anyone with a constitution less than 90 [15 in D&D] into a fit of violent retching", treasure exceeding 50,000 gp, and a number of powerful magic weapons. All of this (naturally) has a 50% chance of contracting looters with a fatal disease, assuming they can even escape, which is terribly unlikely given the 85% likelihood of Shelob being found here.

The rest of the architecture delivers as it should: the Tower of Cirith Ungol with its eleven levels, and two orc dens in the Morgai Vale. The tower is held by Gondor in the module's time frame (1640), and unlike Minas Ithil, on which such a period was criminally wasted, here it's ideal. It's classic Keep on the Borderlands, in fact, with the lone bastion of Cirith Ungol raising a precarious fist against enemy incursions from Mordor. A Gondorian tower between two orc holds offers more potential than an orc tower between two orc holds, and of course Shelob doesn't distinguish between either side. But for those running campaigns post-2000, the tower is easy enough to convert by substituting Gondor soldiers with orc.

Shelob's Lair was one of ICE's earliest modules and shows the influence of early TSR adventures. I had loads of fun running it against members of a college gaming club... and her majesty, it turns out, never had to make an appearance.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Gorgoroth.

Retrospective: The Teeth of Mordor

2012-02-06T09:12:00.000-08:00

Planting a Nazgul at the Black Gate was a shrewd move on ICE's part, and until the capture of Minas Ithil makes The Teeth of Mordor as forbidding as Carn Dum and Dol Guldur. Dwar, "the Lord of Dogs", was always my favorite of the Nine for his Conan baggage. The son of a fisherman who watched his father die at the hands of brutal invaders, and who made vengeance his life's mission, is ripe for Ringwraith conversion, and there's more than a little irony in the fact that one of the PCs I flung against this fortress was a barbarian with similar issues. The Morannon has plenty of baggage itself, or at least by my revisions; I got creative by investing it with a "split-personality", as if Carchost and Narchost were a fossilized Demogorgon whose two heads strive to dominate and kill each other. Alas, I don't remember this idea coming across too well in game play, and in the end had to enjoy my abstract perversities as a private joke.

There is some question as to when Dwar occupied the Teeth, and this module puts it relatively late: "It is not until 1980 that light returns to the windows of the Morannon: dim red lights like demon eyes to stare unsleeping across the Dagorlad." This admittedly fits cleanly into Tolkien's timeline, where the Witch-King comes to Mordor the same year and vaguely "gathers" the other Nazgul. But in later modules like Gorgoroth, Dwar moves in as early as 1656 -- only sixteen years after Gondor's abadonment -- perhaps to provide a bigger window of opportunity before the Nazgul launch their war on Minas Ithil and take up residence in the city. It's the more liberal interpretation, and not surprisingly, the one I prefer.

The layouts magnify the miniscule, like those in Weathertop and Halls of the Elven-King, and again it's a shame this fortress series never went far. On the western end, Carchost the "Fang-Fortress" has the obscene interrogation chambers and perverted chapel run by an ancient priest. But the astrologer captain Krusnak steals the show (in my fantasy), as he schemes to bring down Dwar whom he worships but envies. He wants nothing less than to become the Third of the Nine, and one out of four evenings actually believes he is the Dog-lord. He plots to obtain the ring of power he believes Dwar has in his possession (clueless that Sauron keeps the Nazgul rings during the Third Age while the One is lost). I made him recklessly unstable, though one of Sauron's most efficient inquisitors, and his derangement contagious; at night the tower's soldiers go on mindless rampages, terrorizing the wastelands at the back of Dwar's hounds -- joined, every fourth evening, by the "Dog-lord" himself.

Over at the eastern leg, the real Dog-lord, for his part, tolerates this insanity, while storing up wrath to rend his astrologer limb from limb. Narchost the "Fire-Tower" mirrors the structure of Carchost, but "has its own personality" given by ICE, and which I revved up to the nth degree. The volcanic fissure makes Dwar's audience hall a harrowing encounter area: a throne set in front of the crack, on a stepped platform of black glass, with access to the platform via a narrow bridge arching over liquid rock, and everything in the room obscured by smoking black-red shadows. I got a good chortle landing PCs in that scalding inferno and reduced to near impotence. As for Dwar himself, he's as hate-driven as Krusnak is insane, but intelligently controlled, and this manifests in the Fire-Tower's highly disciplined soldiers so unlike their wild cousins a few hundred yards across. Only their brutal efficacy, and Sauron's high esteem of Krusnak, keeps Dwar from razing Carchost to the ground.

The Teeth of Mordor is a fond memory for all the weird energy I put into it. If it didn't come together quite right, it was still roaring fun to get so much mileage out of my favorite Nazgul -- "both" of them, for that matter.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: The Tower of Cirith Ungol and Shelob's Lair.

Retrospective: Dagorlad and the Dead Marshes

2012-02-06T08:02:00.000-08:00

This module isn't half as good as its cousins, Bree and the Barrow Downs and Erech and the Paths of the Dead; in fact it's the least impressive of the eight adventure modules I'm covering in these retrospectives. By rights it should have been a smash. The marshes outside Mordor are plagued by the uniquely damned: corpse candles, casualty-remains of the Last Alliance, covered with illusions to appear whole, lurking in the water, beckoning awfully; corpse lanterns, larger and more lethal versions of the corpse candles; and swamp stars, the hypnotic lights which lure victims to quicksand pits and other bog-snares. These fascinations, regretfully, are given fleeting coverage in favor of hugely dull sites. Where the towns of Bree and Sarn Erech integrated perfectly with their looming horrors, Caras Gwindor feels contrived, and the Dead Marshes just don't scare us enough to care. I wanted suffocating underwater networks, and got Tol Malbor instead.

Not even the stronghold of Thuringwathost is enough to mitigate Dagorlad's shortcomings, much as it tries. Founded in 1592, and commanded by a sorceress who doesn't look a fraction as old as she really is, it lies on the southeast border of the marshes guarding the approach to the Black Gate. No one wants to be taken captive here, to be sure, as the lady is exceedingly cruel, reports directly to Dol Guldur, and has a nasty cleric on hand who takes great pleasure in vivisections. Yet for all this color, the place feels wholly uninspired. As for the bandit hideout in the middle of the marshes, Tol Malbor (the "Isle of the Golden Fist"), its design is as fine as it goes, but again there's the issue of extraneity. And the bandits aren't as juicy as they let on, having authority issues and baggage common to most outlaws, nothing more. Their hideout boasts little beyond an abundance of snare traps, and while their activity of preying on farms and caravans can be worked into a decent enough plot, it's all ultimately a top-heavy exercise in a module that should be focused below the marshes rather than above them.

Yet even from above Dagorlad fails. At the very least I was expecting to see the safeways taken by Gollum guiding Frodo and Sam, but they aren't to be found. There is the Gondorian fortress of Tir Nindor, built in the 1200s to protect the nearby town of Caras Gwindor. A marsh settlement is also presented, with background of the primitive Marshmen culture. As mentioned, Tol Malbor is the bullseye, reachable only by boat, and Thuringwathost the focal point of evil on the outskirts. Amongst all this ancillary rubbish, is there anything striking to say about Dagorlad? Not really, no. There is, at the end, a burial mound infested with ghouls -- tacked on as an epilogue, of all things, when this sort of thing should have been commanding center stage.

History & Culture Rating: 2
Maps & Layouts Rating: 2

Next up: The Teeth of Mordor.

Retrospective: Minas Ithil

2012-02-04T17:19:00.000-08:00

First things first. This product is a blatant case of false advertisement, so much that I almost wrote a scathing letter to ICE when I bought it. Its cover broadcasts a winged Nazgul, promising the horrors of the 2002-3018 period, and just because it's not called Minas Morgul doesn't mean the unwary can't be fooled. City modules are large (not to mention expensive), and there's no reason why both the Ithil and Morgul periods wouldn't both be covered -- in the same way that Isengard accommodated both Gondor's and Saruman's occupation of Orthanc, and that Moria included the Balrog horror. Packaged in plastic back in the day, there was no way to skim through and see you were getting shafted. Everyone wanted Minas Morgul. To reiterate my frustrations about Minas Anor, there's only so much detail required out of a "friendly" city for gaming purposes, and to pass up the opportunity of mining every nook and cranny at the Tower of Black Sorcery borders on incompetence. We thus end up with the curious embarrassment of one city module that falsely advertises with its title ("Minas Tirith") and this one which criminally misleads with its cover, an implicit acknowledgment on ICE's part that its choice of the 1640 period was less than wise.

That being sincerely said, I came to appreciate Minas Ithil once I got over my fury. The city is more interesting than Minas Anor, for me because of the similarities to the more soft and scholarly culture of Arthedain:

"The Tower of the Moon, introspective and peaceful, stood opposed yet complementary to her warlike and robust sibling across the Anduin, Minas Anor. The royal businesses of commerce and government took place at the Tower of the Sun, while Minas Ithil housed the mind and soul of Gondor... Minas Ithil was a center for artists, scholars, and philosophers from all Mannish lands. The Queen of Gondor ruled the city and the lands around it, using the wisdom gained through the Moon-tower's palantir to maintain order within the Morgul Vale."

I adore the Rynd Paramhyrrath in particular, run by a fascist head librarian who throws people out on a whim, and where priceless works from Numenor, dangerous theories about the Kin-Strife, and untranslated scrolls in Black Speech are stored, and of course inaccessible to most. There's more excitement to be mined here than even in Minas Anor's libraries, and it's not just the contents that make it more compelling. Minas Anor tends to approach the arts and scholarly endeavors as investments and ornamentations more than anything: "While Anorian artists are busy painting portraits and building busts to commemorate their patrons, those of the Morgul Vale are experimenting with light and perspective to find new ways to view the world."

In the aftermath of the plague, Minas Ithil is ruled directly by the queen just as the new capital at Minas Anor seats the king, and while Mirien didn't live as long as her record-holding husband Tarondor (1636-1798), she had a solid reign nonetheless (until 1727), and so the module has about a century's leeway of applicable time period. For that matter, with few alterations, it could be used until 1856, when the city becomes mostly a garrison town. Fascinating is that legal authority counts for rather little in Minas Ithil, with political power coming from oratory skills and honorific status. High charisma and master-manipulating skills get you far here. As in Minas Tirith, the building layouts are vast and anorexically precise, though again it feels like so much effort being expended on so little. The Tower of the Moon is obviously essential, as is the Queen's Palace, and the University, and the arena for popular entertainment, and few other noteworthies, but most of this is just stuff DMs don't need drawn out. I'm probably in the minority in preferring the architecture of this city over Minas Anor's famous hill which grows out of the back rock; Minas Ithil's main road winds up and around in complete circles, yielding seven "levels" in effect, but blurring together more seamlessly.

I'm not going to pretend that Minas Ithil's appeal can mitigate the crime of standing for what should have been Minas Morgul. But for its purpose it does well, and in the long run warms my heart more than Minas Tirith, which is very ironic considering how much I cursed and gnashed my teeth over it.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Dagorlad and the Dead Marshes.

Retrospective: Minas Tirith

2012-02-04T00:08:00.000-08:00

All roads may lead to Minas Tirith, but I'm divided in mind about the city-module approach. It's a vast achitecture of the mundane, which on the one hand is rewarding on an esoteric level, but on the other overwrought for gaming purposes. There's only so much detail required in a "friendly" city, and Gondor's capital could have been satisfactorily covered in a campaign-sized treatment. If this sort of painstaking detail is really required, I'd rather see it applied to a sordid cesspit like Tharbad, a crown jewel like Annuminas, or a primitive wild thing like Edoras. As it is, we got Minas Anor and Minas Ithil. Intuitively they may be logical choices, but more is really less in their cases.

It's worth discussing the cover first, which is a splendid Angus McBride piece, but falsely pitched. The module isn't set during the War of the Ring, nor at any time when the city was called Minas Tirith. Like most ICE modules, it follows the aftermath of the Great Plague, and thus when it was Minas Anor, and which is in fact what it's referred to throughout the text. Admittedly this ends up not mattering much, since the city doesn't change drastically throughout the Third Age. The stewards take over in 2050, the White Tower of Ecthelion is aggrandized in 2698, the White Tree dies in 2852... But it's still a cheap trick, and foreshadows the outrageous stunt pulled in the next city module which leaves my piles burning to this day.

The 1640 period is an interesting time for Minas Anor, as it just became Gondor's capital, but that's really all that carries by way of dramatic tension. It's a seven-tier sprawl of the commonplace, and the module tacitly admits this upfront:

"Minas Anor is, all things considered, a safe place within the empire of Gondor. It sits somewhat smugly below Mount Mindolluin, its citizens well protected, and casting disparaging glances at the folks of Minas Ithil in Mordor's old shadow, or the people of the coastlands that suffer the depredations of the Corsairs. Nothing threatens the capital, for the Sun is still high in the heavens and there is no sign that anything is imminent."

Well. I'm not surprised I got very little use out of this product as a DM, even for campaigns that required visits to the city.

But for what it's worth, the four-page color insert displays the city's seven tiers, while the other side features a color map of the surrounding provinces of Anorien, Ithilien, and Lebennin. Within the module's pages are all sorts of buildings laid out in unprecedented detail, though I remain underwhelmed by it all. The only places that really grab me are the libraries on the fifth level, the houses of healing and halls of the dead on the sixth, and of course the royal bastions on the seventh. Objectively I have to give Minas Tirith high marks for this layout work, as it excels in what it sets out to do. But despite its colossal ambitions -- it's 160 pages and the only hardcover module I ever acquired for any RPG -- it's something I could live without if I really had to.

History & Culture Rating: 2
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Minas Ithil.

Retrospective: Erech and the Paths of the Dead

2012-02-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

The second in a trio of undead modules is a major favorite of mine. It stages an eternal moment for the damned who yearn for eschatological liberation, and crave a sympathy impossible to give. The Paths of the Dead have to be the most terrifying place in Middle-Earth seen by any members of the Fellowship of the Ring, and almost as lethal as the Barrow-Downs. I prefer MERP's classification of the undead over TSR's, and this product outlines the hierarchy: ghouls at the bottom, dumb corpses able to inflict disease but not drain energy; skeletons next, much more fearsome than the TSR breed, able to energy-drain, and cause fear and stun; then ghosts, devoid of physical bodies but intelligent and able to drain energy, sometimes even unconsciously; and finally, wraiths or wights, the worst energy-drainers, often spell-users, and able to mesmerize or dominate their prey by force of will. All of these can be found in the paths, especially ghosts -- but that's not all. There are also the weird pukel-creatures that lie dormant and animate in the presence of the living: stone men, rock lizards, granite spiders, stalactite birds, and even "living lightning".

This horror show is the product of oath-breaking, an act which carries devastating consequences in Tolkien's world, as bad as a high-level D&D curse. The treachery dates to the end of the Second Age, when Gondor's primitives (the Daen Coentis) refused to honor the Dunedain and march against Sauron, and the effects were instant: ore veins dried up, livestock died, harvests shrunk, artisans forgot their skills, and women became barren. People who died suddenly walked the tombs of the primitive nobles, tormented by local confinement. The paths thus sweat a despair that feels intrinsic to the place, something self-inflicted, unlike the invaded Barrow-Downs.

They are mapped over a 20-mile stretch under the Dwimorberg mountain, and given 11 major areas, with anywhere from 1-7 rooms per area. The rooms are filled with tombs and cursed chambers, and the City of Sorrow in the middle, with all manner of undead and pukel-creatures around every corner. It's hard not to envision the huge cavern of the City of Sorrow as Peter Jackson gave it to us, though ICE has the undead actually avoiding this place in favor of smaller areas -- the Tombs of the Oathbreakers (populated by the nastiest and oldest of the undead), the Tombs of the Glorious (the resting place of those who died during the Golden Age of the Daen Coentis culture in the mid-Second Age), and the Tombs of the Heirs (the fathers of the oath-breakers). There are more than enough treasures and enchanted items to make attempting the paths worthwhile for PCs, if they can survive.

The second major layout is the fortress of Morthondost built by Gondor between 570-714, which looks over the town of Sarn Erech. There are colorful politics here (geared for the 1640 period) revolving around an incompetent prince who keeps his sister (the true heir to Morthond) imprisoned like a rat, while the fief is ruled by his despotic master-at-arms. Sarn Erech itself is given remarkably thorough detail; the map key even supplies two 1-4 star ratings for every tavern, inn, shop, and professional establishment -- one for quality, the other for price. Finally, there is the ancient site of the hill with the black stone, on which the Daen Coentis swore allegiance to Gondor and would renew that vow at Aragorn's coming. Some might complain that the Morthondost scenario is space filler, but I disagree. The physical torment eating away a Gondorian princess is a microcosm of the spiritual one consuming the vale, and it all integrates perfectly. If I could run only one adventure-sized module before joining the dead myself, I might very well choose Erech and the Paths of the Dead.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Minas Tirith.

Retrospective: Isengard and Northern Gondor

2012-02-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

Isengard is an odd duck, certainly the most disjointed of the ICE modules. It divides its focus between the Kin-Strife and the period of Saruman's residence at Orthanc, and whilst the latter is obviously essential, the choice of the year 1442 is bizarre. I personally find the political intrigue during Eldacar's rebellion fascinating, but it's a wasted esoteric exercise to delve into it here, and in fact, there is no reason why the entire module couldn't have been set in the time of the Rohirrim -- Isengard and the Riders of Rohan would have made a perfect unified product instead of being spread over two. Especially given the layout shortcomings of the Rohan issue.

The irony is that my DM was able to get terrific use out of it, since my characters were products of the Kin-Strife. And he ran me through it a second time by sending my higher-level characters from outside Middle-Earth (Greyhawk) on a mission against Saruman. So I have many fond memories tied up in Isengard as a player. But speaking justly, it's lightweight and doesn't take its mandate seriously. The rich cultural matrices of most campaign treatments are absent; in their place stand fragmented adventure scenarios. The only true selling point is Orthanc tower, which is impressively designed.

The tower's exterior is displayed on a four page color insert, along with all ten levels of the tower, and some rooms can be easily modified to accommodate either a pre- or post-Saruman setting. I.e. The guard rooms on the bottom levels can be for Gondorian soldiers or Uruk-hai. Libraries fill level three (alchemy, language, magical), Saruman's extensive research area on level four, trapped treasuries on level five, while elite guard & guest rooms are on six and seven. And Saruman's quarters -- for fools who would dare them -- take up all of level eight, with the Chamber of the Palantir above on nine. Finally, the roof holds true to Tolkien, engraved with a Rune of Holding that prevents appearing on, or escaping from, by magical means (and which certainly vexed my characters when they tried infiltrating the tower). As for the breeding pits and forges on the dungeon levels, they are rather reminiscent of Dol Guldur, and date from the latest part of the Third Age when Saruman's corruption was complete.

The rest of the module provides layouts for cities and fortresses in Calenardhon, long before it became Rohan: the fortress of Aglarond (later the Hornburg, or Helm's deep), the cities of Calmirie (later Aldburg) and Ondirith (later Stowburg), and the Glittering Caves. None of which has any relation to Orthanc when it matters most, which makes Isengard, ultimately, a garbled edifice. Then too, the layout of Aglarond remains essentially the same as Helm's Deep in Riders of Rohan, but less fine-tuned, confirming that the two modules should have been done as one.

History & Culture Rating: 2
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Erech and the Paths of the Dead.

Retrospective: Ents of Fangorn

2012-02-01T00:33:00.000-08:00

Ents of Fangorn was inevitably a module that couldn't possibly live up to my expectations, and I still try to like it more than it deserves. I'll start with the best part, the cover, which from a glance spells Angus McBride, and of course represents a cherished scene from The Two Towers. John Howe's Treebeard is better, but this one is still very good, and what he's serving up actually points to the next best thing about the module to be found inside, a full description of the ent draughts which I'll get to in due course. The third feature I like is the biographical information sketched out for the elders (Treebeard, Skinbark, and Leaflock) as well as demographical; we learn that there are about 150 ents in Fangorn (around the time of 1640), allowing some 160 square miles of forest area per ent, though there are many more of the wildly hostile Huorns. And that pretty much exhausts my accolades for Ents of Fangorn.

The problem is that less than half the module actually deals with the ents. This wouldn't be such a liability if the product had been called Fangorn and the Borderlands or Fangorn and the Caverns of Pain, and if those other parts were at least good. After all, that's how the Dunland module succeeded so well... though the analogy isn't the best. "Dunland" doesn't set the highest expectations to begin with. "Fangorn" certainly does. After hobbits, ents are the best thing about Middle-Earth, and if you're going to sideline them at all, you'd best have damn good supplements. Dunland's were libertarian elves piloting air-ships. Fangorn's are a Gondorian town and orc cavern, each about as memorable as the shit I took this morning.

And I'm still irked after all these years by the way ICE copped out on the question of the entwives, leaving their fate a mystery. But let me get to the positives. The egalitarian nature of the ents is well portrayed: their structure founded on a premise of mutual respect without a hierarchy of leaders, though elders like Treebeard are looked to as chief advisers; any ent can call a moot to discuss any topic. The draughts are fantastic, and their side-effects on non-ents completely worked out. There is the thirst-quenching fruit draught, causing rapid hair and nail growth and bulgy eyes, and over a long term weight loss and even starvation due to accelerated metabolism; the chunky nut draught, resulting in growth (Merry and Pippin drank this), and after repeated helpings slumber and even coma from the toxic levels; and the vicious herb draught, resembling lumpy molasses, which functions as a healing potion despite its nasty taste, and also a healing salve if mixed with dirt and moss and rubbed over wounds. Like the hobbit fireworks in the Shire module, ent draughts are practically tailor-made for RPGs.

As for the mapwork, there's very little about Fangorn. Treebeard's home of Wellinghall is featured, the only ent dwelling which offers the artificial environment of beds and tables to receive non-entish guests, and not far away the Derndingle where many an entmoot has convened. At the northern border lie the Falls of Mist, used by the ents as a site of celebration and worship, as well as the home of Tolwen, an elf who was seduced by Melkor in the First Age and now resides in Fangorn so the ents can keep an eye on her. Most attention, by far, is given to the lackluster. Such as the Caverns of Pain, a three-level network of orc caverns located just north of the forest in the Misty Mountains, and bedecked with mockeries of Valinor at the entrance. But aside from the nice touch of the withered Two Trees statues, these caves are dull, and something a first-year DM could design using few brain cells. Likewise, to the east, the Gondorian town of Tir Limight is given way too much treatment in a module that cries out for further elaboration of the majestic shepherds of the trees.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 2

Next up: Isengard and Northern Gondor.

Retrospective: Dunland

2012-01-31T00:16:00.000-08:00

Dunland is a package of surprises. Half the module covers the region as advertised, while the other half features sites more interesting: a community of libertarian elves, a mutant dragon's lair, and Isildur's unmarked grave. It's a case of the extras overshadowing the main feature, which turns out to be not a bad thing at all when the latter has only so much to offer. I remember coughing up $12 with less than my usual enthusiasm for an ICE module, and when I read it that night was gobsmacked by Amon Lind.

I don't mean to hold the poor Dunnish clans in contempt, and they're actually given provocative treatment. Their history starts in the Second Age when they lived in Gondor's White Mountains, well in tune with nature and the Valar until they failed in their oath to Elendil. All fifteen clans are described as they stand around the Great Plague period, each with unique character and cross-referenced as to how friendly they are with the others. Six call themselves the Daen Iontis (the "dispossessed" or "betrayed") to show their displeasure with the way their ancestors trusted the Dunedain; their goal is to retake the ancient homeland and drive the Gondorians back into the sea. Two take the name of their ancestors, the Daen Coentis (the "skilled people"), and look to that heritage as a goal to re-attain. The other seven remain more neutral, some on better terms with the former, others with the latter, but it's clearly the Daen Iontis who have the strength in numbers. There is the grim Temple of Justice run by a messianic priest from Dol Guldur, though only the six Daen Iontis clans follow him.

But the elves of Amon Lind steal the show. They are a complete invention on ICE's part, a small group of Noldor who left Eregion in the Second Age to continue their controversial projects without interference or censure. Their hanging fortress in the Misty Mountains is a wonder, with transparent floors overlooking air, and walls containing pipes that play songs inducing a variety of spell effects -- sleep, fear, holding, calm, or stun. Their creations are staggering, and remind of alien technology, especially Sulkano's air boats made with the rare metal Mithrarian which negates the effect of gravity. There are also Elenril's breeding experiments, resulting in what he calls the "weapons" of Amon Lind, human and elvish subjects merged with mammals like snow leopards and lynxes. While these elves aren't really evil, they are certainly laws unto themselves, and their obsessions off-kilter, and there is rarely any disciplinary action taken on grounds of individual freedom.

The mapwork scores well. The town of Larach Duhnnan is as cosmopolitan as things get in Dunland, the center of trade and one of the few places where the clans intermingle. Miles away the Temple of Justice looms as the focal point of propaganda, holding the Daen Iontis clans in its power, and given four levels. The two-page center map displays the Dunnish region and pinpoints the locations of all fifteen clans. The five-level fortress of Amon Lind, suspended on a western ridge of the Misty Mountains, rules the module, and is perhaps the closest thing in Middle-Earth to TSR's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks: one is hit by a true sense of the alien when walking into this fortress. Finally, the mutant dragon Turukulon's lair offers a nasty labyrinth of illusions, quicksand traps, and rich treasure in the spirit of classic D&D. And I like the special bonus of Isildur's grave, known only to the eagles and Gandalf, marked by a White Tree sapling. Dunland contains wonders I simply could never have expected out of a module devoted to a small region of primitives.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Ents of Fangorn.

Retrospective: Riders of Rohan

2012-01-30T00:09:00.000-08:00

I adore this module inside and out. On the outward side, it was Angus McBride's first and best cover piece, spotlighting a bleak culture in an amazing freeze-frame. The Rohirrim are the closest to the Anglo-Saxons or even Norse in Tolkien's world, courageous yet hopeless, "riding to ruin" to embrace that Ragnarok-like annihilation of all that is good. The long defeat runs in their blood, and in this sense they share more in common with the seers and rangers of Arthedain than most would think possible. But where the northern Dunedain are resigned to it, the horse-lords seem to thrive on it. It's as if their history of repeated migrations and awful-odds warfare forged a culture of exultant fatalism, and Peter Jackson nailed this perfectly at Dunharrow, when Theoden calmly tells his men they can't possibly prevail against Mordor's armies: "But we will meet them in battle nonetheless." That's three millennia of the long defeat talking, and I could practically hear Vidugavia and Fram being channelled from the great beyond.

Meaning, indeed, that Riders of Rohan covers more than indicated by its title. It chronicles the complete history of the horse-lords in their three stages: the Eothraim years of 1-1856 (Southern Rhovanion), the Eotheod era of 1856-2510 (the Anduin valley), and the Rohirric time of 2510+ (Rohan). This makes the module exceptionally easily to use anytime in the Third Age. Players can throw themselves into the Wainrider Wars, go against the Balchoth Confederacy, or bare their teeth against the Long Winter after the slaying of Wulf. It's comprehensive in the way more ICE modules should have been; I'll never understand the heavy reliance on a 1640 default setting.

The personalities of famous huithyns like Vidugavia and Marhwini, althegns like Fram and Eorl, and kings like Helm Hammerhand and Theoden are provided, and it's easy to see how the original six tribes became increasingly centralized to embrace a monarchy. Their foes -- whether the Sagath and Logath chariot-riders, the barbarically matriarchal Asdriags, or the Dunlendings -- are the stuff of Bronze-Age barbarity; Rohan's unity was forged in its fires. I particularly like the breakdown of the six Eothraim tribes (totaling 38 clans), and how their ambiguous social order seems benign by Easterling standards but grim compared to other Northman cultures. This work-out complements the Eothraim material in Southern Mirkwood perfectly, without wasteful redundancies.

The mapwork gets a pass but certainly doesn't shine, another reminder of Rangers of the North. That being said, there's some good stuff here, notably Helm's Deep, which is more fine-tuned than Aglarond in the Isengard module. There is also the Juggler's Hall, a shadowy bardic school of "noble" smuggling and other roguish activities. The capital-towns of Framsburg and Edoras are presented for the Eotheod and Rohirric years (Buhr Widu for the Eothraim period was covered in Southern Mirkwood), and Druadan Forest is also showcased with a Wose village and circle of standing stones. The Wain-town of Ilanin is covered, inhabited by mostly Sagath, the closest Easterling outpost to the Eothraim. Finally, the two-page centerfold details the Deeping Coomb, a close-up geographical of the Helm's Deep area and Juggler's Close a few miles south. For my money though, you could almost scrap all of this and still be left with an awesome product. Riders exudes so much resonant culture that it leaves me burning to ride to ruin myself.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 3

Next up: Dunland.

Retrospective: Dol Guldur

2012-01-28T00:09:00.000-08:00

At the halfway point of these retrospectives we come to ICE's crowning achievement. This is the 220-page monster that completely revamped Sauron's abode from Southern Mirkwood, doubling the size, quadrupling the detail -- all of which was fine to begin with, but who complained? Most of these remakes in the '90s were uninspired, but with Dol Guldur ICE not only surpassed an excellent original, it landed the mixed equivalent of TSR's Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Queen of the Demonweb Pits, pitting intruders against fears unfathomable (and unfaceable), and the maia demigod who sat in its bowels. It's one of those once-in-a-blue-moon modules you read and feel utterly sorry for the players in advance, while also laughing your ass off at their foreordained misery. I cringe to think how my characters would have fared in this version; they barely escaped with their lives as it is in Southern Mirkwood's.

This time a complete history of the hill is provided, starting in the Second Age when the sixth house of the dwarves called it home. We also learn the origins of Celedhring: Sauron's student in Eregion, sent to corrupt and curse and wipe the dwarves out. The politics of Dol Guldur are now intricately convoluted, with Khamul the Nazgul commanding the war host and the smiths, the Mouth of Sauron overseeing the Conclave and slave masters. The backbiting between these two, and the lickspittling lengths they go to in order to impress Sauron, are bloody fantastic. Khamul manages to stay on top for the most part, until Gandalf penetrates the hill's defenses in 2850 and learns Sauron's identity -- at which point the Easterling is railroaded by the Dark Lord and put under the Mouth's authority. Only in 2951 when Sauron moves to Mordor, would Khamul be left again in charge of Dol Guldur (with two other Nazgul), a period which provides for "safer" adventuring opportunities. Other "safer" periods are described in the timeline, when Sauron is on sabbatical during the Watchful Peace, or when Khamul is off raising hell in the east or assisting his fellow Nazgul at Minas Morgul. As for Gandalf, his two visits to Dol Guldur (in 2063 and 2850) are described in vivid narrative detail, his exact path to every room and every encounter.

The reworked design is on such a staggering scale I can hardly do it justice. We are now to understand that the original layout in Southern Mirkwood applies only to the period of 1100-1258 (though it was clear at the time that it was meant for the entire post-1100 period), for between 1258-1382 Dol Guldur is hugely expanded. Instead of eight levels, Dol Guldur now boasts a whopping sixteen: three precipices (the upper halls), seven levels (the middle halls), five strata (the lower halls), and the hidden Necromancer's Hall. Radiating out from the seventh level, furthermore, is the Web, a vast network of orc warrens and warg dens extending for miles. The three precipices serve as a constellation of watchposts guarding the upper lip of the volcano, with the Fell Beasts' Eyrie and Clouded Bridge guarding against airborne intrusions. The seven levels quarter all of Dol Guldur's warriors save the common orcs (found in the Web): Uruk-hai on the first level, men on the second, trolls on the third. The fourth-sixth levels remain similar to those of Southern Mirkwood: the fourth is Celedhring's residence with forges and labs, and also Sauron's viewing chamber; the fifth is the residence of the Grimburgoth (the Warlord-Ranger who commands the war host when Khamul is absent), his elite guard, and the foul Black Lake; the sixth is the domain of the Snagagoth (Slave-Master), the thralls' dungeons, torture chambers, and prison cells. Finally, the "central keep" of the seventh level houses over 4000 Uruk-hai and guards three avenues: the tunnels to the Web, the descent to the five strata, and access to the Necromancer's Hall. This last is hidden between the seventh level and the first stratum, and was Southern Mirkwood's original seventh -- the deadliest, unholiest throne room in all of Endor.

Moving way below, the first stratum was the original eighth level, the breeding pits. The second stratum begins the expanded territory, with massive treasure vaults moved from the original second level, as well as dungeons for special prisoners not destined to become thralls up on the sixth level. The third stratum holds the Great Temple; the chamber of the Conclave (an elite group under the Mouth's command) who enforce worship of the Necromancer, and who are charged with recovering the One Ring; and naturally, the residence of the Mouth himself. The fourth stratum is grim beyond words: Khamul's abode (moved all the way from the original third level) where he cultivates a Black Forest of perverted Huorns and other vicious horrors. Finally, the fifth stratum, both the heart and bowels of Dol Guldur, is a single colossal domed cavern of bubbling acids and noxious steams, which Sauron calls home, with side caverns leading to treasures beyond sane imagining.

By my count, this all adds up to over 520 rooms keyed with incredible detail, about 1200 rooms total, and none of that includes anything in the Web. It's the most insane place in all of Middle-Earth to venture into, but then role-players are a pretty insane lot. My only quibble is that the Hall of Many Deaths from the original first level isn't carried over anywhere into the expanded version. That sadistic homage to The Tomb of Horrors was one of the best parts, and I'd sure retain it somewhere if I ever ran this thing.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5+

Next up: Riders of Rohan.

Retrospective: Southern Mirkwood

2012-01-27T00:09:00.000-08:00

Southern Mirkwood is pure classic. Every RPG has its mother of killer dungeons, and in the case of Dol Guldur, the designers went the full nine and enjoyed the hell out of themselves. Take the sadistic commentary on the pit-and-tilt trap from the Hall of Many Deaths:

"Assuming the wily and clever PCs have discovered and disarmed the trap, and are marching across it, thinking themselves truly wily and clever, they may discover to their dismay (unless they are truly wily and clever) that there was a secondary trap, which is the next fifteen feet of corridor floor beyond. The second section of the trap is made of carefully painted paper, resembling very closely the stone of the floor. The paper conceals a pit trap which is actually a chute, routing the luckless victim out a hole in the side of the central shaft of the cone and sending him plummeting to (almost) certain demise nearly 3000 feet below. This section is Extremely Hard (-30) to detect. However, there are artfully carved hand and footholds on the left wall. Only the most wily and clever will discover the Absurd (-70) to detect trap eight feet out on the hand and footholds; three in succession are trapped, which not only flip the wall to horizontal, summarily dumping all creeping across through the paper floor and down the chute, but also triggers the original pit and tilt trap just 30 feet back, no doubt catching a few more cautious adventurers."

I ended up on the receiving end of these iniquities, since my friend bought this product before I, and this was perfectly just since I usually DM'd ridiculously unfair projects like Tomb of Horrors. Still, I regret not ever having the malicious pleasure of inflicting Sauron's terrors upon others.

Many lament that ICE never got around to designing a module of the Barad-dur, but if I had to choose, I'd pick Dol Guldur any day. Mirkwood forest is far more insidious than Mordor's wastelands, noxiously alive as I think of it, and it's also under Sauron's power throughout the entire Third Age. Adventures involving the Hill of Sorcery can thus be set in any time (after 1100), while Barad-dur isn't even rebuilt until 2951. Not only that, the atmosphere of Dol Guldur is one of mystery: the Dark Lord hasn't declared himself yet.

Of course, there's more to Southern Mirkwood than the Necromancer. The Eothraim of Rhovanion are found here (the module is geared, like many, for the 1640 period), long before they acquired the territory of Rohan, in the towns of Burh Widu and Burh Ailgra. Their Easterling foes are also given treatment, tribal Asdriags and Sagaths with fierce customs. Then there is Radagast the Brown, who is far from the senile fool most believe, indeed a force of salvation keeping the Necromancer's influence at bay with druidical powers. Point counterpoint is the presence of the One Ring which has blighted the Gladden Fields over the centuries, banishing the river spirits that once existed, turning mud to quicksand, and killing enough morale to cause emigrations out of the area. The Necromancer rightfully steals the show, but the module is faithful to its overall region. Like Hillmen of the Trollshaws it stands as a model which ICE should have followed more often, offering a major dungeon that pays off big-time with all the sandbox auxiliaries.

Being Sauron's home, the mountain is worth touring: It starts at the top with a dungeon crawl of impossible traps (the Hall of Many Deaths, the Chamber of Subtle Demise, etc.), blatant shades of The Tomb of Horrors, and keyed with the sadism cited above. The second level finds the orc garrison, along with staging areas, armories, treasure vaults, a nasty demon tomb, and a maze trap. The third is for Khamul, Second of the Nine Nazgul -- his throne room and audience hall, his private and ceremonial chambers, and his unspeakable sacrificial altar; The Mouth of Sauron also resides on this level. The fourth is for the renegade elf-smith Celedhring, with forges and labs, and also Sauron's special viewing room where he gazes out across Mirkwood, brooding, planning. The fifth has a poison lake which eventually feeds into the Anduin River, the effects of which reduce memory and self-discipline; also troll quarters and herb storages. The sixth level is a horror show of torture chambers and prison cells which suffocate spell-casting ability. The dreaded seventh level is the throne of the Eye (where no one in Endor wants to find himself), surrounded by eight guest rooms for the other Nazgul, and Sauron's personal quarters which are rich beyond royal imaginings. And the bottom level ends in breeding pits where Sauron commits the foulest crimes against all manner of living beings. Thankfully I didn't have to descend below the fourth level (the target of my mission was Celedhring's lab), but I didn't escape without facing off Khamul, and it was bloody harrowing.

Southern Mirkwood is one of the true high points of my gaming years. I can only imagine the ecstasy my friend and I would have derived from the incredible remake of the mid-'90s...

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Dol Guldur.

Retrospective: Halls of the Elven-King

2012-01-26T00:45:00.000-08:00

This fortress module atones for the astounding display of incompetence in Northern Mirkwood, and basically pretends that it's the first stab at Thranduil's halls. In a sense it is. The scribbled-up campaign version isn't remotely close to what could be thought of as the seat of Silvan royalty, and I'm not surprised ICE ditched it (along with the author's putrid prose) in a later '90s revision of Mirkwood. By comparison this product belongs in the Louvre. The only thing that grates on my nerves is the first-person narrative style used in the map key, told from the point of view of a Dale merchant who visited the elves. It's a nice try at something different, but memoirs are distractive to a DM who just needs the facts.

Thranduil's abode is now grounded imperatively in the memory of Thingol: "Both housed great halls built under large hills on the banks of a river. Both halls had limited access over the river by a single stone bridge. The borders east and west were protected by rivers, and both were situated in a deep forest." While certainly no rival in size to Menegroth's thousand caves, these halls can still accommodate several thousand elves with a endless water supply from its underground springs, and the appropriate sense of a subterranean paradise is conveyed on every page. The front gate opens by command of song; Thranduil's throne room is subtly lit by torch and lamp, dominated by a throne of oak, the floor etched with floral images native to Mirkwood, its walls with tapestries of "birds and beasts frozen in flight and halted leap"; the feast halls are luxurious; the treasuries staggering. This is all prefaced by a brief history of the wood-elf realm prior to the construction of these halls in 1050-1100, particularly relating to Oropher's dispute with the Noldor, his abandonment of Lorien in the late Second Age, and the way his coming to Mirkwood blended Sindar and Silvan cultures.

Because it's a fortress module (like Weathertop and The Teeth of Mordor), it benefits immensely from the mega-zoom shots of key rooms with detailed drawings. Every anvil, work bench, forge and barrel can be seen in the foundry, every tree pillar in the throne hall, every table and fire pit in the feast hall, and more. The two-page center displays an impressive 3D look at the halls through the outside hills, doing everything possible to bring to life ancient Sindarin architecture now fused with the primitive Silvan. The halls are given four levels (against Northern Mirkwood's pitiful single one), a ground, an upper, and two below. There's an apothecary hall filled with potions that heal more powerfully than anything mannish or dwarven, derived from herbal lore and songs of healing dating back to the mists of time. The weaving hall contains garments of amazing design and function. And of course, there is the wine cellar with flavors unique to Mirkwood -- right above a hill stream that would provide escape for a certain hobbit and group of captive dwarves.

Put simply, these are the Elven-King's Halls as they should have been done in the first place.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Southern Mirkwood.

Retrospective: Northern Mirkwood

2012-01-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

And so we move from the best Tolkien module to the very worst. I don't know anything about John Ruemmler other than as the author of this travesty, written in a sophomoric and exclamatory style, nothing at all like the other ICE writers. "The lowly flea, mass murderer of Mirkwood? Impossible! No, it's true." Or: "Perhaps no creatures in Middle-Earth have tingled so many spines and inspired so many 'Yechs!' of disgust as the Giant Spiders of Mirkwod." Still worse: "Enough of gruesome, loathsome, evil creatures! Consider the mighty monarchs of the woods, the Great Bears." There is also plain incompetence, even silliness, as found, for instance, in this unbelievable description of orcs: "If they accidentally hack off a fellow orc's limb, the injured orc is likely to say, 'Hey, that's okay! I have another!'" Does anyone remember those April Fool parodies in the '80s issues of Dragon? That's what I thought Northern Mirkwood was on first reading.

Unfortunately, the entire module is as bad as the prose, for it doesn't offer much beyond a bare-bones geographical sketch of the region and superficial overviews of the cultures of the wood-elves, dwarves, and the men of Long Lake. There is some useful background here, but not much; it's very possibly the worst Tolkien accessory ICE ever published. That's a double shame considering that it's Mirkwood, one of the grandest icons of Endor. Some might accuse me of a jaded perspective, reviewing this product in between top-notch modules like Lorien and Southern Mirkwood. But frankly Northern Mirkwood is so bad that positioning it between any other modules, no matter how dire, would amount to little more than trying to polish a pile of feces.

The mapwork continues in offenses, though in its favor there is a four-page color detachable that's very well done. Beyond this lies pure failure. First and worst are the Halls of the Elven-King, which are more like TSR's Caves of Chaos, and what's amusing is that the author seems acutely aware of how poorly he represented Thranduil's home: "After reading this one might think that these halls are cold and damp, having perhaps visited natural caves; but this is not true." But declarations of this sort mean nothing, for indeed these caverns do no justice to what the elven structure should look like; on top of this, the rooms are given almost no detail whatsoever in the key. It's no surprise that ICE would later completely redo The Elven-King's Halls in a fortress module (to be covered next). The Lonely Mountain isn't much better. Like Moria it's portrayed with unsatisfying route maps (only the Chamber of Thror is given a proper layout), but Moria at least detailed the room contents. Erebor leaves almost everything to the DM like the Elven-King's Halls. Really the only thing given a proper, detailed layout is the minor tower of Sarn Goriwing. The towns of Esgaraoth and Dale are displayed but not described. If not for the four-page color insert, the mapwork would have gotten a rock-bottom rating of 1. What a waste.

So who is John Ruemmler, and what are his excuses? Oddly enough, he authored Rangers of the North two years later, which for all its faults is a good module. By this time evidently something happened to discipline his prose, if not inspire better architectures. But really, the editor of Northern Mirkwood is as accountable as the author of this fiasco. I'm glad nothing this bad was repeated in future modules.

History & Culture Rating: 1
Maps & Layouts Rating: 2

Next up: The Halls of the Elven-King.

Retrospective: Lorien and the Halls of the Elven Smiths

2012-01-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

My cards are face-up on the table: this is the best Tolkien module ever made, better than even Dol Guldur, and I can hardly begin to enumerate the reasons why. But let me get its single imperfection out of the way, which pertains to the cover. It's an Angus McBride piece, and for the most part fabulous -- save for Galadriel. I don't know what the artist was thinking, but her hair is the long-straight ghastliness of the '70s, and her face looks like a sow. I'll never understand the objections to casting Cate Blanchet in the later films; she was a perfect Galadriel. But this sketch is dire. With that out of the way...

Lorien is a bible for all things elven, and has a joint focus on both sides of Khazad-dum: the Golden Wood and the Jewel Halls. The latter makes this module completely unique in devoting heavy space to a Second Age setting, and I remember breathing the antiquity as a DM; Eregion felt like the equivalent of New Testament times. Honestly, who could pass up the opportunity to visit Ost-in-Edhil during the forging of the Rings of Power? These were the days of the Noldor's last realm, when magic was still unbridled, dwarves were good company, and when Sauron himself, in the benevolent guise of Annatar, "the Lord of Gifts", walked among the firstborn and guided their labors. In these pages, Noldor culture is wonderfully detailed, the personalities of legendary figures like Celebrimbor brought so convincingly to life, and the magic items to be found in the Jewel Halls make TSR artifacts like Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn look like baby toys.

As if these riches weren't embarrassing enough, on the eastern side of the mountains lies the most precious domain out of any fantasy, and where Galadriel wields the power of her elven ring to enshroud it. I gave Nenya's powers a Gygaxian overhaul so its wielder could cause tempus fugit (one week outside = one day inside) or dreamwalk in a 50-mile radius, in line with its protective function; mirror of vision for scrying purposes; and water-breathe & water-walk, create water, wave of water, and part water or cause tsunami once/day, per its relationship to the element of water; plus generic bonuses common to the other elven rings. Nenya is easily my favorite of the three rings; there's something, I don't know, ethereally unnerving about its effects on the Golden Wood (and something Peter Jackson nailed perfectly, despite protests that his cinematic treatment of Lothlorien was too creepy). Vilya heals, and Narya emboldens, but Nenya mystifies with its time distortions and uneasy visions.

The centerfold color map of Ost-in-Edhil rules the module, and many of its buildings are laid out: Galadriel and Celeborn's house (before Galadriel moved to Lorien, distrusting Annatar), Celebrimbor's island house, Annatar's house (where intruding fools can find themselves teleported to the Barad-dur if they're not careful), other houses and outside estates, the council hall & library, fountain baths, inns, and finally, the prized Mirdaithrond, or Halls of the Jewelsmiths, which is to the Noldor what the lower deeps of Moria are to Durin's folk: "Designed by Celebrimbor, it is a strange marvel of architecture, combining a love for nature with a lust to conquer the mysteries of science as the elves know it." This of course is where the Rings of Power (aside from the One) were forged, and the continual production of mighty artifacts is staggering. There is a table outlining all minerals, elements, metals, alloys, and glasses, their value, and their use in enchanted creations. On Lorien's side of things, Caras Galadhon and Cerin Amroth are displayed, keying the high points of the tree-cities: Galadriel and Celeborn's tree palace, Galadriel's mirror, orchards, and fountains.

Worth discussing is the figure of Annatar (Sauron), who in the hands of a good DM can be exploited to maximal effect. In my poor friend's case, the effect was shocking, as he had no idea who "Annatar" was -- any more than I did before buying the module. I kept the secret from him so that he was stunned by the reveal in game play; I think he accused me of inventing a charismatic version of Sauron just to be malicious. It reminds me how much we learned about Tolkien's world through gaming products. (We'd each read The Silmarillion, but the Lord of Gifts evidently didn't make an impression.) Annatar is used so well here, fomenting discord and factionalism among the smiths, like an incarnation of Baal mingling among the twelve apostles.

What can I say? Lorien the module is as unassailable as the Golden Wood itself.

History & Culture Rating: 5+
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Northern Mirkwood.

Thomas and the Gospels

2012-01-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Don't miss Mark Goodacre's Thomas and the Gospels, due out in May. It's a wave of sanity in Thomas scholarship, demonstrating with relative ease the gospel's derivative nature, and loaded with spoilsport wisdom that makes Goodacre so refreshing and necessary in this field. It's also the perfect sequel to The Case Against Q, and just as convincing. I had the privilege of reading a draft, so I know... But here's the Eeerdmans blurb:

"The Gospel of Thomas -- found in 1945 -- has been described as 'without question the most significant Christian book discovered in modern times.' Often Thomas is seen as a special independent witness to the earliest phase of Christianity and as evidence for the now-popular view that this earliest phase was a dynamic time of great variety and diversity.

"In contrast, Mark Goodacre makes the case that, instead of being an early, independent source, Thomas actually draws on the Synoptic Gospels as source material -- not to provide a clear narrative, but to assemble an enigmatic collection of mysterious, pithy sayings to unnerve and affect the reader. Goodacre supports his argument with illuminating analyses and careful comparisons of Thomas with Matthew and Luke."

Of Bibles and Balrogs: Earliest Isn't Best

2012-01-23T01:11:00.000-08:00

Over a year ago, at the SBL convention in Atlanta, I attended a session on reception-history in the Old Testament. One of the speakers made some preliminary comments that struck me. First, when asked why he didn't study history ("what was originally meant") instead of reception-history ("what was later made of the bible"), he replied that he simply didn't have the imagination it took to be a historical critic. But second, and in support of his cheeky comment, is that historical critics -- whether of the historical Israel, or the historical Jesus, etc. -- tend to operate under an implicit assumption: that what is earliest is, somehow, best. And this is silly. The apocalyptic worldview of Jesus and his disciples wasn't necessarily better than, say, the gnostic one of the second century. Not least since Jesus was wrong about the world's imminent destruction... but aside from even the question of mistaken beliefs, visions cry out for reinterpreation lest they stagnate.

So too in the field of Tolkien scholarship. Interpretations of The Lord of the Rings found in film, art, and role-playing games are often blasted for no other reason because they contradict what the author intended. I've been strongly reminded of this lately in the debate as to whether or not Balrogs have wings and/or can fly.

Let me be clear. It is about 99.98% certain that Tolkien's Balrogs were wingless and could not fly, despite continued protests to the contrary. I won't go through every piece of evidence, just the highlights:

(1) When Gandalf confronts the Balrog of Moria, the text speaks of demon's "shadow reaching out like two vast wings". That's obviously a simile, not a description of literal wings. The text goes on to say that this shadowy form of the Balrog "stepped forward slowly onto the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall". The wings here must be metaphorical, poining back to the simile just made. This conclusion can be rather easily drawn from other passages in Tolkien. To wit:

(2) If Balrogs could fly, Melkor would not have needed to try obtaining the secret of flight from the Eagles (see HoME II: The Book of Lost Tales II, The Fall of Gondolin). He would have already had it.

(3) Tolkien wrote of "the Eagles dwelling out of reach of Orc and Balrog" (see HoME IV: The Shaping of Middle-earth, Silmarillion). If the Eagles are inaccessible to Balrogs as much as to orcs, that pretty much puts to bed the idea that Balrogs can fly.

(4) Melkor eventually created breeds of dragons that could fly, and their description bears on the question at hand: "Out of the pits of Angband there issued the winged dragons, that had not before been seen; for until that day no creatures of his cruel thought had yet assailed the air." This obviously means that Balrogs, who existed prior to this time, could not fly. And certainly Tolkien never mentioned later breeds of Balrogs that could.

(5) The following text is often brandished by the opposing side: "The dwarves roused from sleep a thing of terror that, flying from Thangorodrim, had lain hidden at the foundations of the earth since the coming of the Host of the West: a Balrog of Morgoth." But "flying" in this context is an archaic term for "running from" or "escaping". We know that Tolkien often preferred the archaic, for instance when Gandalf cries out to the fellowship, "Fly, you fools!" -- not, obviously, telling them to grow wings and fly, but to haul ass before the Balrog kills them all.

(6) The following passage has wreaked havoc: "Far beneath the halls of Angband, in vaults to which the Valar in the haste of their assault had not descended, the Balrogs lurked still, awaiting ever the return of their lord. Swiftly they arose, and they passed with winged speed over Hithlum, and they came to Lammoth as tempest of fire." (HoME X: Morgoth's Ring, The Later Quenta Silmarillion, (II) The Second Phase, Of the Thieves' Quarrel). "Swiftly they arose" refers not to flying, but to the Balrogs' ascending or climbing out of caverns far below; and "winged speed" is yet another metaphor.

All of this evidence taken together proves, to me, beyond sane doubt that Tolkien's Balrogs were wingless and could not fly. Now, it may very well be that Balrogs could fly in their non-incarnate forms like any other ealar in Middle-Earth, as argued, for instance, by Thomas Gießl (see Other Minds Magazine, #10, Aug 2010, pp 4-12). But that point is so esoteric as to be trivial. Interestingly, Gießl thinks the Balrogs described in point (6) were indeed flying in their incorporeal state: "They flew to Lammoth because there is no reason to assume that they had taken on a corporeal form...since Manwe himself had slain them before" (Ibid, p 11). I somehow doubt even this, but at least Gießl gets the basics right. Substantively speaking, Balrogs didn't fly, and certainly the Balrog of Moria showed no capabilties on this point.

Having settled this matter (though I'm under no delusion the question has been settled in the minds of the opposing camp), let's take it to the next level. Is there anything wrong with giving Balrogs wings, as so many filmmakers, artists, and role-playing gamers have done? Absolutely not. Readers of this blog know that I believe the worst adaptations are those which slavishly follow their source material and hang on the text's every word. This level of faithfulness, ironically, avoids interpretation itself, and usually kills artistic spirit in advance. Going back to the analogy of biblical studies -- "earliest isn't necessarily best"; what Jesus did, the gospel writers saw fit to change; and what the gospel writers decreed, later chruch thinkers upended in turn. This is a natural healthy process. But we need to acknowledge what we're doing. If we like interpretations of Balrogs with wings -- as I certainly do -- we should be comfortable acknowledging our departure from the canon, rather than twisting Tolkien's original meaning to suit our tastes.

I leave you with some artistic interpretations of the Balrog. Click on the images to enlarge, and pay your money and take your choice.

This is my favorite Balrog portrayal of all time, by Flavio Hoffe. But it's obviously not true to Tolkien.

I really like this one too, by John Howe. It's a mighty aggressive wingspan.

This is another one by John Howe, his second swing at the Balrog when working on the films for Peter Jackson. And of course, this is the image burned in the minds of millions of people for over a decade now. That's not a bad thing, even if it has little to do how Tolkien envisioned his creature.

Here's Ted Nasmith, another renowned Tolkien illustrator, and one of the very few to eschew wings. Now, obviously this portrait is faithful to Tolkien unlike the above three. But that doesn't make it the better interpretation. I don't know about you, but I think this one not terribly impressive. (Ted Nasmith is superb with Middle-Earth's landscapes, but not always so with its peoples and creatures.) Put it another way: Ted Nasmith is a great "historical critic" but perhaps not the most outstanding "receptionist".

Here's Stephen Hickman's vision, which leaves the matter ambiguous, doing justice to all the shadows Tolkien harped on, but not boasting the best aesthetic.

This one's curious. It's the cover of a role-playing supplement put out by Iron Crown Enterprises, which clearly avoids wings. Yet ICE assigned the Balrog dreadful flying abilities (as I mentioned in yesterday's retrospective on Moria). Even in the text of the module there is no mention of wings. So here's an interpretation that allows Balrogs, apparently, a magical power of flight (even in their corporeal forms) but not wings.

Retrospective: Moria

2012-01-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

I'll be upfront: I'm not wild about Moria. It's a thorough enough treatment of Durin's folk from their blasphemous creation under Aule down to the Fourth Age, and many things you'd think to ask about their customs, religion, military structure, and women. But it somehow never feels like ICE's heart is in the project. On the other hand, it was a module I remember having very high expectations for, and maybe I just haven't gotten over the letdown. In retrospect it's certainly not bad; it just could have been a lot more. That the dwarven rings of power aren't detailed is an astounding criminal omission -- Durin's, at the very least, demands the same meticulous attention given to the elven and Nazgul rings in other modules.

Moria does score points for its versatile setting: it can be used in any age with few adjustments. Khazad-dum was founded in the misty days of the first, absorbed the tribes of Belegost and Nogrod in the second (the Golden Age of trade with the elves of Eregion), and hit by demonic calamity in the late third. The Balrog period naturally offers the most in terms of dramatic conflict, and the module commendably extends beyond the usual 1640 focus to describe orc tribes (the "fire-ruler" and "slaver" groups), trolls, cave worms, and water-drakes that fill Moria's halls in its time of darkness. It also does well in depicting dwarven technology, such as the elevators, fire wagons, and water wheels that make the mountain kingdom go round. The expected enchantments are also detailed: light stones, watchers (the infamous stone sentinels with piercing gazes), and rune keys like the one on the West-Gate ("speak, friend, and enter"). Those who can overcome these will find a variety of traps around every corner -- chute, dart, plate, spike, steam, pit, wheel -- and the wheel traps are particularly nasty.

Where the module lets down is with its mapwork. On the one hand, the treatment is comprehensive, showing all seven levels and seven deeps, and detailing important areas in the key. The problem is that this is done almost exclusively on route maps, with very few rooms zoomed in with standard dungeon layouts. In fact, those rooms can be counted on two hands: The Second Hall and Durin's Bridge, the West-Gate and Western Entry Hall, the East Entry Hall, the Chamber of Records on the seventh level, the Balrog's Lair in the sixth deep, the Chamber of Teeth in the seventh deep, and the King's Chambers & Armory in the seventh deep. Rooms and areas covered on the route maps are described adequately enough but can barely be envisualized. This contrasts sharply with Mount Gundabad, The Grey Mountains, and Goblin-Gate, which present their mountain cities in the close-up way gamers expect. The Balrog's Lair (formerly the dwarven king's smithy) is a highlight, boasting a hall of enchanted mirrors, the grim hall of questions, and animated dragon columns. And this Balrog can fly, unlike Tolkien's, a departure from the canon I always approved for gaming purposes.

There's certainly enough in Moria to please fans of huge subterranean kingdoms, and the post-1980 material provides rounds of ammunition for DMs to murder PCs under cover of fire and darkness. By rights this should be a module to brandish with enthusiasm. For all its diligence, regretfully, it comes up a bit short. Then there's the cover from the dreadful '70s film, of which it's best I not speak at all.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 3

Next up: Lorien and the Halls of the Elven Smiths.

Retrospective: Goblin-Gate and Eagles' Eyrie

2012-01-21T01:00:00.000-08:00

The best old-school D&D modules managed to pack a lot in short space, and Goblin-Gate reminds me of that effortless economy. First, there's the mountain city of the orcs, spanning close to forty miles; second the Northmen town of Maethelburg east of the mountain range; third the sky citadel of the eagles; and last a giant's isle in a massive lake to the north of the High Pass. All of this in a 40-page module declares its business with little fanfare, and confirms my general confidence in the adventure-sized approach. The eagles' lair doesn't have much to it, and is described in a single paragraph (which I'll remedy below), but aside from this point, the module delivers pretty much as it should.

Goblin-Gate is essentially Mount Gundabad in miniature, with a quarter of the population (around 3000 orcs) but the same infra-structure. The Great Goblin is as nasty as the northern Ashdurbuk, has a pair of warlords on hand just as treacherous and a priest whose sacrificial knife is just as busy. The warlords command gates instead of spires: the Wolf Gate, the Back Door, and (after the dwarf war of 2793-99) the concealed Front Porch that would ensnare Bilbo and the dwarves. Goblin-town itself is classic D&D nastiness, a network of caverns and twisting passages ending in wild feasting halls, torture chambers, and (again like Gundabad) a gladitorial arena where slaves and captives battle hideous creatures for their lives. The layout of the mountain is excellent, with route maps of Goblin-town's three levels, the ice caves above, the fungi caves below. Goblin-town is then fleshed out with standard dungeon layouts for all levels, as well as the entrance areas of the three gates.

The wild card of Goblin-Gate is of course Gollum (during the 2470-2944 period), an invisible predator who hates orcs as much as the Free Peoples, and he can be put to extraordinarily good use. His wretched rock-island evokes pity in a way that always catches me off guard. Here's the bearer of the mightiest artifact of the Third Age, living in the foulest habitat, hate-filled yet craving the company of his kind: "Lone intruders are 90% likely to be ambushed by surprise, but there is only a 20% that Gollum will attack a hobbit outright." The wheels are spinning to any Tolkien fan. To run Goblin-Gate without at least one hobbit PC is a wasted opportunity; DMs can get plenty of mileage replicating the bickering and backbiting dynamics out of The Two Towers, let alone The Hobbit.

After terrors below the mountains comes a ray of hope from above, at Eagles' Eyrie, the impregnable sky-citadel of Manwe's servants. The eagles are fascinating but an ongoing bone of contention. Some complain that Tolkien used them inconsistently to get out of jail free, while apologists rationalize their every move. And of course there's the classic "plot-hole" of them flying Frodo and Sam away from Mount Doom, underscoring how easy it would have been to fly them to the cracks to begin with. It's not a plot-hole at all actually, though the issue isn't as tidy as the apologists think. My view of the matter is this: The free peoples have to fight their own battles as responsible beings, and the eagles, as servants of the gods, can't (or won't) do their heavy-lifting for them anymore than the Valar can (or will). Yet they are permitted (or willing) to intervene in rare cases, mostly for rescue operations -- like Maedhros from Thangorodrim; Hurin and Huor from Dimbar; Bilbo and the dwarves from Goblin-Gate; Gandalf (twice) from Orthanc and the peak of Zirakzigil; Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom. They can also lend help in battle when the stakes are highest -- as they did in the War of the Wrath (which even the Valar joined), and when the Black Gate opened (which by rights spelled the end of the world). So far so good. But that doesn't account for the Battle of Five Armies, which was a pinprick on the map of Endor's conflicts, and which I don't think the eagles had any business getting involved in. I think it safe to say that at the time of writing The Hobbit Tolkien's intuitions on the nature of the eagles were crude at best. Take my philosophical detour for what it's worth. I advise simply treating the eagles as "of the gods" in game play, and remember too that they're not always kind; they feast on the livestock of poor decent people.

Goblin-Gate is a solid installment, and shows that without Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves wouldn't have stood a chance in escaping Goblin-town. Word to the wise.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Moria.

Retrospective: Rivendell

2012-01-20T01:36:00.000-08:00

Only in Middle-Earth can you get an entire module out of an inn without it feeling like a cheat, but even here I'm pushing it. Rivendell may be where great decisions are made and Elrond wields the mightiest elven ring, but it isn't the masterpiece it deserves to be. Yet I can't think of a way it could have possibly been done as outstanding as the Lorien module. Unlike the ethereal Golden Wood or the transcendent Grey Havens, Rivendell is rooted in a simplicity so pure it's almost banal. It makes me regret even more that ICE never got around to the Grey Havens module it promised in the '90s. I would have much preferred Mithlond over Imladris, and to see Angus McBride wrestle with more ineffable visions in his cover art. But I digress.

The vale surrounding Rivendell is a pocket paradise, as it functions according to Elrond's command of the ring. Its powers are completely detailed, and I was so obsessed with the elven rings as a teen that I reworked the properties in more Gygaxian terms (and I always translated MERP statistics into D&D terms anyway). So as I had it, a competent wielder of Vilya could control weather or cause hallucinatory terrain in a 10-mile radius, in line with its primary ability to conceal and protect; heal, exorcise, and restore, fitting its secondary focus on healing; and also fly, create air, gust of wind, and either control winds or cause tornado once/day, per its tertiary relationship with the element of air; plus some generic bonuses common to all the elven rings. Vilya was a definite highlight for me, so much that I entertained scenarios of self-serving characters infiltrating Rivendell to wrest the artifact from Elrond as if that were remotely plausible. Imladris, by rights, is a place of respite, healing, and counsel.

The inn is home to the northern rangers as much as the elves, and of course the seat of the Wise. Stats and bios are provided for many elves besides Elrond: Arwen, Glorfindel, Elladan and Ellrohir, Gildor, more. The surrounding culture of Rhudaur is briefly revisited, and the module works perfectly in tandem with Hillmen of the Trollshaws, and there are suggested adventures involving spying for Elrond in the region. It's also perched on the doorstep of Goblin-Gate for any who want to depart hobbit-wise into the Misty Mountains. As neither an open colony like the Grey Havens, nor a secluded realm like Lorien, Rivendell is hidden yet accessible, but on a small scale to make just finding it a major task, and this is probably the kind of scenario I'd run, with enemies hot on the PCs' heels a la "Flight to the Ford".

The layouts treat fans of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to architectural details so often imagined: Bilbo's suite on the second floor, Frodo's room of recovery on the third, Saruman's guest state suite, the dining hall supported by majestic wood vaults and filled with tapestries and chandeliers, the hall of fire, Elrond's library (one of the most extensive of Middle-Earth, second only to that of Annuminas), and of course the council chambers where the fate of the One Ring was decided. While some gamers would call all of this a wasted indulgence, it's a treat to Tolkien fans, though I have to admit there's something about this kind of approach that overdoes things a bit. I'm sincerely fond of Rivendell, but you'll never hear me rhapsodizing about it.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 3

Next up: Goblin-Gate and Eagles' Eyrie.

Retrospective: The Grey Mountains

2012-01-18T02:30:00.000-08:00

The Grey Mountains are a playground for Morgoth's drakes, and as such they're an endless source of adventure for fools, the mega-experienced, or vengeful dwarves wanting to take back what's theirs and retire fifty times over. I suppose you could say that dungeons and dragons are what the module is literally about, though if we're magnanimous, "dungeons and dwarves" is more respectful of rightful claims. Regretfully, I never got to use this beast, as it was published in the '90s when I was hardly gaming anymore. But I remember wanting to play it very badly.

The dragons of Middle-Earth are twice as lethal as those of classic D&D, and fall into six breeds which I prefer over the rainbow kinds (yes, Dragonlance, I'm looking at you): cold-drakes, fire-drakes, ice-drakes, cave-drakes, marsh-drakes, and rain-drakes; and there are winged variations of the cold- and fire-, able to create local hurricanes just by stirring the air as they fly. The module provides stats and bios for 28 of them, including really nasty brutes like Scatha, Smaug, Ando-anca, Itangast, Throkmaw, and Uruial. And if this menagerie isn't enough, there are also ice orcs, of all things, terrorizing the northern range with a priest-cult more terrifying than its military.

Then there are the dwarves. The module can't seem to decide whether it's situated in the year 1640 or 2589, but of course it's only during later times (2210-2589) that dwarves lived here until crushed by the cold-drake Ando-anca and forced to return to Erebor. There's a real feeling of suspense conveyed by the Norr-dum setting and the splintered society under Dain I, as its about to replicate the tragedy of Durin VI in its final hours. And while the Balrog horror is far more epic than that of Ando-anca, The Grey Mountains is a surprisingly better module than Moria.

The mapwork is generally in top form. In addition to the detachable color map, detailed layouts are provided of Norr-dum (the dwarven capital from 2210-2589), Kala Dulakurth (the ice-orc palace present throughout all of the Third Age), and Celeb-ost (the dwarven smithy founded by the renegade Narvi V in 2086, who went insane and massacred his own colony, and whose ghost haunts the ruins after 2110). The nice thing about dwarves is they're such treasure-mongers that their halls serve as opportunistic dungeons in the classic sense, which of course they become anyway when the drakes drive them out. Two particular dragon lairs are laid out, with treasure and magic items out of a Monty-Haul campaign. Way too much attention is given to the Northmen town of Buhr Thurasig, which ceases to exist by the end of the 1600s, but which for some reason is used as the basis for three adventure scenarios. On whole The Grey Mountains stands as one of the better campaign products of the '90s, and I wish I'd gotten to use it.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Rivendell.

Retrospective: Mount Gundabad

2012-01-17T02:27:00.000-08:00

It might be an exaggeration to call Mount Gundabad the greatest Tolkien module ever produced, but it's certainly one of them, along with Lorien and the Halls of the Elven-Smiths, Dol Guldur, Bree and the Barrow-Downs, Erech and the Paths of the Dead, and The Court of Ardor. At the very least it's the best orc dungeon ever designed, in or outside of Middle-Earth, and true to the spirit of both Tolkien and classic D&D. The Angus McBride cover is my second-favorite in the ICE series; I even had a nightmare as a teen walking into Mount Gundabad's hellish maw.

The orc capital of Endor screams aggression: its triple-peaked structure punches the sky up to 13,000 feet, its interior shelters almost 13,000 goblins. That's a bigger population than Fornost's -- a lot of hate to come pouring out the front maw. But that hate turns inward too, and the seething factionalism within Gundabad provides players with striking opportunities to mess with orcish politics. I'm a long time fan of modules that do this, like TSR's Lost City, where it's practically inevitable that characters will sympathize with (or even join) one of the Cynidicean cults who are at each others' throats. Of course, these are orcs we're talking about, which makes things, well, interesting, though the scenarios are sound. The Free Peoples would have perfectly legitimate reason to help the Warlord of the Cloven Spire, who seeks greater independence from Angmar and would thus undercut the power of the Witch-King. Alternatively, evil characters allied with Sauron could have fun throwing in their lot with the Warlord of the Twisted Spire, who not only favors stronger ties to Angmar and open war on the Dunedain, but gives new meaning to sadism. (I sure as hell wouldn't trust him regardless of my allegiances. Some of the rooms in the Twisted Spire make my stomach hurt.) Self-serving neutral types might opt for the safest course and just back the current Goblin-King reigning from the Great Spire, since the odds are with him and he can offer richest rewards. None of this political intrigue is essential to a Gundabad campaign, by any means, but it does offer excitement beyond hack-and-slash dungeon crawls which in this case invite almost certain death to all but most experienced characters.

The cast of Mount Gundabad is out of a film-noir horror: the Goblin-King Zalg; his sons, mentioned above, warlords Hurog and Bralg, who despise each other worse than elves; the High Priest Karagat, who becomes a giant bat by drinking living men's blood; the Warlock Akargun, a half-orc mage sired by Zalg on a tortured woman; the Spymaster Ghardak, whose true face is unknown; and (my favorite) the masochistic consort Saviga, who thrives on being abused by Zalg but has bardic skills in reserve to keep him at least somewhat charmed. These personalities are set in the usual 1640 period but could be used really anytime between c. 1300 and the fall of Angmar and the migration of the Eotheod to Framsburg (1975-77), which saw a containment Gundabad's power.

When I DM'd this module I remember being taken aback by some of the artifacts to be found here, not least the Ulukai of Morgoth, which is as deadly as the One Ring:

"A huge gem, multicolored and ever shifting in hue, the Ulukai seems to pulse with a horrid life of its own. It is the very essence of evil, embodying a portion of Morgoth's own foul being... From wherever it is concealed, darkness emanates like ever-widening ripples in a pond, engulfing surrounding lands... The possessor acquires the focused will necessary to rule over masses of evil beings, driving them to cooperate in ventures and to reproduce. Focused will differs from domination in that the subject beings retain the power of independent action and individually are capable of betraying their master; they are merely motivated in accord with the ruler's general desires and will be thrown into confusion at his death... In a very real sense, Mount Gundabad exists to perpetuate the evil that the Black Enemy first spawned in Middle-Earth."

The Crypt of Skorg is where the Ulukai resides, and not so subtly evokes the demi-lich's room in Tomb of Horrors; the Wraith of Skorg (the first Goblin-King of Gundabad) is nearly as hard to destroy as Acerak. Gundabad is more than just a beehive of orcs; it's a taloned organ of malignancy.

The layout of the peak couldn't be more rewarding. Right away its unique structure distinguishes itself from most underground caverns which somehow manage to look the same after a while (or at least to players and DMs). The ground-level Drake Gate consists mostly of barracks and stores, plus a huge cavern inhabited by a cold drake to greet intruding fools. There are four rises (levels) to the Great Spire, including the royal maze packed with nasty tricks and traps, the great temple of darkness where blood sacrifice goes on daily, the incredible royal treasury, the throne hall, grim trophy halls, and finally the crypt of Skorg just mentioned. The Cloven Spire has two rises, each of which is divided by a chasm thousands of feet deep, while the Twisted Spire has two rises blending into one, with passages continually ascending and descending. Under the Drake Gate come the pits (or sinks), four levels of them, dominated by forges, craft halls, and particularly foul places like the arena in which captives are forced cruelly to play in "the Games of Gundabad", hideous variations of gladiatorship. The folks at ICE went over and above the call of duty with Mount Gundabad, and I count it a gem.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: The Grey Mountains.

Retrospective: The Northern Waste

2012-01-16T01:25:00.000-08:00

The last campaign module published by ICE is the one most overtly steeped in antiquity. I was dubious when it came out, wondering how you could possibly get 180 pages out of an arctic wilderness, and the general quality of these modules in the '90s didn't inspire confidence. As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised. Despite the title, nothing is wasted here, and the fact that Tolkien provided so little information about the icy north gave the folks at ICE free reins to their imaginations. In this sense the module reminds of those set in the far south, where thinking outside the box yielded wonders.

The Northern Waste could be justly described as an "aftermath of Morgoth", and is given fascinating history involving demons haunting mountain peaks, sled-horde invasions led by Hoarmaruth the Ringwraith, dragons ready to pounce where you least expect, and Morgoth's Well itself into which only fools or the most experienced players descend. There are pockets of hope, to be sure: in the Vale of Evermist, Noldor mystics work the will of Yavanna to heal a wounded land, and at the north pole stands a snow-elf (Nandor) paradise, of all things, kept warm by a shard of one of the lamps from the First Age. Amidst all this, the Lossoth do their best to eke out a living and hold off the terrors of the Urdic invasions. I'd always loved the Lossoth and found their treatment in Rangers of the North disappointingly brief, so was glad to get their full story here. For those who like to play barbarian characters, this module is rather essential.

There's some tasty cultural background on display, for instance in the war customs of Hoarmaruth's minions; they don't even believe in taking slaves and just throw all their captives (men, women, elders, and children) into bear pits for awful entertainment. Then there's more insidious evil, like the Witch-King's blight, extended on sorcerous winds from Angmar and turning Lossoth shamans into undead thralls. The cultures of these snowmen, icemen, and sea-hunters (the three Lossoth peoples) are worked over in great detail, and I'm particularly fond of the song-duels they use in place of violence to keep blood feuds under control: scurrilous insults prized as a high form of art. Readers of this blog know my obsession for various arts of flaming, and the Lossoth song duels are reminsicent of Anglo-Saxon flyting, Black American sounding, and Mediterranean forms of challenge-and-riposte.

The maps and layouts are something of a mixed bag. There is an excellent 17" x 22" detachable color map which is covered by the gazeteer summarizing highlights of notable areas, and again, far more of which than one would expect out of a region called "the northern waste". The layouts of particular sites, on the other hand, could have used much more fleshing out. The snow-elf city of Helloth is hardly detailed at all, though the Noldor Vale of Evermist is adequate. Morgoth's Well is the best of the bunch, a volcanic crater with a schizophrenic feel, its upper circles burgeoning with floral healing engineered by Yavanna's servants, its lower circles still the hellish domain of Durlach the Balrog. Beyond these, there are layouts covering a typical iceberg delving for the sea-hunter clans, a tomb, a haunted iceberg, some general stuff. This is clearly a module that excels for its rich cultural matrix more than its architectures, but so strong on the former that it's a success, and a triumphant last gasp from ICE before it went under.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 3

Next up: Mount Gundabad.

Retrospective: Empire of the Witch-King

2012-01-15T01:24:00.000-08:00

It's fair to say that I was more infatuated with Arnor than Gondor in my gaming days, my campaigns more Angmar-centric than Mordor-focused. And there's something about Carn Dum in its cold, barren isolation that haunts me still. Angmar is a natural vacuum of life and all things joyful, where Mordor had to be fashioned that way. In such a landscape I can easily see a tribe like the Uruk-lugat taking root and thriving: gruesome even by orc standards, in thrall to the rejuvenated and beating heart of a vampire slain back in the First Age, and walking a thin line by holding their shaman in higher reverence than the Witch-King. The orcish and mannish factions on display in this module reek of an obstinate ugliness that goes beyond even those found in Gorgoroth and Dol Guldur, and this contributes to its success as much as any donjon ruled by Sauron's right hand.

The Witch-King is a piece of work, and his bio fills eight pages. I always loved how ICE made him the brother of Tar-Atanamir, and the product of an insidious envy occurring around the inception of Numenor's downslide. His inner circle is a horror show: the Angulion (the sadistic sorcerer who commands in his absence), the five top generals, and the three high priests (one of whom is a renegade elf). The militarized culture of the Angarim (mannish inhabitants of mostly Rhudaurian and Dunlending heritage) is described at length, as well as the various tribes of orcs directly in service to the Witch-King. The priesthood's practices are less about blood sacrifice and more about subtle brainwashing (unlike orc priests who revel in sacrifice), but are to me just as chilling. And the assassin cult under command of the Angulion is a nice touch, rather reminiscent of the Amida Tong from ninja folklore in our world. Special orc communities are also given attention, including the bloodthirsty Uruk-lugat mentioned already, and the brutally efficient Uruk-kosh. It all adds up to a hellish landscape that only a Nazgul could hope to keep under control, and even that imperfectly.

The four-page color map of Angmar (and northern Rhudaur) is well done, but the layouts tend to be rough around the edges. Carn Dum itself is both rewarding and disappointing, its architecture impressive, the details of the rooms' contents surprisingly sparse and leaving much for the DM to flesh out. Sometimes the key provides nothing more than a subject heading for a room ("Ceiling Trap", "Rune of Absolution", etc.) with literally no elaboration whatsoever. Other places of interest include the Tower of Lughilsarik (the Witch-King's secret retreat where he disappears every year to work sorceries manipulating weather and climate), the Lugata settlements of northern Rhudaur (where the hideous Uruk-lugat conduct unspeakable rituals), the town of Litash and its college of evil priests, and plenty of mannish and orcish strongholds.

Empire of the Witch-King is an arousing product, but I wouldn't accuse it of having the strongest aesthetic. This is all the more surprising given that it's a revamping of the first Tolkien module ever published, Angmar: Land of the Witch-King; areas in need of fine-tuning were neglected. (Usually I cover the earliest version module in these retrospectives, but make an exception for Empire since on whole it's a worthy remake.) It doesn't bother me much though; the crude aesthetic even complements the rudimentary feel of Angmar as a nation. Ultimately, I think my assessment of this product is influenced as much by what I brought to it as how it stands on its own, and by the truly awful feelings it engenders when I think of orcs who worship that pulsating heart, and man-priests who suck the life out of their students with litanies of hate.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: The Northern Waste.

Retrospective: Hillmen of the Trollshaws

2012-01-14T01:55:00.000-08:00

For whatever reason, ICE decided to cover Rhudaur in an adventure module instead of a full-blown campaign -- probably because it never asserted itself with any glimmer of promise. Its "height of power" came right after Arnor's split and was over in an instant, declining from the tenth century on. Still, I always thought it deserved better, though can't complain. Hillmen of the Trollshaws does complete justice to the north-central region of Rhudaur and its reputation as the "evil wood", swarming with primitives who despise Dunedain and Angarim equally, not to mention trolls. There's a feeling of spiritual malaise about the area that still creeps me out, and sets a perfect tone for a campaign.

The beauty to Trollshaws is its flexibility. It's suitable for almost anytime before the fall of Arthedain and dissolution of Angmar, whether during Rhudaur's inclusion in Arnor (1-861), its independence as a sister kingdom to Arthedain and Cardolan (861-1349), its subservience as a puppet state of Angmar (1349-1410), or its complete dominance under Angmar (1410-1975). Rhudaur changed a great deal throughout these periods, and the module is designed to show its growth and decline, particularly at the capital of Cameth Brin. The primitive culture of the Hillmen contrasts sharply with their Dunedain overlords, notable for its inflexible rejection of both the Valar and Black Religion of Sauron in favor of ancestor worship, with a particular reverence for ghosts. Of which there are plenty to be found; the Ta-Fa-Lisch (dwarven ghosts) haunt Cameth Brin in the early days before the Dunedain take control. Between the tumultuous politics, an inhospitable land, and the overabundance of Hillmen and mercenaries, it's no wonder the Dunedain of Rhudaur fell so swiftly under the shadow, and the adventure-sized module conveys this with terrific economy.

The layout of Cameth Brin ("The Twisted Hill") dominates the product, and even its early structure is provided for those who wish to get involved with ghosts working in cahoots with Hillmen. After the Dunedain expansion of 166-339, it becomes Rhudaur's capital, though no less ominous, and the look is naturally sinister: "Its base is a steep hill, but from this foundation erupts a tortured outcropping of naked black granite that leans impossibly far over the southern face, as if a sparrow's sneeze would send the craggy top tumbling down". The inside of it lives up to its appearance, with halls of enchanted darkness, surprising traps, and a generally schizophrenic feel that betrays haunted roots underneath an advanced Dunedain architecture, which in turn becomes usurped by Hillmen much later after the Great Plague. The barracks settlement of Tanoth Brin below the hill is also detailed, as well as the nearby town of Talugdaeri. Then there's an exemplary troll lair for those desiring adventure outside of Cameth Brin. Add to all of this the color map of central Rhudaur, and the end result is pretty much what's needed for a solid Rhudaur campaign any time pre-1975.

This wraps up my first stage of retrospectives (Eriador), and I've come to an interesting conclusion so far. The adventure modules tend to rate higher than the campaign, and I wasn't expecting this. Bree and Trollshaws are near flawless, while Rangers and Cardolan, for all their greatness, are marred by certain shortcomings. Whether that reflects a difficulty in living up to campaign-sized ambitions, or a relative ease in excelling when there's less ground to cover, I'm not sure, but what's surprising is that I have mightier memories of the campaign modules; maybe it's just what I made of them. And whether this pattern continues in upcoming retrospectives I can't predict. I'm writing these reviews as I reread the modules, and finding their enduring value not necessarily squaring with my nostalgia for them. Next we'll move into the evil territory of the far north, where nostalgia promises a goldmine...

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Empire of the Witch-King.

Retrospective: Thieves of Tharbad

2012-01-12T02:27:00.000-08:00

The "eighth principality of Cardolan" is an ironic curiosity, steeped in nobility, but saturated in corruption; nominally ruled by the Cardolani king (861-1409) or Gondorian Canotar (1414-2052), but effectively a free city; a riverport that survived almost to the end of the Third Age (2912), long after the rest of Cardolan ceased to exist (c. 1700). It's the closest thing to Lankhmar that exists in Tolkien's world: a decadent overcrowded melting pot so unlike the grand cities like Annuminas, Minas Anor, and Minas Ithil we associate with Middle-Earth -- a point to which we will return shortly. I almost think Tharbad should have been done as a city module, and it probably would have been if the city series had existed at the time. It's fittingly set in the year 1410, during the chaotic aftermath of the Second Northern War, offering scenarios of extortion rings, food smugglers, and all levels of sordid thievery.

The two-page color coded map of Tharbad is essentially the entire module, with certain buildings and sites laid out in more detail. The Gwathlo River divides the city into three parts: the north and south banks, and the island bridging them. The north side is dominated by guilds like the glassblowers, lampmakers, masons, gravediggers, and singers, while the south boasts more educated talents such as guides, scholars, healers, alchemists, and shipwrights. The center island, meanwhile, is the heart of the city, with dockyards on the far west (the oldest part of the city founded by Tar-Aldarion in the Second Age), and the merchant's quarter and its moneylenders adjacent to it. The east side is the high point, and assaults with contrasts: King's Row closest to the center, including the mayor's office and townhouses of the seven hirs (princes) of Cardolan, as well as luxury shops and homes of the richest merchants; this area segues into the commoner's quarter where the city is actually run by servants and artisans; finally, at the far eastern end is Middle-Earth's version of Lankhmar, the poorest quarter of the entire city, a decaying labyrinth of streets swarming with thieves, whores, and drug-dealers. This last in particular, and the corruption of Tharbad in general, forces interesting questions about the supposed incompatibility of Tolkien's "pure" high-brow fantasy with the gritty pulp universe of classic D&D.

This was often claimed back in the day, and the point must be taken to an extent. And of course Gary Gygax despised The Lord of the Rings, and only used creatures like orcs and halflings in D&D to capitalize on pop culture. Aside from a few Middle-Earth trappings, classic D&D is significantly anti-Tolkien and steeped in the morally ambiguous worlds of Conan the Barbarian, Elric of Melnibone, and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. But with enough imagination you can make anything work, and in my strong opinion, pockets of pulp within an overarching highbrow myth isn't necessarily contradictory (even if Tolkien would have been displeased by it). Just the opposite, it breathes sordid reality into a world that's -- let's face it -- too pure for gaming purposes. The MERP rulebook struggles with the problem, for instance, in accommodating spell casters:

"There are two principal dangers that help to restrain the use of magic in the Third Age. The first of these is the Shadow of Sauron -- drawing the attention of the Lidless Eye has led to the downfall of many a spell caster. For gamemasters who want to encourage a restraint in spell casting, Section 15.3 presents a mechanism for reflecting this danger [i.e. every spell has a 'risk factor' for drawing evil attention]. The other danger is the corrupting influence of the use of significant magic for 'non-pure' goals. Unless a spell is cast for the purposes of combatting Darkness or maintaining the Balance, there is a chance that the caster will be corrupted, drawn towards darkness. This is what happened to Saruman -- he used too many powerful spells, too often. Section 15.4 presents a mechanism for reflecting such corruption [i.e. every spell used loosely applies a certain number of 'corruption points' to the user]." (Merp Rulebook, p 70)

Now, as a DM I certainly never imposed these mechanisms on players in Middle-Earth, nor were they imposed on me, but the message is loud and clear: wizards like Gandalf don't go around fireballing and shapechanging as they please; magic in Endor is precious and subtle, and even a threat to one's soul.

What does this have to do with Thieves of Tharbad? Simple. More than any other ICE module, it reminds me of classic D&D adventuring where spell casters do snap away with abandon, and where characters in general are hardly subjected to an omnipresent moral ontology (unless for some bizarre reason they worship a deity who micro-manages their every move). The most compelling alignment in D&D is the chaotic neutral one, which our heroes in the Fellowship of the Ring would find anathema. The amoral leaning, in other words, of barbarians like Fafhrd and thieves like Mouser. They would have been right at home in Tharbad.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 4

Next up: Hillmen of the Trollshaws.

Retrospective: Weathertop

2012-01-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

Weathertop was first in the short-lived fortress series, whose stated intent was "to provide DMs with extremely detailed overviews of individual towers, castles, citadels, and other fortifications of particular note". It's also the best, though that's probably my love for all things Arnor talking. I was so excited when it hit the stores back in '87 that I ignored most of my college assignments that week, and spent time in my dorm room penning an adventure that would require decent characters to steal the Master Stone of the North against their will. The fortress modules cover an amazing abundance of detail in short space that I remain surprised only four were published; three will be covered in these retrospectives.

What can be said about Arnor's bastion? It was everything: the realm's greatest stronghold, home of the High Seer and chief palantir, and strategically situated on holy ground -- all, of course, tragically gone after the Witch-King's army demolished it in 1409. When I first saw Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring and the hobbits were camping at the circle of stones, I thought of what those stones used to be, and got immediate chills. There's potent history here, and the rocks are full of it. The module even traces back to the sacred times of the First Age when the hill was an astrological holy site for the Edain, though the treatment is understandably brief; the focus of the fortress series is on architecture rather than history. For the Third Age, the tower garrisons and civilian populations are detailed for all relevant periods, in particular the military forces supplied by each of the sister kingdoms (Arthedain, Cardolan, and Rhudaur) when Arnor split in 861, and possession of the hill was hotly contested.

The layout of Weathertop is breathtaking, I believe the most thorough treatment of any stronghold put out by ICE with the exception of Dol Guldur. The critical part is of course the tower, and all rooms on all fourteen levels are fully detailed and even given artistic representations so you can tell just at a glance the function and contents of each room. In addition to guard halls and guest chambers are the armories, libraries, alchemical hall, sage's hall, warden's chambers, king's chambers (for when he visits), and the seer's chambers which contain the holiest of holies, the Hall of the Stone. The outer defenses are covered just as diligently: the lower and upper gates, the prison tower, bastions and watches, stables and smithies. It's rare to see this level of detail in any gaming product.

The only weakness to Weathertop is no one's fault, just historic fate. It doesn't exist after 1409, which constrains the time period. The earliest setting for any characters I DM'd for was the Kin-Strife... but that didn't stop me. I just ended up geasing my best friend's Greyhawk characters to pay a visit to Middle-Earth on the eve of the Second Northern War and steal Weathertop's palantir. It was a hell of a ride, and I don't think he thanked me for it.

History & Culture Rating: 3
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5+

Next up: Thieves of Tharbad.

Retrospective: Bree and the Barrow-Downs

2012-01-10T02:51:00.000-08:00

This is the first in a trilogy of undead modules, as I like to think of them, the others being Erech and the Paths of the Dead and Dagorlad and the Dead Marshes. The Barrow Downs straddle Arthedain and Cardolan (though belong more to the latter), while the Paths of the Dead bridge Rohan and Gondor; and the Dead Marshes sit between Rhovanion and Mordor. The neither-here-nor-there geography suits an undead theme rather nicely, and of the three modules this one is probably the most fearsome: the Barrow-Downs would slay beginners in an instant. Wights in MERP are more formidable than their D&D counterparts, their mere presence inflicting paralysis, their touch causing an eternal nightmarish sleep that can only be broken magically. The four hobbits wouldn't have stood a chance without Tom.

There's something primal about Bree and the Barrow-Downs, and not just because it was ICE's first adventure-sized module. It sets a haunting stage: a crossroads village where men and hobbits co-exist, surrounded by ongoing tensions -- bandits on the roads and evil tombs off them. This breathes classic D&D in a way few modules get at so simply, and I'll bet that for many MERP gamers, Bree is among the first places they got started. I never got any use out of it, and I'm baffled as to why. It's aged tremendously well, and in my view holds the near equivalent status of TSR's Keep on the Borderlands, though again, not exactly tailored for low-level characters if the downs themselves are to be attempted.

What really grabs me is the overshadowing power of the wights that goes beyond killing people who just happen to be stupid (or ignorant) enough to not stay away: "The wights are symbols that point to the waning of the Dunedain of the North since the coming of Angmar; men now lack the strength to keep their ancient graves free of unclean spirits." This is a recent phenomenon: only in 1638 were the wights sent from Angmar to animate Arnor's dead kings and princes and make the tombs their home for the rest of the Third Age. The module is set in the year 1700, making the undead presence a fresh wound, and thus primarily a killer of morale. Graphic brutality is fun -- and rituals by which the wights carry victims into the barrows and deck them with jewels in preparation for ugly sacrifice are described here -- but tone is just as important in RPGs, and Bree gets the tone perfect. There's a real feeling of foreboding evil that saturates Bree's atmosphere without going over the top.

The mapwork is completely satisfactory. There are arial views for the villages of Bree, Staddle, Archet, and Combe. The Prancing Pony is notably absent, as it didn't exist yet in 1700. A layout of a typical hobbit-hole is provided, giving the feel of the mixed hobbit-mannish population. Drawings of the barrows display different kinds: First Age barrows, the royal barrows of Arnor's kings (from 1-861), and the barrows of Cardolan's kings and princes (861-1409). These tomb layouts are where the module delivers, no less than 24 of them by my count, each detailing the treasure contents of artifacts, magic items unheard of, powerful weapons, jewels, and antiquated coin. It's a Monty Haul feast for the eyes, but removing any of this stuff without being vilely cursed is the real trick.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Weathertop.

Retrospective: The Shire

2012-01-08T02:59:00.000-08:00

The Tolkien modules of the '90s were mostly a recycling of '80s products, marked by a disappointing change in trade dress and cover design that gave them a more mainstream appearance. In this sense, perhaps, the handwriting was on the wall for ICE's bankruptcy as much as TSR's at this point in time, and if the Tolkien Enterprise fascists hadn't revoked the company's license in '99 for their own reasons, I wonder how long it would have lasted anyway. This isn't to say that nothing good came out of the '90s, and The Shire -- published only four years before ICE's demise -- was long overdue. It's also ridiculously huge, clocking in at 276 pages, but then I suppose Tolkien's brainchildren deserve no less.

Middle-Earth, of course, wouldn't be half as compelling without hobbits, not least because they're so out of place. They're modern English peasants in a medieval feudal world, and The Shire fleshes out the anachronisms: the use of surnames, reflecting common property rights instead of noble; the dislike of politics, and love of meals and festivals around hard labor; and the disdain of artistic imagination and scholarly endeavors, for which Bilbo, of course, was derided as a crank. This is all superbly integrated into the Shire's geography, sandwiched in between Arthedain and Cardolan: "Hobbits have an open, cheerful nature that attracts them to Cardolani traditions -- and most Shire-folk have ancestors born in that country -- but their need for a safer life draws them to the stricter laws and stability of Arthedain." And while not taken seriously by other races, something about their inherent innocence taps into dreams shared by the Siragale elves, Arthedain philosophers, and a wizard like Gandalf, since all of these know distant pasts when people lived in relative peace and without fear. King Argeleb's granting of the Shire in 1601 makes sense in this context (even if it also played into his agenda of weakening noble rights), as well as the subsequent motivations of the rangers to guard the Shire's borders.

Famous hobbits from different eras are detailed, including Marcho and Blancho at the Shire's founding, Bilbo and Frodo during the War of the Ring, and many others. There is a fabulous section on fireworks, a dozen different kinds, and let me list them: backarappers (candles that create small flame), crackers (sudden sharp flashes and noise), dwarf-candles (colors in small fountains with musical hissing), elf-fountains (a myriad of colors spewing with complete musical phrases, with partially formed illusions of butterflies and flowers), goblin-barkers (small fountain effects with repeated growling and barking sounds, often used by hobbits to scatter flocks of sheep), punks (slow-matches that are rainproof), set-pieces (ground-based displays like the flying dragon for Bilbo's farewell party in the book), rockets (air explosions like the flying dragon for Bilbo's farewell party in the film), sparklers (fountain effects of bright sparks which can panic undead), squibs (minor hissing and squealing pops), thunder-claps (booming noises causing stun), and torches (cylinders the size of dagger handles gushing forth plumes of intense multi-colored light). I adore this catalog, and it's a perfect example of the sort of cultural paraphernalia that the ICE modules tease out so well.

The mapwork is first rate: superb color inserts at the center, with a detailed gazeteer explaining all the noteworthies. Then there are migration charts which chronicle the stages of Harfoot, Fallohide, and Stoor movements from the Anduin Vale to Rhudaur and Cardolan (1100s-1150s), then to Bree (1300s), and finally to the granting of the Shire territory in 1601. Overviews of Eriador are provided for both 1640 and 3018, as the module tends to split its focus between these two time periods. Arial views of hobbit villages -- Hobbiton, Michel Delving, Sackville, and Bywater -- are also shown for both time periods, with some interesting evolutions. Most enjoyable are the layouts of famous hobbit holes: Bag End, Tookbank, and Brandy Hall. Bag End is even larger than I would have guessed, though Bilbo sealed off a number of rooms after inheriting the place from Bungo and Belladonna in 2934. The elvish glade of Woodhall (where Frodo enjoyed a respite with Gildor) is a special treat, with its magical wards and specially woven thickets keeping it safely concealed. Also detailed are typical elvish tree villages, and the effects one suffers when attempting to follow an elvish trail in the Siragale: feelings of misdirection, treadmill sensations of not getting anywhere, passing through obstacles (like ravines and dense brush) and emerging up to a mile elsewhere.

If there's a criticism I have about The Shire, it's that it's all too easy to be misled by it and succumb to caricatures of hobbits as happy-go-lucky optimists living without a care in an idyllic paradise. In fact they were Tolkien's quintessentially hopeless heroes, as pessimistic as the other free peoples, their fatalism obscured by an eternal cheer which was the ironic byproduct. Frodo of course was a foreordained failure, ultimately unable to resist the Ring (the cause, not the hero, was triumphant only because of fate's intervention through Gollum), and he, like any hobbit, expected evil to have the final say; as he reminds Sam, reciting as a general proverb, "It's like things are in the world: hopes fail." Sam, for his part, "never had any hope in Frodo's quest from the beginning, but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope". There's something weirdly liberating about the idea that since things must turn out badly in the end, they can only be better in the meantime -- and that's hobbits in a single sentence. While the module doesn't exactly contradict this theme, it doesn't convey it either. I'm not saying I expect heavy doses of philosophy on the "long defeat" in a gaming module. RPGs are about escapism, after all, but herein lies a problem: The Lord of the Rings is the opposite of escapist fantasy, and gaming is about authentic role-playing. To those who feel there's enough of the long defeat in real life, and that we retreat to any RPG precisely to escape it, I counter that Middle-Earth, especially the Shire, isn't the best sandbox for that kind of escapism.

History & Culture Rating: 4
Maps & Layouts Rating: 5

Next up: Bree and the Barrow Downs.

Retrospective: The Lost Realm of Cardolan

2012-01-07T02:21:00.000-08:00

The Lost Realm of Cardolan seizes you right away with its cover. As any collector of these modules knows, Angus McBride was the equivalent of TSR's Erol Otus. But where Otus reveled in psychedelic surrealism, McBride conveyed the solid reality demanded by Tolkien's world which for all its myth served as a pre-history to our own. His artwork, like Otus', had that rare ability to unnerve and fascinate the longer you stared at it. There are veteran gamers who claim they would have never been moved to pick up a D&D product if not for Erol Otus, and I suspect more than a few MERP devotees would say the same about Angus McBride. Since his death in 2007 I've been hoping for a kind of festschrift that compiles his best work... but that's enough by way of praising the cover artist. What about the contents inside the module? They're quite good, as it turns out.

Cardolan is wild territory. On the one hand it exudes a sombre dignity, with sites steeped in more nobility than even Arthedain: the river/port cities of Tharbad and Lond Daer founded in the early Second Age, the burial grounds of the Barrow Downs going back to the First. On the other, its politics and landscape are so chaotic, and the princes such laws unto themselves that the king had effectively little control. It was, in fact, more a smorgasbord of seven hirdoms (principalities) than an actual kingdom throughout 861-1409, that when it fell the princes hardly noticed and just carried on as usual, until forced to pack it in around 1700 and migrate to Arthedain or Gondor. The module is geared for the time of 1642 (soon after the Great Plague and the invasion of the Witch-King's wights into the Barrow Downs), long after the fall of the monarchy, but with a little tweaking could, interestingly, be applied to the Times of Trouble (1235-1258), during the kingdom when civil war reigned and the royal compound at Thalion changed hands no less than eighteen times.

Colorful personalities are detailed, with stats and bios provided for seven princes, best of all the usurping warlord Ardagor, a half-elf/half-troll abomination who hates orcs even more pathologically than men. The historical timeline is well fleshed out and does justice to a very complex nation. In my opinion, Cardolan is twice as tragic (though far less sympathetic) than Arthedain, being a victim of her own obduracies as much as outside influences like Angmar, and this is seen particularly in the fall from its peak of prosperity in the 1100's from which it never recovered. It's really one autonomy within another, with barons often barely heeding their hirs anymore than the hirs ever did their kings. For whatever reason I always saw this sandbox as ideally suited for TSR classics like Castle Amber and Ravenloft (add to that now Maliszewski's Cursed Chateau), as it's easy to imagine haunted castles perched on the frontiers of lawless principalities.

Castles in fact plaster the region, for which there is an abundance of layouts, unlike the sister module Rangers of the North. Most feature the princes' fortress capitals, but there is also the lair of Creb Druga commanded by the elf-troll Ardagor. The more general mapwork, however, is frustratingly piecemeal. The color centerfold displays the Shire to Weathertop along the north, down to the point of Tharbad in the south, which covers three hirdoms and part of a fourth; then there are two single-page color maps, one covering two and a half hirdoms, the other showing one; and it's never clear how the region of Cardolan looks as a whole. To make things worse, there are sloppy mistakes. For instance, the stronghold of Girithlin is referred to as Minas Girithlin on the maps, but Barad Girithlin in the text. While Ardagor's lair is well done, it's not clear where it is located on the arial view of the Creb Durga hillsite. On top of all this, the color-coded map of Tharbad is replicated from the adventure module Thieves of Tharbad (to be covered in due course), which is nice in itself, but without that module the codes mean nothing. Rather amusingly, the confusion from all the map and layout work seems to play into the theme of Cardolan's political confusion, and an extreme cynic might wonder if that was intended on the part of the designers. I'll refrain from offering an opinion.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 3

Next up: The Shire.

Retrospective: Rangers of the North

2012-01-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

The first Middle-Earth module I acquired will always hold a special place in my heart, and it's only fitting that it launches this series of retrospectives. I say this with the deflective irony such an accolade needs, for Rangers of the North has a lot going against it. The cover is appalling, looking more like a magazine ad, perhaps because that's exactly what it was, used on the back of Dragon in the '80s to push ICE's products. The mapwork is also a bit light (which I'll get to in due course) and the detail for Annuminas in its glory days non-existent. But it gets highest marks for its treatment of the most tragic yet uplifting nation of men in Middle-Earth: Arthedain, chief among the three sister kingdoms of Arnor.

The module actually covers the entire history of the Dunedain starting in Numenor, to the founding of the two realms in exile, to the 2000-year lifespan of the northern one. The contrast with the south is captured perfectly: "As Gondor habitually reached for the sword and shield, Arnor looked to the stars and relied heavily on wizardry, lamenting each bloody encounter in song and verse." As one built an empire, the other fragmented and died, but the latter was truly noble, in my view, and of course ultimately produced Aragorn who would reestablish both realms. There's something incredibly haunting about Arthedain which taps into Tolkien's "long defeat" theme -- that evil can't be defeated; any time it appears to be, it's just a temporary holding action -- and the module stirs tragic emotions in this regard. The specter of Angmar is always in the background, the crushing blow of 1975 waiting in the wings.

Arthedain lasted longer than it had any real right to, six centuries after Cardolan went down under the backbiting of its own princes and Rhudaur was swallowed up by the Witch-King. Granted the time it took for Angmar to recover after the war of 1409, Arthedain's endurance is a testimony to the kind strokes of fate as much as to its level-headed monarchs, prescient seers, and vigilant rangers -- not to mention a certain wizard. Gandalf's stats are provided here, along with the details of Narya, the elven ring of fire he acquired from Cirdan, a real selling point of the module. The unique features of the three northern palantiri are also described, and there's even a Fourth-Age scenario premised on the recovery of the two lost seeing stones near the ice-bay of Arvedui's shipwreck.

My enthusiasm for Rangers, however, is tempered by the underdeveloped mapwork. There is a two-page color map of the Arthedain region, on the back of which are city grids of Annuminas and Fornost. Yet no buildings of these capitals are detailed, save the royal library at Annuminas, which is admittedly a treat, as it rivals most any library in Middle Earth. But this is the only major layout in the entire module; besides a seer's observatory, and a couple of towns and villages, that's literally it. Arthedain isn't exactly a region of "dungeons", to be sure, but other things could have certainly been fleshed out. At the time of purchase I resented the fact that Weathertop of all places wasn't covered, though that was later rectified in a fantastic standalone module. There is a nice map of Numenor derived from the one in Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, and the color map of Arthedain is duplicated in black-and-white displaying the lands held by the seven noble families. The layout deficiencies end up not mattering much, at least not to me, in a module whose strengths lie elsewhere, and which deals with such an inspiring nation where rangers watch from the shadows, and scholars are esteemed as soldiers.

History & Culture Rating: 5
Maps & Layouts Rating: 2

Next up: The Lost Realm of Cardolan.

Middle-Earth Retrospectives

2012-01-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

I'll never forget the day I learned that Tolkien Enterprises revoked ICE's license to produce gaming modules of Middle-Earth. This material was nothing less than scholarly, as fun to read as to play, and completely dominated my role-playing years. I would check in at the local comic store religiously to buy every accessory I could get my hands on, and I'm glad I did: thanks to the Tolkien-Enterprise fascists, these things are now collector's items. It's a shame, because they're probably the most academic modules ever written for any RPG. It's as if Tolkien himself had taken up D&D and poured his linguistic and cultural scholarship into the hobby. The irony, of course, being that the high fantasy setting of Middle-Earth is on the face of it so at odds with D&D's pulp fantasy roots, but I never saw a contradiction.

In upcoming weeks I'll be doing a series of retrospectives on these ICE classics from the '80s and '90s, primarily the earlier ones. Most are campaign modules, detailing histories and cultures of particular regions, and providing maps and layouts for various sites of interest; they were typically priced at $12 back in the day. There are also adventure modules, going for $7, and have the same basic format as the campaign but cover more specific sites over less ground. The fortress modules at $6 never went far as a series but were grand, laying out incredible detail of castles and strongholds. And only two city modules were ever published, at nearly $20 each, for which extraordinary detail was worked out, more than for the cities typically presented in the campaign modules. Of course, any of these can go for well over $100 today if you're lucky enough to find one on eBay.

I've divided my picks into eight geographical sections, working roughly from northwest to south: Eriador (7), Angmar & the North (4), The Elven Refuges & the Central Misty Mountains (4), Rhovanion (4), Rohan & the Southern Misty Mountains (5), Northern Gondor & Mordor (6), Southern Gondor (3), and the Far South (4). That adds up to 37 modules for review, and it should be fun looking back on this stuff. Unlike my top 20 list of D&D modules, this isn't a favorites series, but a comprehensive overview of "essentials" adding up to a grand atlas of Middle-Earth. Some are better than others, of course, but all mine Tolkien's world without raping it, and deserve the honor of acclaim rather than the shame of extinction.

First up: Rangers of the North.

Ancient Honor and Bisexual Norms

2012-01-03T03:58:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of essays to jump start the new year:

"Reading Biblical Narrative with Its Ancient Audience", by Philip Esler.

"Paul opposed Roman (bisexual) norms, not gay marriage", by Richard Fellows.

Esler looks at some basic stuff, such as honorably appropriate responses to battle (failed by David in II Sam 10-12)), the bitter animosity between co-wives (causing Hannah to shame Penninah in I Sam 1-2), and other things which in typical Context-Group fashion "wash away modern, Northern Atlantic understandings of what the biblical texts mean and find something very different underneath".

Fellows puts to bed a particular modern western reading of Paul, namely his condemnation of homoeroticism. "When reading 1 Cor 6:9 and Rom 1:26-27, it is natural for us to assume that Paul has in mind the actions of a group equivalent to modern homosexuals -- a persecuted minority who represent about 2% of western society. Rather than having such people in view, Paul is attacking the sexual practices of the majority of Romans, and that these practices can better be described as bisexual and unfaithful." A lot of data in this well-crafted post.

Happy New Year to all.

The 69 Stories of Doctor Who

2011-12-26T03:43:00.000-08:00

Each and every one of them are ranked on this page -- from the crown jewels (5 jelly babies) to the very good (4 jelly babies) to the decent (3 jelly babies), to the mediocre duds (2 jelly babies) to the absolute stinkers (1 jelly baby). There's a good portion on every step of the ladder, as it turns out.

Of these 69 stories, 26 were penned by Russell Davies and 12 by Steven Moffat, which means that over half the stories of the new series were scripted by one of these two men. It's worth contrasting their quality:

Davies -- 0 crown jewels, 5 very good, 7 decent, 7 mediocre duds, 7 stinkers

Moffat -- 4 crown jewels, 4 very good, 3 decent, 1 mediocre dud, 0 stinkers

So it's no mystery that Moffat is a superior writer, but I don't know that makes him a better captain at the helm. His overall vision as producer seems about as strong as Davies'. If we contrast their entire eras:

Davies Era -- 22% crown jewels, 24% very good, 12% decent, 22% mediocre duds, 20% stinkers

Moffat Era -- 16% crown jewels, 37% very good, 33% decent, 7% mediocre duds, 7% stinkers

This confirms what I've always said about the Davies era, that the highs are really high, and the lows are really low, with very little in-between. The Moffat period, on the other hand, hasn't sunk as low as his predecessor's, but there are also less pinnacles, with the weight falling in the very good-middle categories.

My favorite season is actually from Davies (season 2); aside from a couple of lemons, it's near unassailable. Moffat's debut (season 5) would be a close second, however. Davies' last (season 4) is the absolute worst: literally half the stories are duds and stinkers. And somewhere in between these fall seasons 1, 3, and 6. Off the cuff, I'd probably rank the seasons 2->5->1->6->3->4. So I'm certainly not of the mind that Russell Davies was bad for Doctor Who just because he himself wrote shit half the time. I can't even decide between Rose and Amy as the best companion of the new series, so that's another tie between him and Moffat. (For that matter, I can't decide between Mickey and Rory as the beta-male who drives me more crazy.)

I think it's fair to say that the Davies era had a lot of soul when it was on top of its game, but was brought low by kitchen-sink soap opera, silliness, and cop-out climaxes when it wasn't. The Moffat era has rectified these deficiencies, but at the expense of some of the soul -- papered over, lamely, with the recurring "triumph of love" theme. What happened to the Moffat who served up rich characters like Madame de Pompadour and Sally Shipton? What happened to the brilliant emotional power delivered in stories like Forest of the Dead and The Big Bang? This has been lost in his season-six stories, and we had to rely on others -- Neil Gaiman, Tom MacRae, Toby Whithouse -- to be really moved, just as we, ironically, had to rely on Moffat, Cornell, Shearman, Jones, Moran, etc. to deliver the goods under Davies.

Enjoy the list.

1. Blink. 5+ jelly babies. Yes, it's everyone's favorite, and for good reason. It's completely beyond criticism. I can't even nitpick Murray Gold's scoring, as he gets even that right for a change, hitting every beat perfectly. The weeping angels are brilliant creations, the best aliens of the new era, and definitely the most frightening. Most remarkable is the status this story has achieved despite, or perhaps because of, being Doctor-lite. It's a sign of something special when the Doctor can be sidelined for the better, and of course Sally Sparrow is a fantastic character, possibly the best guest performance of the six seasons. Moffat is at his best playing with time paradoxes in Blink, the highlight of course being the DVD Easter Egg scene, as the Doctor uses a copy of the transcript Lawrence is writing to have a conversation across time, which in fact generates the script. And it takes pure genius to cap it all off with a final scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the story, yet everything, designed to make kids afraid of statues.

2. The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. 5 jelly babies. In a way I think of this as my favorite story, since Blink doesn't really count being everyone's favorite. I'll never forget when I first watched the second season DVD set, and this no-holds-barred epic came in the middle, trailing a fantastic werewolf story, a wonderful return of Sarah Jane Smith, a dark fairy-tale, and an amazing reboot of the Cybermen in a parallel Earth. The devil outdid them all in the deepest space where truly no one can hear you scream, stealing shamelessly from Alien, The Abyss, and The Robots of Death, yet never feeling like a cheat. The dread and tension and claustrophobia never let up, with Rose and crew battling Ood on the sanctuary base above, and the Doctor blindly freefalling into Satan's Pit below. We haven't seen the Doctor show down a godlike adversary since he went against Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars and the ancient evil in The Curse of Fenric, and this masterpiece ranks right alongside them. When I finally caught my breath at the end, I remember thinking, "Okay, it's official: we're in a new Golden Age of Doctor Who."

3. Dalek. 5 jelly babies. The story that convinced me of the potentials of the new series is a pure classic. When I'm crying over a Dalek, something unprecedented is going on, and what's mind-numbingly brilliant is the way this episode inverts the legendary Genesis of the Daleks with just as much economy in the span of 45 minutes. The brutally tortured Dalek draws not an ounce of sympathy from the Doctor, who has to be stopped by Rose from blasting it to atoms -- the exact opposite of Sarah who once urged genocide against his pacifism -- all climaxing in a weird "E.T." moment as the creature forms a strange bond with her. If anyone had described the plot to me in advance, I would have dismissed it as a sentimental betrayal of what Doctor Who is about, but Dalek is absolutely transcendent, and the second best Dalek story (after Genesis) in the entire history of the show.

4. Human Nature/Family of Blood. 5 jelly babies. Some consider this the best story, even over Blink, and no surprise. Drama can't go any deeper than making a Time Lord human, taking away his TARDIS, and erasing all memories of his true identity. And it's really a story that only Paul Cornell could pull off so that it plays like something adapted out of high-brow literature. The Doctor makes the sacrifice of becoming human out of kindness (preferring evasion over a grim sentence he's forced to carry out on the aliens in the end), but ends up bringing horror and death to an innocent village. David Tennant gets to show off new acting skills, as he's a completely new character, emotionally vulnerable, and devoid of the flippant sarcasm that defines his role as the Doctor. When the jig is finally up and he refuses to change back into a Time Lord, having fallen in love with a fellow schoolteacher, he delivers a performance so painful, so angry and tearful, that we almost don't want the Doctor back anymore than he does.

5. The Girl in the Fireplace. 5 jelly babies. A creep-show, fairy-tale, and tragedy all in one. It captures the innocence of The Chronicles of Narnia and horror of Pan's Labyrinth to produce something rather unique in Doctor Who, something I wish we'd see more often. Moffat must have had me in mind when writing the spaceship powered by human body parts -- especially the beating heart in the interior smelling like cooking meat -- and the demented robots who believe that a certain woman's are needed just because the ship is named after her. Madame de Pompadour herself is brilliantly scripted, and her love for the Doctor completely compelling despite knowing him for only brief moments throughout her life, since he arrives out of nowhere like a mythical protector. When he comes the final time to find her dead and gone, and her letter waiting, it's truly heartbreaking. This is pure magic, pure storytelling.

6. The Doctor's Wife. 5 jelly babies. Getting Neil Gaiman to write for Doctor Who was a coup, and true to expectations he managed to deliver the most powerful story of the Moffat era. He takes the living essence of the TARDIS, pours it into a human being, gives it voice, and explores its (her) relationship with the Doctor. Idris is a spellbinding character, constantly speaking out of tense as she lives moments of the Doctor's life in non-linear fashion, and insisting on an equal playing field by insisting that it was she in fact who stole him and not the other way around. In a perfectly geeky way, the TARDIS gives the Doctor what no other "woman" can (not even River Song), constant adventure, which he gives her back in turn. When Idris finally has to die and they both start breaking down, I was doing the same. And those aren't even the best parts, which go to Amy and Rory trapped inside the darkened TARDIS robbed of its soul, and tormented by a voice out of hell.

7. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. 5 jelly babies. As a librarian I have to love this one; hell, I dream of planet-sized libraries. The menace is bloody chilling: shadows that kill on contact and strip flesh to the bone, hard to distinguish from the garden variety, and as hard to evade as the weeping angels from Blink. And of course this is where the Doctor first meets River Song, though for her it's their last meeting, and she dies with appropriate tragedy. True, she awakens in the matrix to continue in some sort of metaphysical existence, but at least her demise is permanent on the physical side of things, which is more than can be said for the deaths in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Even if the epilogue waxes schmaltzy, this is Moffat at his best -- the best two-part story he ever wrote, with the first half being a nail-biting horror piece, the second taking us inside the disturbing matrix where Donna is married and has kids and no memory of anything else.

8. Amy's Choice. 5 jelly babies. By far the weirdest story of the new series, an actual nightmare that evokes David Lynch. It finds the Doctor, Amy, and Rory flicking back and forth between two scenarios, one of which they are told is a dream they are sharing, the other reality. To die in the dream will cause them to wake up in reality for good, and to die in reality will cause them to really die; so they must choose wisely. The choice, however, Amy's choice, ultimately boils down to a choice between the Doctor and Rory, and I love the twist that the frozen TARDIS circling a cold star is as much a dream as the idyllic countryside where feeble grandmas are getting whacked by crowbars and thrown off the roofs of houses. The perversity is grand, but at heart the story is ingeniously introspective, a welcome rarity in Doctor Who, and a true work of art.

9. Father's Day. 5 jelly babies. Paul Cornell's tragedy proved at once that tear-jerkers can work outside the cloying sentimentality of Russell Davies' stories. The plot is simple, the resolution predictable, but only in way the tragedy often is; the drama is brilliant, the acting Oscar-worthy. Rose persuades the Doctor to take her back in time to when her father was killed by a motorist, and despite being forbidden to alter the past, she intervenes and saves him anyway, ushering in nothing less than Armageddon. Everywhere on earth people are suddenly assaulted by Reapers (winged creatures resembling Tolkien's Nazgul-steeds), parasites that act like antibodies, destroying everything in wounded time until the paradox is gone. The Doctor nearly disowns and abandons Rose, and it's one of Eccleston's harshest and finest moments. But in the end the Doctor and Rose are closer than before despite (no: because of) their falling out, after the painful lesson that triumph costs.

10. The Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel. 5 jelly babies. Of the twelve stories I consider crown jewels, this one tends to surprise people, but frankly I think it's about as strong as Father's Day to which it serves as a sort of sequel. Not only is this the best Cybermen story of all time (though let's face it, they were never used very well in the classic period), it's before even that a parallel-Earth story, like the Pertwee classic Inferno, in which all bets are off as we get to see familiar faces die (Jackie), others beat hasty retreats when confronted with "relatives" they never knew (Pete), and then a major character from our world choose exile when he finally realizes his girlfriend will always choose the Doctor over him (Mickey). Much as I loathed Mickey up to this point, I had to admit this story justified his existence, and his farewell to Rose was really moving. As for the Cybermen, the Davros-type genius who creates them is a ranting megalomaniac and alone worth the price of admission.

11. Fires of Pompeii. 5 jelly babies. The most ambitious historical of the new series achieves greatness with everything -- drama, comedy, horror, tragedy, time paradoxes, and not a minute of screen time wasted. It tackles the dilemma of whether or not history should be altered to save lives, and the Doctor's struggle to pull the lever recalls Tom Baker's agony over whether or not to change history by committing genocide on the Daleks. The Sibylline Sisterhood is another throw-back to the Hinchcliffe era (The Brain of Morbius), and half of the fourth-season's special effects budget seems to have gone into creating the Pyrovile (stone-magma creatures resembling Balrogs) which the priestesses are hideously transforming into. That the Doctor is the one to blow up Vesuvius and murder thousands is genius, and if you aren't weeping with Donna at the end you're made of stone yourself.

12. The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone. 5 jelly babies. This two-parter is to Blink as Aliens is to Alien: bigger, longer, more; not quite as perfect but still excellent. The weeping angels are back in droves, faced off by an army of priestly soldiers who aren't nearly as equipped as they think. Like Ripley, the Doctor understands the menace better than anyone, though not always quite enough, and the angels have some alarming new tricks, like breaking peoples' heads open in order to reanimate their consciousness. In terms of suspense, I hadn't been kept on the edge of my seat so much since the Ood closed in on the space crew back in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit; and as in that story the body count is high. Amy is in deep trouble, and when on death's door she cries out in a pitifully broken voice, "I'm scared, Doctor," I love our hero's callous retort: "Of course you're scared, you're dying, shut up." Amusingly, when all is said and done, she wants to jump in the sack and fuck his brains out in one of the best epilogues of the new series.

13. Midnight. 4 ½ jelly babies. The best thing Russell Davies ever wrote is by his own admission a low-budget afterthought, asking what would happen if Voyage of the Damned were turned on its head. If the garishly bombastic Christmas special was about feel-good togetherness and people bringing out the best in each other when united against an outside threat, Midnight is about the beast inside everyone bringing out the worst. With the claustrophobic intensity of United 93 and rapid dialogue-fire of Twelve Angry Men, the story succeeds by undercutting the Doctor's hero qualities as he's left at the mercy of an hysterical mob. Opposite Voyage, where his is melodramatic speech about a being a Time Lord makes the ship's passengers obey him without question, now it's precisely his arrogant superiority that shoots him in the ass. The tension and yelling reach a horrifying crescendo as the passengers try to kill him and he's unable to save the day. That's something unique in the Tennant years, and this is a uniquely strong story for Russell Davies.

14. A Christmas Carol. 4 ½ jelly babies. I never wanted to see Christmas specials again after the stream of Davies-fiascos, convinced that The Christmas Invasion was a one-off exception. Not only did Moffat prove me wrong, he did even better with a brilliant spin on Dickens. The sets and lighting with purplish-black hues set a perfect tone, haunting yet mystical, and Michael Gambon as the tormented Scrooge character is as evil as greed gets. And I love how the Doctor is so unethically manipulative in trying to save his ugly soul. It reminds of the Seventh Doctor who tried to save as many lives as possible in carrying out his vendetta against Fenric: there's no reason why he couldn't simply have taken the flask he trapped Fenric in and dumped it in a black hole like he once did with the Fendahl-skull. Ditto here: there's no reason he couldn't have gone back in time to prevent the Starliner from taking off in the first place instead of jumping through hoops to rewrite a man's life on the slim hope that he'll change his mind. Part of me that thinks the Doctor is getting off on using people as pawns, rewriting their lives -- as the Scrooge character rightly charges -- "to suit himself". Brilliant.

15. The Unquiet Dead. 4 ½ jelly babies. A superb gothic story harking back to the Hinchcliffe era, and the first episode that showed promise with the new series. Doctor Who is almost always in top form with period pieces like this one, and Charles Dickens is used splendidly, as a skeptic who becomes more open-minded about ghostly matters on account of his dealings with the Doctor. Of course, the undead corpses stalking Cardiff aren't really undead, but animated by gaseous aliens from another dimension, as they want to reclaim every corpse on earth for bodily existence. The best part is that the Doctor actually aids them in their morbid goal out of pity (after all, human corpses are just corpses), not realizing the aliens' real goal goal to dominate planet earth once they acquire physical existence. The Doctor is amusingly incompetent in this story, and it's up to Dickens to save the day.

16. Tooth and Claw. 4 ½ jelly babies. The second best thing Russell Davies ever wrote is something I still have a hard time believing, as it shows none of his bad traits at all. It's as if he donned the professional writer's cap to prove he could match the previous season's Unquiet Dead, and that's exactly what happened. I'd always wanted to see a werewolf story in Doctor Who, and you can't do better for setting than the Scottish highlands. Queen Victoria is one of the best guest performances of the new series, and the ninja monks are a big bonus too. The monks' agenda is to get the Queen bitten so they can rule the British empire through her, though it's never quite clear whether they're worshipping the werewolf or using it for their own ends. The ending is priceless, when the Queen rewards the Doctor with a knighthood, and then promptly banishes him, "not amused" by his heathen nature.

17. Vincent and the Doctor. 4 ½ jelly babies. This one is as good as the previous two and by far the most emotional. By portraying Vincent Van Gogh as a tormented genius who sees things others are blind to, the story is able to explore artistic insight on both literal and metaphysical levels. It represents the final year of Van Gogh's life quite well, recreating various sites painted by the artist, the paintings themselves in arresting color, and his disturbing fits of manic depression. The theme of vision permeates almost every frame, and on the literal level this plays out in the attack of the Krafayis, an invisible giant bird-reptile that Vincent fends off entertainingly with long wooden poles and armchairs, while the Doctor gets slammed against walls by its tail. On the deeper level, Van Gogh sees things in nature's midst and people's souls. And of course, the ending hits hard: the Doctor brings Vincent to a museum in the present, where the artist breaks down in front of his paintings that are now famous.

18. The Girl Who Waited. 4 jelly babies. This story may wield sentimentality like old-Amy does her sword, but the emotions on display ring true, and it's impossible not to be moved during the scenes between her and Rory. It's completely defined by its title: Amy's tragedy from The Eleventh Hour is repeated, but with infinitely worse results, the simple press of a wrong button costing her half her life. The beauty to this episode is that it does so much with so little; there are no guest characters, just the three regulars; the Two Streams Facility is minimalist as sets get in Doctor Who, but eye-candy just the same with its blinding whiteness and lush topiaries. At heart, the story exposes the Doctor's destructive nature as Amy faithfully waits on him and evolves into a bitter isolated warrior, whom Rory must find the will to kill, and segues neatly into her swan song, The God Complex. Which, incidentally, is just as good...

19. The God Complex. 4 jelly babies. A perfect exit for Amy, not only for trailing her most harrowing experience in The Girl Who Waited, but for crushing her childlike faith in the Doctor. It does this in a tense story about a beast who feeds off corrupted belief in a haunted hotel, where each room contains the worst fears of one individual. Amy faces hers and is liberated, and her farewell at the end is beautiful, the best since Sarah's in The Hand of Fear. Fans might object to me ranking this above Rose's departure, and part of me agrees; Doomsday is an unrivaled tear-jerker. But I ultimately put Rose in a class by herself on account of the exceptional (if unrealized) romance between her and the Doctor. Amy's farewell, like Sarah's in the '70s, delivers so much in simple gestures and looks that speak volumes. There's a real feel in the closing scene that the Doctor and Amy have have become best friends and find it enormously painful to part company.

20. School Reunion. 4 jelly babies. Speaking of Sarah's departure, let's talk of her return. Three decades later, she's spirited and feisty as ever -- and royally pissed that the Doctor never came back for her, prompting an amusingly jealous bitch-fight with Rose. K-9 is back too and in rusty form. Around the fun nostalgia revolves a plot involving batlike aliens who have taken over a school and are turning children into geniuses to help them solve an equation that unlocks complete control of time and space. A powerful concept like this really deserved more attention than serving as a backdrop to the return of old friends, but this is still a very good story, a special one I hold dear like many fans. The Doctor gets in a particularly compelling moment when he considers using the paradigm to save Gallifrey, and Sarah reminds him that pain and loss are essential in the course of evolution. Their final farewell choked me up as much as back in the '70s when Tom Baker sent her away.

21. Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways. 4 jelly babies. For all the garbage Davies cranked out, he went out strong in seasons one and two. This finale is a massive adrenaline rush, a sequel to Dalek (in theme) and The Long Game (in setting), and involves the riotous plot of people trapped in reality television where everything is a game and losers get vaporized. When the Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack play for their lives they discover the outfit is a front for an impending Dalek invasion of earth. This is what I was waiting for when I finally started watching the new series: the sight of zillions of Daleks (who can levitate and fly now, thanks to CGI) balling "EXTERMINATE!" and other horrible mantras, more fearsome than ever for having found religion. The Dalek God is awesome, as demented and entertaining as Davros, and calls forth obsequious devotion from his subjects who go ape-shit when the Doctor interrupts him ("DO NOT INTERRUPT!"). The climax is both fantastic and awful, the latter for involving the intrusion of Jackie and Mickey with, of all things, a trailer truck.

22. Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. 4 jelly babies. This finale is a sequel to The Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, with Daleks thrown in for good measure, and Rose's swan song to boot. It's a Who-fan's wet dream -- the two most popular villains invading earth, and then fighting each other to see who's best -- and remains an example of fanwank that's actually good, completely unlike The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. The appearance of the Daleks caught me way off-guard, and the cliffhanger is one of the best of all time. And I love the Cult of Skaro: four elite Daleks with actual names, designed to think as the enemy thinks. A great moment is when the Cyberleader proposes an alliance with the Cult, is refused, and demands: "You would destroy five million Cybermen with four Daleks?" To which the response, of course, is that they would destroy five million Cybermen with but a single Dalek, for "this is not a war, this is pest control". As apocalyptic as the previous finale, and just as good, with Rose going out incredibly emotionally, knowing she'll never be able to see the Doctor again.

23. Utopia. 4 jelly babies. For purposes of this list, I consider the season-three finale to be three separate stories, not only because a new plot launches at the beginning of each (within the overarching thread of the Master), but they end up rating differently as a result. Utopia is unquestionably the best, though as always, Davies' futuristic vision isn't terribly strong. The Futurekind somehow come across as both savage and lame, and the centipede-humanoid assistant is a bit awkward. Penalties also for the return of Captain Jack. But aside from these irritants, this is a dark and compelling look at a dying humanity trillions of years in the future, and its desperate quest to seek out a mythic utopian planet. The plot then suddenly turns into a race against time as the Professor spearheading this mission turns out to be the Master, who shockingly -- even for the Master -- murders his assistant and hijacks the Doctor's TARDIS. It's a great start to a finale, but that greatness unfortunately isn't maintained in the subsequent episodes.

24. 42. 4 jelly babies. This may be a rip-off of the previous season's Impossible Planet/Satan Pit, but I'm a sucker for spaceship-in-distress stories where sweating crew members fight hopeless odds, race against time, and get picked off one by one. Here the Doctor and his companion appear on a ship which is going to crash into a sun in 42 minutes. Like last time, they get cut off from the TARDIS almost as soon as they step out of it (thus preventing a convenient rescue and escape), and just as before, we get possessed crew members (this time by an angry sun), suffocating claustrophobia, and the Doctor going EVA in the middle of it all. Because the drama unfolds in real time (Doctor Who episodes are 45 minutes long), and punctuated by a nerve-racking countdown, it keeps your blood racing. An awesome episode.

25. The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. 4 jelly babies. The season-five finale shows Moffat giving his predecessor the finger whilst feigning homage. The subtext essentially is, if you're going to raise the stakes to extreme heights, Mr. Davies, this is how you do a story like Journey's End. And indeed, the crack in Amy's bedroom wall proves to be the most successful seasonal story arc in the new series, and while there are certainly resets to be found here, they're not cheap. They come at a fair price, and there's solid emotional payoff. The Doctor's farewell to Amy as he prepares to sacrifice himself -- "You don't need your imaginary friend anymore" -- got me choked up. Also, the reset carries the unexpected surprise of giving back people we never knew existed, notably Amy's parents, which beautifully accounts for the emptiness of Amy's many-roomed house and why she never talked about a family. Another bonus over Davies: we didn't have to suffer through yet another season of a TARDIS companion weighed down by a dysfunctional family, a formula which by seasons three and four had taken its toll.

26. The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon. 4 jelly babies. Moffat followed the big bang finale with something just as good, and which smashes the season opener formula to smithereens. For one, it's scary: the Silence are as terrifying as the Autons and Adipose are laughable. Two, it's lengthy, the first two-parter to launch a season. Three, it doesn't find the Doctor fending off an alien invasion, but rather leading a revolution, for the aliens are already well ensconced and in control. Four, no time is wasted bringing out the big guns: the Doctor is killed seven minutes into the story, and while it was a guarantee this would be undone by the end of the season, the message was loud and clear: no messing around. It's only too bad the continuations of this Silence/River Song thread in the mid-season double bill and finale didn't live up to what's established so nail-bitingly here.

27. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. 4 jelly babies. Some consider this Moffat's masterpiece, but I think it's overrated. There's no denying it's very good, but there are things which irk: the "everyone lives" trope, and the dreaded Captain Jack. Yes, the happy ending was copied in the library story, but at least it was only in the matrix, so some semblance of protagonist death was felt. In this story it feels more like a cheat and trivializes the horror, though this isn't a major complaint on my part. Worse is Captain Jack, who is really a Russell Davies character through and through, even if Moffat wrote him, and whose interactions with the Doctor and Rose clash with the story's dark tone. That being said, this has become a classic for obvious reason, with the setting of the London Blitz inspired, where microscopic robots are turning people into zombies made over in the image of gas-masked victims of the war. Everything is gloomy and surreal, from war-torn London, dark alleyways, a smoky nightclub, a creepy hospital, to an old house where starving kids gather for repast. It's incredible cinema.

28. The Shakespeare Code. 4 jelly babies. The mystery of Shakespeare's lost play is finally solved in this historical, where William is being harassed by a trio of witches who use the power of words to unlock space-time boundaries. They need a wordsmith to open a gate for their kind to invade earth, and Love's Labour's Won becomes the medium for that goal. As always, there's science behind the superstition: voodoo dolls are DNA replicators; spells are incanted the same way mathematical computations are intoned in the Tom Baker classic Logopolis. There's also plenty of humor here, with the Doctor citing quotes that Shakespeare hasn't come up with yet, and the climax is hilarious as Shakespeare defeats the witches by using their own weapon against them: pure verse, which burns them like holy water and closes the gate forever. Some of the levity keeps this story from reaching the heights of other gothic historicals, but it's a gem nonetheless.

29. Planet of the Ood. 4 jelly babies. It's not often the Doctor gets political and crushes oppression, but it happens from time to time, especially on alien planets in the future, and Planet of the Ood is in fact the best "revolution" story after Tom Baker's Sun Makers (taxation), E-Space trilogy (servitude and slavery), and Sylvester McCoy's Happiness Patrol (fascism). It's great seeing the Doctor bring management to its knees when provoked, and in this case he clearly feels guilty for having let so many Ood die in his battle against Satan in season two. But what really sets this story above average is the musical climax, which is simply transcendent, and defines the story in a way never seen on the show. I get chills during the last five minutes of this episode, and not from the ice planet.

30. The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. 4 jelly babies. Channeling classic Who with a vengeance, this one taps into how everyone remembers the Pertwee era to be, but also the Colin Baker period, with protracted torture scenes and luminescent underground sets; I must confess that Vengeance on Varos was more on my mind than Pertwee's encounter with the Silurians, who this time around look more human than reptilian when their masks come off. That's a compliment, mind you, since I like more about Colin Baker than most, and less about Pertwee than many. The minimalist setting is a welcome reprieve to the urban noise from four seasons of Davies, and as in the Pertwee classic, the story takes a tired cliché and turns it on its head: the alien invaders aren't really aliens but "Earthlians" who have as much claim to the planet as humanity, which is why the Doctor bends over backwards to put them on the same playing field with homo sapiens. A splendid installment that takes us completely down the season-five rabbit hole.

31. Turn Left. 3 ½ jelly babies. Now here's a gem that would positively glow if not weighed down by the baggage of Davies' previous lemons, especially The Runaway Bride and Partners in Crime, and also the gaping plot hole that if the Doctor died at the start of season three, the world would have retroactively ended in 79 AD since he doesn't go back to Pompeii and stop the Pyrovile. But for the most part Davies manages to pull off a compelling time-warp scenario in which Donna replays her life without ever meeting the Doctor, with catastrophic results for the world. There's a lot of good drama here: the Italian family being taken off to a "labor camp" is heartbreaking, as is Donna's life as a refugee. The return of Rose is handled surprisingly well (since she doesn't meet the Doctor, thus remaining true to the season-two finale), and Catherine Tate puts in a hell of a performance as she sacrifices herself to turn left and get the world back on track. Again, if this story weren't saddled with ridiculous spectacles like marshmallow-men invasions (the adipose), it would have gotten a solid ranking of 4.

32. The Eleventh Hour. 3 ½ jelly babies. The next two fall into the category of stories I adore despite myself, where I find myself enjoying the ride even as I'm loathing, conceptually, much of what I'm seeing. There's a term for this, of course, guilty pleasures, and that's what The Eleventh Hour and The Christmas Invasion are. They follow the invasion-of-earth formula that leaves me cold, but they do it so well that they turn out to be splendid introductions to a new Doctor. The Eleventh Hour even copies the plot of Smith and Jones to the point that it has no right to succeed yet does. The real high point is the tempus fugit drama with the seven-year old Amelia Pond, who of course becomes established as the "girl who waited". On whole this one-hour special remains what it is, an invasion-of-earth story in which the Doctor saves the entire planet in the space of twenty minutes, and by (of all things) using a laptop to spread a global virus. But it's an incredibly fun ride, drawing us back for repeated viewings almost against our will.

33. The Christmas Invasion. 3 ½ jelly babies. The first and only good Christmas special written by Russell Davies turns out to be a great introduction to the Tenth Doctor, and as in The Eleventh Hour the invasion-of-earth baggage works for rather than against it, even the offensively ludicrous killer-Christmas trees. The story actually reminds me of Tom Baker's own first entry, Robot, involving a threat in present-day London which calls forth a military response, and his female companion playing a key role "negotiating" with the threat that ultimately needs to be destroyed. The dramatic tension builds well in the first half due to the Doctor being out of commission as he recovers from regenerating, and when he finally emerges from those TARDIS doors, we almost want to clap like little kids. He gets in a good sword fight with the alien-king before banishing his race from earth, and the best scene is his hand getting chopped off then immediately regenerating. And the "Song for Ten" at the end is perfect.

34. The Waters of Mars. 3 jelly babies. The "special year" between seasons four and five is a year I wish I could pretend never existed, for there was nothing special about the stinkers Davies was rolling out before Moffat took charge. Except for Waters of Mars, that is, which is actually quite good. It works on two levels, the first completely successfully, the second not so much, so it ends up feeling like the proverbial less than the sum of its parts. The straightforward level offers plenty of horrific entertainment, as crew members on Mars are being infected by water that turns them into alien zombies. The other level attempts to explore the Doctor's dark side as he violates the laws of time. The problem is that his crime doesn't seem particularly reprehensible, not least because there's no convincing reason why the deaths of this particular crew on Mars are unalterable "fixed points" in time. A textbook example of shooting too high and missing, but a very creepy and enjoyable story nonetheless.

35. The Wedding of River Song. 3 jelly babies. Somewhere in season six Moffat exhausted his genius. The thread launched in a fantastic season-opener, and continued in a mid-season disaster, landed results somewhere in-between, and confirmed not only that he never really had a plan with River Song, but that he was getting buried under the onus of his own cleverness. The Wedding of River Song is a decent story on its own right, but as a finale doesn't go out strong as it should. The major disappointment is River Song herself, who turns out to be the Doctor's assassin at Lake Silencio, yet this turns out a cheat, because she shoots him against her will, at the Doctor's command so that time can resume its course. River, in other words, wants desperately to save the Doctor, not destroy him, at the expense of everyone else in the universe locked in a moment of time. That doesn't make her dark, just astronomically selfish, and frankly unbelievable. There are certainly things to admire in this story, not least the horrifying Silence, and the way all of time and history blends together, but The Big Bang this isn't.

36. The Sound of Drums. 3 jelly babies. The middle chapter of the Master finale is good, but not nearly as good as Utopia, and the biggest problem is that John Simm is a rather embarassing Master. Unlike Derek Jacobi who was flawless in the role, Simm hams it up like a comic book villain. He's admittedly amusing at times, my favorite point being when he mockingly pantomimes zipping his lips for the American president, but his general flair for giving victims two thumbs up, reveling in pop music, and gurning like an oaf are painful to watch. Stronger is the general plot of his takeover of England and the ensuing political clash when America comes to chastise him, and there's a lot of good suspense when the Doctor and Martha are on the run being chased by his cronies.

37. The Lazarus Experiment. 3 jelly babies. An undervalued story that takes the theme of John 11:1-12:11 and fuses it with The Fly: a scientist finds immortality at the price of uncontrollable shapeshifting. Not worth it, if you ask me, but I enjoy the fact that Lazarus can burn the Doctor philosophically; when lectured on what it means to be human (as if the Doctor knows), Lazarus retorts that clinging to life at whatever cost is as human as you can get. The creature that keeps overpowering his human DNA rather puts me in mind of the freaky metamorphosis Noah underwent in the classic Ark in Space. The Lazarus Experiment may not achieve the greatest heights, but it is a fun romp in the purest sense, a quintessential example, actually, that comes to my mind when I think about Doctor Who "romps". It includes all the standard ingredients in a Who story -- creepy monster, high body counts, sci-fi weirdness, and solid philosophical debates with no easy answers.

38. The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People. 3 jelly babies. Another undervalued story, and saturated with homage: the isolated monastery setting, an acid-mining operation using slave labor, base-under-siege suspense, and running down corridors. Add to this Tom Baker's shockingly intrusive voice asking after jelly-babies and you've got a classic-Who stew. Especially noteworthy is the dark manipulative side to the Doctor at work before the story even begins, as he acts with a plan up his sleeve instead of blundering blindly into a situation and doing his best to sort it out. When the TARDIS is "caught" in a solar tsunami, it is being hurled deliberately to a time and place that will allow the Doctor to learn how to destroy Amy, whom he suspects is rather less than she seems. That in the process he shows himself to be concerned with fair play to both humans and their dopplegangers does not effect this conclusion; in the end he callously blasts almost-Amy to smithereens. The audience is invited to ask, though few ask it, whether his moral outrage over the murder of another ganger can be taken seriously.

39. The Beast Below. 3 jelly babies. This story works on two levels, one as a political fable about society kept in ignorance, albeit democratically by their own choice, and two as a metaphorical commentary on the Doctor's nature. The "Last of the Starwhales" allows Amy to understand the Doctor better, and more polysemously, than previous companions, and on top of that she gets to save the day, as the Doctor is caught up in helpless fury as he works to kill the poor whale on humanity's behalf. At this point in the series we hadn't seen Time Lord fallibility like this since the Ninth Doctor, and it's seriously refreshing. Minus points, however, for the Smilers, which are scary in the first five minutes, but never end up killing anyone and are way too easily disposed of by Her Majesty, the cavalierly pistol-slinging Liz Ten. On whole, an impressive attempt at something new, but it could have been much better.

40. Vampires of Venice. 3 jelly babies. For a gothic historical this one is substandard, but it manages to hold its head above water, and that's no mean feat given the subject matter; it takes courage these days to play the vampire card. The aristocratic Dracula model has been way overused, and the bubblegum teen version is offensive beyond words. Vampires, in my opinion, should be brutally savage (e.g. From Dusk Till Dawn, 30 Days of Night), but the problem is that the R-rated breed isn't suitable for a family program. State of Decay actually did astonishingly well by the aristocratic model, and The Curse of Fenric even better with sea vampires that were products of human evolution caused by pollution. Venice goes a more radical route, with vampires that aren't really vampires, but rather alien fish monsters who want to drag Venice under water and call it home. It works pretty well, though a part of me wishes the myth wasn't stripped away to this extent. Still, I applaud the originality.

41. The End of the World. 3 jelly babies. For all my Davies bashing, I'm fond of the following three stories which I affectionately call the New Earth Trilogy. They're silly in the way only Davies can be, but oddly enjoyable, and form a nice arc across the beginnings of the first three seasons. The End of the World sees the destruction of our planet in the year 5 billion, under an apocalyptic solar expansion. Rich aliens gather to watch the event on an observation platform, and the drama becomes an action mystery when someone starts killing the others for greed. Notable are the Face of Boe, and the bitchy Cassandra -- the mutilated flat mass of skin who represents the last surviving human being -- who appear again later in the trilogy.

42. New Earth. 3 jelly babies. There's something soothing about the first few minutes of this story, as we see the Tenth Doctor settle into his role by reliving his first "date" with Rose in the far future, this time 5 billion 23, where New Earth has replaced the old. Suspense is carried on two subplots, the first involving human clones stuffed into cells like lab rats and subjected to hideous experiments, the second seeing the return of the bitchy Cassandra (the flat mass of skin resembling a vertical trampoline) who will stop at nothing to take over a real human body. The humanoid cats are used effectively, as they honestly believe their hideous experiments justify the hospital they run, in which a cure can be offered for every known disease. Comedic, pedestrian, but quite fun -- and Cassandra's death is unexpectedly moving for such a hateful character.

43. Gridlock. 3 jelly babies. The third part of the New Earth Trilogy is loved by many fans -- far more than it deserves. Its premise is the most ludicrous of all the stories on this list: a perpetual traffic jam in an undercity, where it takes six years to travel ten miles, the air pollution suffocates you, and snapping Macras wait to tear apart your car if you're lucky enough to get promoted to the fast-lane. It's up to the Doctor to liberate the underworld, which he does with flair, leaping from car to car like a neo-James Bond, and eventually finding the means to open the surface of the city. It's a fun bit of nonsense that works despite itself, but I certainly can't join the enthusiasts who (astonishingly) consider Gridlock a crown jewel. It's as good as The End of the World and New Earth, frankly, amounting to a fun ride, nothing more.

44. Night Terrors. 3 jelly babies. Think The Girl in the Fireplace meets Fear Her: monsters in the closet, worlds behind portals. And it just so happens you could add the ratings of those stories (5 and 1) and divide by 2 to get the score for this one. It's an effective nightmare of giant dolls, and while some critics complain about poor special effects, that's much the point, meshing with a child's rough, haunted perspective. The major weakness (which prevents a solid rating of 4 from me) is the melodramatic climax which sees the destruction of the doll world through the father's love and final acceptance of George. Part of me likes this, but the other part says this kind of device has been used too often for the show's good. Though to be fair, this story can get away with it much better than The Lodger and Closing Time on grounds of its premise. Bedroom nightmares easily feed into themes of childhood trauma and parental neglect, and what child underneath it all doesn't simply crave love?

45. The Curse of the Black Spot. 3 jelly babies. For reasons that escape me, this story is panned as one of the worst of the new series, but it's enjoyable enough as long as you don't expect anything more out of it than, say, Vampires of Venice. On the plus side, it's a base under siege drama calling to mind a classic like The Horror of Fang Rock and harkens back to the Hinchcliffe era in terms of style, as a period piece with a distinct gothic horror feel. It then shifts in emphasis and tone to become a rather banal morality lesson, with the villain turning from a murderous pirate to a responsible father in the blink of an eye. The hyperspace punchline is reminiscent of Stones of Blood (the best installment in the Key to Time classic), where things get less mythic and more sci-fic: the Siren is really an automated physician that whisks people off at the first sign of injury in order to heal them. The story feels a bit disjointed, but it certainly has features that on whole make it fun.

46. Victory of the Daleks. 3 jelly babies. Here's another one that's often deemed mediocre at best. In my view, it's a fun World War II piece that sees Britain training an army of Daleks to be thrown against the Third Reich, and a great homage to Power of the Daleks, which similarly involved the hate-mongers feigning servility to humankind whilst really working against them. The sight of them gliding around Churchill's Cabinet War Rooms, carrying files on their sink plungers and bleating out subservient inquiries like, "WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?", are hilarious, and unlike many, I'm fond of the rainbow-colored reboot, which is fitting for Moffat's fairy-tale epoch. There's also the ridiculous but entertaining Star-Wars-like battle between the Spitfires and Dalek ship. More of a let-down is the way the Doctor and Amy neutralize the bomb-android by putting it in touch with his most affecting memories as a human being, inaugurating the "triumph of love" theme that would come to plague Moffat's tenure.

47. Love and Monsters. 2 ½ jelly babies. Of all the stories in the new series, this is one I still can't get closure on. On first viewing I loathed it, indeed felt punched in the gut after a stellar run of season-two stories culminating in the mind-blowing Impossible Planet/Satan Pit. Subsequent viewings helped, though not as much as I hoped. For to this day I really want to love Love and Monsters. I adore the concept of Doctor-lite episodes, and I admire what this story tries to do. It portrays the Doctor from the perspective of an innocent bystander who only briefly gets involved with him, thus appearing different from the hero we're used to following with our God's-eye view, someone who leaves chaos and pain in his wake. It also takes an affectionate swipe at nerdy Doctor Who fans with the LINDA group, and for all my Davies-bashing I applaud the way he can make us laugh at ourselves. The problem is that the story falls flat with way too much slapstick comedy, and crumbles under a ridiculous creature -- the green fat man in a thong. Thus my rating of 2 ½, straddling the mediocre with (what I want to be) the worthy.

48. The Unicorn and the Wasp. 2 jelly babies. I went into this one thinking I'd love it, as it promises so much with an inspired setting and a fun murder mystery. It's refreshingly unusual for Doctor Who in that there's no threat to humanity, just the mystery -- a bizarrely comedic Clue game involving an alien. But it makes no sense whatsoever and delivers the non-sequitur reveal of a huge alien wasp that assumes human form at will, and which for demented reasons thinks Agatha's mysteries are the way the world really works, and so kills people in caricature of them (i.e. wielding a ridiculous lead pipe instead of just stinging the poor sap to death). This being Doctor Who, there has to be an alien element, but there's no internal logic leading to how the mystery is solved. It's a true shame, since the guest playing Agatha Christie does a good job; if she'd been only been given a half-decent script, this could have been a great story.

49. The Long Game. 2 jelly babies. This one is marred by an incredibly lazy vision, tacky set designs, and supporting characters we couldn't care a whit about. The setting of the orbital broadcasting platform in the year 200,000 doesn't feel very futuristic, human society hasn't evolved much, and the premise of people being dominated by the media network, while having potential, is exploited in a lame plot. On the plus side, the alien lording himself over humanity is enjoyable, and what occurs on Floor 500 yields some admittedly tense moments involving frozen corpses. But ultimately, the revelation that everyone is living in a nasty dictatorship where a blob-alien controls all flow of information just isn't felt in any real way. Davies evidently wanted to satirize media propaganda and the climate of fear, but boredom is what comes through for the most part, and the biggest crime is that Simon Pegg's talents playing the diabolical Editor are rather wasted in a bland script.

50. The Idiot's Lantern. 2 jelly babies. I never liked the concept of possessed TV sets (hated Poltergeist and The Ring), so this one didn't have much of a chance with me. It's about an alien who has escaped execution on the home planet by transforming itself into pure energy, and has come to earth to reconstitute itself. To do this it needs massive amounts of human energy, which it gets from the people of London via their televisions. The setting of 1953 is almost pointless -- though the crowning of Queen Elizabeth provides the excuse for everyone turning on their TV's at once -- there's really no feeling of period at all, and it could have easily taken place in the present. And the point of peoples' faces vanishing is never explained, nor for that matter how they manage to breathe in their state of takeover. A mediocre story in every way leaving much to be desired.

51. The Doctor's Daughter. 2 jelly babies. Susan's mother unveiled at last? Not hardly. "Jenny", spawned from the Doctor's tissue sample in mere seconds, is more Little Miss Rambo than Time Lord, born to kick ass in a war against the alien Hath. On an underground planet in the distant future, people have been fighting these Hath for "generations", which it turns out means for a single week, since twenty generations are born daily from their progenation machines. Under the delusion they need to combat aliens who usurped power from them in decades past, they imprison the Doctor and Donna as pacifist invaders. The story's center of gravity is the relationship between Jenny and the Doctor, but it isn't at all impressive, and the emotional climax of her dying in his arms is robbed by a last minute return to life and zipping off like a comic hero. Really.

52. The Last of the Time Lords. 2 jelly babies. After the excellent Utopia and decent Sound of Drums, Davies veers off into unacceptable melodrama, heavy-handed Christian allegory, and a cheap reset. The Master deserved to go out better than this, though the final moment between him and the Doctor -- who begs him to regenerate and "not leave him alone" -- is admittedly moving, and encapsulates an entire history of these adversaries being addicted to each other even in despite. But the Doctor being angelically restored to life by having the world's population think of him is something not even Davies usually pulls out of his ass, though unfortunately this story is where the real rot sets in, and foreshadows worse gimmicks to come in season four.

53. A Good Man Goes to War/Let's Kill Hitler. 2 jelly babies. Or when Moffat dropped the ball. After a disappointing non-drama at Demon's Run, things don't get any better in Nazi Germany. In fact, half of me thinks this mid-season mess was secretly penned by Russell Davies. The not-war completely fails the first title's promise, with armies allowing the Doctor to grandstand on stage without even shooting him. The non-sequitur of Hitler being squirreled away in a cupboard and completely ignored just adds insult to injury. But worst is the non-payoff of River Song, who was supposed to evolve in an increasingly evil direction, but here just does things for no reason -- hating the Doctor one moment, inexplicably deciding she loves him the next, and in a matter of moments, presto, learning to fly the TARDIS. There is no story here, and we're light years away from the brilliance and tragedy that ended Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and promised more of the same. The headless monks and the Teselecta are admittedly enjoyable, but they're just window dressing.

54. Aliens of London/World War III. 2 jelly babies. This one wins the award for most appalling opening to any Doctor Who story, which in fact has nothing to do with the story at hand, just a soap-opera throwaway as Rose's mother shrieks lines in a voice that makes me want to kick her face in. When we finally get to the story, it's yet another in a long line of Davies' invasion-of-earth cheese fests, and it doesn't help that things don't get any scarier than humanoid pigs and lame Slitheen. There's one thing, however, that keeps this story out of the rock-bottom category, and that's the dominating theme of flatulence. This is an exceedingly guilty pleasure on my part, but farting aliens entertain me on the basest possible level, especially the fat woman played by Annette Badland, whose gleeful facial expressions as she continually breaks wind have me laughing so hard my stomach hurts.

55. The Sontaran Stratagem/Poison Sky. 2 jelly babies. Sontarans who chant hakas like football jocks aren't any more compelling than farting aliens, and even less entertaining. The story isn't even redeemed by UNIT, as the military outfit isn't the same without the Brigadier we knew and loved. And it certainly isn't helped by Martha, who for crying out loud just left at the end of season three. This is yet another substandard invasion-of-earth plot in which Sontarans are using human agents to release poison gas into the atmosphere. Expectations were high for a Sontaran return in the new series, but this story laughs at our expectations and gives us the finger. I did like the Doctor's passing remark about working for UNIT "back in the 70s...or was it the 80's?", a nod to the unresolved contradictions in the classic chronology. But boobytrapped automobiles don't do it for me.

56. Rose. 2 jelly babies. And now for the trio of stories that barely hold their noses above the stinker category, and that's me being generous. Their sole value lies in introducing a new companion, but like the two above, they follow the tiresome invasion-of-earth formula that Davies adores so much but is unable to do anything decent with. In the case of Rose, we meet not only her but the Ninth Doctor through her eyes, as London (wait for it) is being taken over by an army of mannequins. We haven't seen the Autons since the Pertwee era and for damn good reason: they're lame. It's hard to be intimidated by an army of plastic. But the Nestene Consciousness (the animated vat of living plastic controlling the rest in London) is admittedly on the impressive side these days, bolstered by CGI. We also get a lot of Rose's irritating mother, which unfortunately foreshadows things to come.

57. Smith and Jones. 2 jelly babies. Or when grandma puts on vampiric airs, and makes us cringe in embarrassment rather than fear. The plot involves rhino-headed aliens invading a hospital in order to ferret out a stowaway alien for execution. To do this they teleport the hospital to the moon to prevent interference from earthly powers, and the stowaway turns out to be the aforementioned grandma. Amidst all this rubbish we are introduced to Martha, who turns out to be a decent enough companion though the least compelling to date in the new series. She's basically an educated Rose, developing a crush on the Doctor which is thoroughly unrequited on account of his pining for Rose. As such, Martha never becomes as distinctive on her own right as Rose, Donna, and Amy.

58. Partners in Crime. 2 jelly babies. Last and certainly least is this appalling joke, Doctor Who meets Pokemon, or the invasion of the marshmallows, take your pick. Actually these menaces are pieces of human fat, and the plot admittedly leans toward the amusing: a company in present-day Britain is selling diet pills which make body fat come alive, break off in chunks, and kill the host. Bonus points go to the way Davies milks so much fun out of obesity, but let's face it, this is really dumbing down to an all-time low. On the bright side, Donna turns out to be more than the screeching fishwife we saw in The Runaway Bride and a worthy companion, more subdued and genuinely funny, though of course nowhere near as good as Rose or Amy.

59. Boom Town. 1 jelly baby. Seasons one, two, five, and six share the weird commonality of a penultimate stinker, and the cynic in me sees a strategy at work: to make the finale shine brightly as possible. In the case of Boom Town, it's a chance for Davies to revisit farting aliens, but not even the juvenile flatulence is enough to entertain me this go around. The story is a complete waste of time, involving the Doctor pondering the ethics of doing humanity a favor by deporting the last Slitheen to its home planet where the death penalty awaits it. And we get plenty of soap opera between Rose and Mickey too. It also explores the question of whether people commit crimes as a result of nature or nurture, leaning toward the latter, but neither convincingly nor profoundly regardless of what side you happen to fall on.

60. Fear Her. 1 jelly baby. The great thing about Doctor Who is that it's a children's program without ever feeling like one -- until you watch a story like this. It plays like goddamn Sesame Street, so much that I felt slapped in the face when I watched it. The plot of children vanishing out of thin air on account of a girl controlled by an alien intelligence is promising, but when it boils down to capturing them on paper by (yes) drawing them in her bedroom, we've jumped the shark. Add to this that the intelligence doesn't mean any harm, just wants a lot of company, that kills the menace factor even more. Fear her? The only thing to fear is the appalling script.

61. The Lodger. 1 jelly baby. I annoyed people when I declared two years ago that I would sooner eat my own feces than watch The Lodger again anytime soon, and rest assured it hasn't aged any better since. I've heard it claimed ad nauseum that the story works wonders for the Eleventh Doctor like Human Nature/Family of Blood did for the Tenth, but that's rubbish. Tennant's story was harrowing: the Doctor had literally become human, truncated and trapped by love, unable to save people as they died around him. Smith's story is a mockery: the Doctor plays at being human in a ludicrous parody. Just because comparisons and contrasts can be drawn, it doesn't mean one is as good as the other. In fact, the appropriate contrast is simple: The Lodger is crap as Human Nature/Family of Blood is classic.

62. Closing Time. 1 jelly baby. As if The Lodger weren't bad enough, its sequel is even worse. With Closing Time we can again slide into comparisons, this time with Journey's End, which was not only atrocious, but went out of its way to be atrocious with non-payoffs and outright betrayals. This story isn't quite as vindictive, aiming instead for the preposterous: Craig, on the verge of being made into a Cyber Controller, hears his infant son crying at a distance, and his paternal love swells to such epic proportions that the influx of emotion causes the Cybermen's heads to explode along with their ship. Not only is this the same kind of ridiculous ending as The Lodger's, it's worse for making horses' asses out of the Cybermen.

63. The Runaway Bride. 1 jelly baby. After the near unassailable season two (the best of the new series, in my opinion), and Rose's wonderful closure, we get kicked in the teeth with this dross. It dumps a screeching bride inside the TARDIS and a pantload of nonsense that's supposed to serve as a Christmas special, but the only thing special is the all-time low for Doctor Who, as it's the worst story of the new series up to this point. (The Dalek double-bill in Manhattan would soon rectify this.) Our bride has been infected with a strange energy (that whisked her to the TARDIS) as part of an alien plan to take over earth, and that's only the start of the silliness. But the really bad news (at the time, anyway) is that this foreshadows Donna's return in season four as a regular TARDIS companion. Merry goddamn Christmas.

64. The Voyage of the Damned. 1 jelly baby. Damned in every sense, this Christmas special offends like The Runaway Bride but twice as garishly. The Doctor finds himself on a floating spaceship, caught between corporate greed, sabotage, and robotic angels armed with killer halos. It sounds impressive but it's entirely not: there's comedy in every line, but nothing funny; noise and action in every other sequence, but no excitement. It's a sign of how bad a story is when the body count is so commendably high (as in classic Who) but you just don't care about who dies. Ironically, we have this episode to thank for Midnight, the inverse story in which Davies wrote this one all over again but did everything right for a change. Was he making fun of himself and produced a work of art by accident?

65. The Next Doctor. 1 jelly baby. The Cyberking may be badass, but this story is still a steaming pile of manure. Just as the Daleks were used abominably in the season-four finale (on which see the very bottom of this list), the Cybermen are abused in a horrendous follow-up, as if Davies were determined to ruin every single aspect of Doctor Who before turning the reins over to Moffat. Let alone that it makes no sense that the Cybermen are able to unleash their own King Kong when they've been stuck in the Void. That's a triviality compared to the preposterous handling of the story's deeper theme about loss and what happens to the mind when it tries to cope with it. Applied to a traumatized guy who thinks he's the Doctor (with his own sonic screwdriver and all) just doesn't work, and indeed "The Next Doctor" served purely as a cheap ploy at the time to make viewers think that Tennant's regeneration would happen in this story.

66. Planet of the Dead. 1 jelly baby. Aside from the superficial Easter trappings, there's nothing special about this episode, not even in the awful way that most specials end up falling into the stinker category. It feels about as important as the routine season openers under Davies (Rose, Smith and Jones, Partners In Crime), pedestrian in the extreme, only in this case the mediocrity isn't even redeemed by the introduction of a new companion. The Doctor takes a bus ride and gets mired on an arid planet, and like in Midnight gets stuck with a handful of cranky passengers desperate to get back home. But if Midnight overturned Voyage of the Damned with brutal intensity, Planet of the Dead returned us to go-nowhere territory, and I rank it among the stinkers because it's so thoroughly devoid of any real purpose, indeed the most inconsequential story of the new series.

67. The End of Time. 1 jelly baby. I don't even like talking about this one. David Tennant did such a great job as Doctor Who and deserved better than an excremental swan song that not only brings back a comic-book Master, but also resurrects the Time Lords in a cheap plot, while making sure to plumb the worst aspects of kitchen-sink opera with Donna and her family. Payoffs are abysmal and the trappings are as bad as they get in a Davies script, from a medical fix-it machine, to silly cactus-people, to the Master flying with his bare hands, to a climax which can barely be called that -- just the three leads talking to each other in a ballroom. Things get even worse in the long and saccharine denouement, as the Doctor revisits all his previous companions before he regenerates, and while Davies is obviously trying to honor Tennant, the result is way too self-indulgent. It's a horrible end to his era, but everything I unfortunately expected.

68. Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks. 1 jelly baby. A truly terrible story, not even helped by the inspired setting of New York in the Great Depression. The Cult of Skaro -- four elite Daleks introduced at the end of season two, designed to think like the enemy -- had incredible potential, but the idea of them trying to evolve into humanoid form was doomed from the start. Dalek Sec looks and sounds ridiculous. When Daleks evolve into something less fearsome instead of more, there's a big problem, and I was applauding when the compassionate Sec finally got exterminated by his mutinous colleagues. He was enough to turn me into a trigger-happy Dalek myself. On top of the horrendous use of the Doctor's arch-enemies is the atrocious overacting from the guest stars. They're the worst performances of the new series, and the ending which finds the stage dancer willing to live out her life with her fiancee who has been transformed into a pig-mutant doesn't play authentically at all. This story is painful to watch in every frame.

69. The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. 0 jelly babies. I reserve a rating of 0 to something so bad that it's not only awful but goes out of its way to be awful, as if -- and please excuse this, but there's no polite way of conveying -- the writer is trying to shit down our throats. And make no mistake, it's one defecation after another: a bogus regeneration, Donna's non-death, and to top it all off (I still can't believe Davies did this) a duplicate Doctor to give Rose her dream-lover after all. There's not even a body count; the Daleks don't kill anyone (except for the resurrecting Captain Jack, which doesn't count). Honestly, if Russell Davies is going to trap the Doctor's best companion in a parallel universe and say she'll never see the Doctor again, he should have the balls to follow through with that. If he sets us up with repeated predictions about another companion dying, he should bloody well deliver on that promise. Does he think we're all five-year olds who can't handle good storytelling? Classic Who never copped out in so many ways; never pulled punches with body counts; never betrayed the audience so aggressively in every other frame. But even for the new series, this is a new abyss, and poor Davros for getting saddled with the worst story since the show began in 1963.

The Wedding of River Song

2011-12-16T04:38:00.000-08:00

I have, on the whole, loved the sixth season of Doctor Who, but I've come to the conclusion that Steven Moffat has exhausted his genius. The handwriting was on the wall by the mid-season fiasco, where zany dialogue and unwieldy plot twists were supplanting character development and good storytelling. If Russell Davies (never the best writer to begin with) got worse with melodramatic cheese and go-nowhere plotting, Moffat is getting buried under the onus of his own cleverness. I hoped that for the single-episode finale he would pull out all the stops and write a brutally economical resolution to River Song, but he achieved this artificially at best. The thread launched in a fantastic season-opener, and continued in a mid-season disaster, lands results somewhere in-between, and confirm that Moffat never really had a plan with River Song.

Leaving aside the business of her mother's identity, River simply did not evolve into the darker character foreshadowed repeatedly since her debut in season four. The Doctor thus has not been subjected to the heartbreak of his love turning into someone who despises him, which would have been knock-down drama. In Let's Kill Hitler she went from hating and trying to kill him at the moment they meet, to saving him in the blink of an eye, inexplicably deciding that she loves this man for no reason at all. Of course, we've been promised that she really does kill him, so that couldn't be the real murder attempt, which we in fact get now: the astronaut-assassin at Lake Silencio is none other than she. But even this turns out a cheat, because she shoots him against her will, at the Doctor's command so that time can resume its course. River, in other words, wants desperately to save the Doctor, not destroy him, at the expense of everyone else in the universe locked in a moment of time. That doesn't make her dark, just astronomically selfish, and frankly unbelievable.

At the same time, there are things to admire in The Wedding of River Song. The Doctor's determination to die is compelling, and the way all of time and history occurs at once shouts Moffat at his best. We get to see Charles Dickens interviewed on the BBC, knights on horseback sharing the London streets with automobiles, steam trains barreling out of the Gherkin and into the Pyramids, and then plenty of arial eye-candy -- balloon minis, pterodactyls, all blending together in perpetual anachronism. The Silence also help redeem the story's shortcomings, as they remain truly horrifying creatures, perched in ceilings like vampiric parasites -- the scene where the Doctor and Churchill look up to a nest of them made my heart skip a beat even knowing what was coming.

The return of Amy and Rory was a given, and trivializes Amy's departure at the end of The God Complex, though to be fair, they are different people in the alternate timeline. Rory doesn't even recognize the Doctor, and Amy is a commander in charge of keeping watch over the Silence, until they break free of their aquarium prison and unleash hell. Amy, for her part, gets in some cold-blooded murder, killing Madame Kovarian with her own eye-patch -- a wonderful moment for her character, alternate or not -- and Rory puts in some inspiring moments with his trademark loyalty and willingness to endure torment to get the right thing done.

As for the Doctor, he's in tolerable form for a sixth-season Moffat script. Unlike his opening and mid-season performances, this one isn't so hyper-manic, and his quip comes in moderation as he is weighed down by the gravitas of his imminent demise. Except of course that he doesn't die, because he's been clever in the way that only Moffat can write him: instead of sacrificing himself, he forces River to shoot the Teselecta disguised as him. This may be a nimble twist but is glaringly problematic. Even if the Silence are stupid enough to be fooled by sleight-of-hand, time itself is not, and we're left with the absurdity of the Doctor getting around the fixed point of his death by simply playing magician. This is where Moffat's desperate games have caught up with him. There's no denying the cleverness to the Teselecta, but cleverness, unfortunately, is all The Wedding of River Song leaves us with.

The best part of this finale is actually Dorium Maldovar. The talking head is a perverse bit of fun who entertains me to no end, and a fitting mouthpiece for killjoy prophecies. He tells the Doctor that on the fields of Trenzalore, at the Fall of the Eleventh, a question will be asked, a question that must never be answered, which he finally bellows out in the closing scene: "Doctor WHO?", promising fundamental identity issues next season. All of the Doctor's scenes with Dorium are great, not least their exasperating trades in the TARDIS where Dorium's head is upside down. Best of all is the Doctor's end resolution: "I got too big, Dorium; I got too noisy. Time to step back into the shadows." I literally got the chills listening to Matt Smith deliver this vow. Whilst Moffat has done much to scale back the Doctor's ubiquitous savior-image from the Davies era, River Song's call for universal support was alarmingly Last of the Time Lords, and I am with the legions of fans who are applauding the Doctor's return to his classic role as an unknown traveler.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

Closing Time

2011-12-15T02:31:00.000-08:00

Indeed for Doctor Who, if this story is to be taken as exemplary. Thankfully it's not; like The Lodger it's a single steaming manure-pile in a season of roses, and repeats the prequel's embarrassing sitcom strategy. The Doctor wants to play at being human so looks up his friend Craig. Once again, he ends up helping Craig with his personal problems, this time his insecurity as a father, while Craig in turn helps him see the good behind his taking on human companions. As before, people think they're gay, and I really wish they were, so we could at least get some base entertainment out of this horrible pairing. Gareth Roberts evidently had one great story in him, but after The Shakespeare Code has been determined to kill his reputation with astonishingly bad throwaways.

Closing Time actually reminds of Journey's End, which was not only atrocious, but went out of its way to be atrocious, as if Russell Davies reached a point where his bankruptcy of ideas caused him to throw up his hands and decide to not only not pay us off, but un-pay us off with mockeries and betrayals. Roberts isn't quite as vindictive, aiming instead for the plain preposterous -- the highest plane of it, in fact, seen in the new series. Craig, on the verge of being made into a Cyber Controller, hears his infant son crying at a distance, and his paternal love swells to such epic proportions that the influx of emotion causes the Cybermen's heads to explode along with their ship. Not only is this the same ridiculous ending as The Lodger's, it's worse for making horses' asses out of the Cybermen, and is the umpteenth time that evil has been literally defeated by love. Whether that's lowest-common-denominator marketing or sentimental incompetence I'm not sure, but I certainly expect better out of Moffat, who should have fired Gareth Roberts last season. At least Night Terrors involved a traumatized kid's nightmares owing to parental neglect, in which the triumph of love theme was much the point, and Victory of the Daleks could also get away with it since the android was trying to recall its own feelings when it was human.

River Song's wedding had best move mountains. I'm not surprised the editors tacked on the segue into the finale -- it's the only half-decent thing about this episode.

Rating: 1 star out of 5.

The God Complex

2011-12-14T03:18:00.000-08:00

The God Complex is a perfect swan song for Amy Pond, not only for trailing her most harrowing experience in The Girl Who Waited, but by putting her childlike faith in the Doctor finally to rest. It does this in a simple but effective story about a beast who feeds off corrupted faith in a haunted hotel, and like the story that precedes it is one of the best of the season.

The hotel is a glaring homage to The Shining, with clashing decor, endless hallways, and staircases shot Vertigo-style. There's even a clown in one of the rooms, posturing deliberately out of Kubrick's film. The concept of this building is bloody fantastic, a playhouse of horrors where each room contains the worst fears of one individual, that when confronted causes insanity and a sudden perverse devotion to the minotaur who stalks the corridors like a psycho out of a B-slasher. It's also an active maze, meaning the halls randomly shift, which conveniently foils the Doctor's rescue of the hotel prisoners when his TARDIS becomes lost -- we've seen this sort of device used before in The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit and 42. The hotel is in fact the true antagonist of the story, rather than the minotaur itself, but a 45-minute episode doesn't really allow its full potential to be unleashed.

The minotaur works fairly well, if a bit cheesy, and it's a nice touch that it's related to the Nimon of the Tom Baker years. Since the beast succeeds by perverting faith, his captives must have some belief system to begin with. That lets Rory off the hook, but not Amy, who of course still believes in the Doctor in her innocent Amelia-like way, despite all the hell he's put her through the past two seasons, and also the way her trust in him has already been somewhat crushed in stories like Amy's Choice. When she and the Doctor see what's inside her room, the Doctor proceeds at once to destroy her faith in him, which not only saves her from the beast but severs its food supply and gives it space to die (a resolution that requires we don't look too closely). His demolishing of her faith is the crux of the story, and many critics have drawn the parallel to The Curse of Fenric, where the Doctor's victory also depended on shattering the faith of his companion. The difference is that the Seventh Doctor relied on psychological bullying to tear Ace down, while the Eleventh builds Amy up more positively, significantly by admitting she was right from the beginning: "I'm not a hero, just a madman in a box". While I honestly prefer McCoy's mean-spirited strategy, Smith's acting here is quite good, conveying impressions that he is weighed down by the way he uses human companions to assuage his loneliness and have inferiors around to "worship" him and feed his ego.

As for what's inside the Doctor's room (appropriately #11), it's a cop-out that we don't get to see what so horrifies him, though it's not hard to guess. The ring of the cloister bell is a TARDIS tip-off, perhaps pointing to the Doctor's eternal fear of losing it, without which he would be near powerless, and for that matter there would hardly be any Doctor Who. Amusingly, this could almost stand as a meta-fear of the audience; what else is the greatest terror of any Who-fan? Meanwhile the guest actors do well for their parts and allow us to ride the thrill of more traditional horrors. The weeping angels make an unexpected appearance, and we initially assume they are for Amy given the terror she endured in Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone. There's a gorilla for the prologue victim that's a bit on the embarrassing side, but the ventriloquist dummies that laugh maniacally are downright chilling.

The epilogue is simply beautiful. Even if this is the new series, where farewells are preordained cop-outs -- it's a sure bet that Amy and Rory will be back at some point, for the finale at least -- I haven't seen a companion departure so moving since Sarah Jane Smith in The Hand of Fear. Sarah's exit set the standard by which all other companion departures are judged. The only one who came close to topping it, fittingly, was Toby Whithouse in School Reunion, with a second farewell to Sarah decades after her return. Fans might object to me ranking these above the departure of Rose Tyler, and part of me agrees; Doomsday is an unrivaled tear-jerker. But I ultimately put Rose in a class by herself on account of the exceptional (if unrealized) romance between her and the Doctor. Amy's farewell, like Sarah's in the '70s, delivers so much in simple gestures and looks that speak volumes. There's a real feel in the closing scene that the Doctor and Amy have have become best friends and find it enormously painful to part company.

In sum, The God Complex is a terrific episode that falls short of the highest greatness only for a slightly cheesy creature and the feeling that a diabolical monstrosity like the hotel fits within a wider context of something larger than a story on its own right.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

The Girl Who Waited

2011-12-13T04:53:00.000-08:00

If The Girl Who Waited wields sentimentality like old-Amy does a sword, the emotions on display ring true, and it's impossible not to be moved during the scenes between her and Rory. The ending is fairly predictable, but only in the way that tragedy always is, and in this sense reminds of Pete Tyler's fate in Father's Day. Comparing Tom MacRae to Paul Cornell might seem blasphemous, but I should remind that he was responsible for the undervalued Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, which was a sequel of sorts to Father's Day, and which frankly I thought just as powerful. All bets were off in the parallel-Earth story, as we got to see familiar characters die (Jackie), others beat hasty retreats when confronted with "relatives" they never knew (Pete), and a long-time favorite choosing exile when he finally realizes that his girlfriend will always choose the Doctor over him (Mickey). The Girl Who Waited does something a bit different as a parallel-character story, but allows MacRae to cover another "What if?" scenario with returns almost as great.

The story is minimalist in every way the Cybermen epic was maximalist. There are no characters aside from the three leads; the Two Streams Facility has been cleaned out by plague. White sterilized rooms are balanced by lush topiaries and gardens, adding up to a weird futuristic look which aligns perfectly with its purpose: to allow infected people to live out their few hours in a quicker time stream, while their loved ones can observe them effectively living a life from the slower one. Whether this is merciful or morbid depends on one's point of view, and Rory's human one stands, I think, for most of ours. I would be sickened to watch a friend or family member grow old fast, and not be able to physically interact. Yet the Doctor counters with (what is to a Time Lord) common sense: "Why? At least you're not watching them die."

Time Lord quip isn't appropriate here, however. The simple press of a wrong button costs Amy half her life: lagging behind the Doctor and Rory, she walks into the same room but in quickened time, and ends up spending 36 years waiting for them to rescue her. This puts her in her fifties by the time Rory manages to locate her only hours later in his timeline, and she's pissed to say the least, bitter and battle-worn, an empty shell of her former self. She's spent all these years in survivalist mode, with nothing more to look forward to than fending off "benign" androids programmed to administer lethal cures, since as an alien she would be poisoned by their antidotes. With the Doctor remaining in the TARDIS and communicating to Rory via a looking glass that accesses alternate timelines, the dilemma becomes one of how to rescue the younger Amy out of the past so that she never has to grow old in this horrifying life of isolation. And of course, when the solution presents itself, she naturally doesn't want to go through with it. To save her past self would mean killing her present self, which no living creature willingly accepts.

This warrior-Amy in her fifties turns out to be a great character and critical to the story's success. We haven't enjoyed the spectacle of a TARDIS companion kicking ass so professionally since the days of Leela, and it gives Karen Gillam a chance to show off new acting skills. The Doctor is also in fine form, unloosing his dark manipulative side, and unlike Rory we're not fooled by his promise that he can save both Amy's by resolving the paradox of them co-existing in the same time stream. There is a slight problem with Rory here, however, that he would want to save old-Amy as much as "his" Amy. Let alone for a moment calling into question the sanity of any man who would want to be saddled with two wives, one of them old enough to be his mother, it just doesn't play authentically. More natural would be Rory aghast by the thought and willing to do what it takes to make the horrible mistake cease to be. And this would have worked wonders for the story, making old-Amy's heartbreak even worse and putting Rory in touch with a darker side he constantly slams the Doctor for. Even so, his desperate attempt to save both Amy's works despite the problems, and the emotional farewell through the doors of the TARDIS is a kind of scene we haven't seen since Rose went wreck in Doomsday.

The Girl Who Waited is completely defined by its title. Amy's tragedy from The Eleventh Hour is repeated, but infinitely worse, hinting at a full circle with her story arc. In fact her swan song is just around the corner. This episode exposes the Doctor's destructive nature as she faithfully, eternally, waits on him; the next one demolishes that childlike faith altogether.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

Damages: The Four Seasons

2011-12-08T05:40:00.000-08:00

Damages is a high-stakes litigation thriller, but don't fear the clichés. Hardly any action takes place in the courtroom, and despite the flashforward technique it's impossible to predict the end games. There are no righteous melodramas, no cheap victories. Suspense is wrung out of depositions, bickering strategy sessions, and complex relationships, particularly that between the two female leads. For whatever reason I always imagined Glenn Close as being someone like Patty Hewes in real life: cold and ruthless, champion of the oppressed, mostly for prestige, but also because she (like her protégée Ellen Parsons) despises corporate bullies, even though she's an outrageous bully herself. She demeans her subordinates, fires people on a whim, divorces her husband, disowns her son, and has his girlfriend thrown in jail. And for desert she tries having her favorite employee Ellen killed. I love Patty Hewes.

If her character is too colorful to be true, her lawsuits are based entirely on real-world events. Season 1 is inspired by the Enron and WorldCom scandal of '02, season 2 by toxic dumping and price-fixing on Wall Street, and season 3 by Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in '09. Season 4 then moves out of white collar crime into the Afghanistan war, the demon now being a private military contracting firm working with the CIA to perform illegal extraction activities and torture, getting soldiers killed on dangerous missions with no payout benefits for their families. It's a very dark season, and in some ways my favorite, though nothing can top the tight and relentless suspense of season 1. In an eerie way, the fraud victims of seasons 1 and 3 resonate loudly in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement: the 1% can join the 99% at a moment's notice.

The dramas are character driven, with fair ball played to the good and bad guys, though of course there really are no good guys when dealing with high-profile lawyers, least of all Patty Hewes; co-protagonist Ellen Parsons is the one we're meant to identify with, though my favorite character is actually Tom Shayes. As for the corporate assholes being sued, they are truly assholes, yet sympathetic (with the exception of toxic-dumper Walter Kendrick in season 2, whose character really isn't fleshed out enough). We get to know their families and are pulled in by pathetic attempts to justify themselves and make good out of foul behavior. Ted Danson has become legendary as Arthur Frobischer (season 1), the billionaire who kills his company, dumps his stock, and leaves all his employees destitute. Campbell Scott is just as convincing as Joe Tobin (season 3), who initially despises his father's criminal activities only to get sucked in after his suicide, and "do as he must" for the family. There's a not-so-subtle Godfather theme running through season 3, with Tobin a tragically realized Michael Corleone; I could never have imagined he'd have what it takes to murder Tom Shayes in the final episode by drowning him in a toilet bowl. Finally, John Goodman is flawless as Howard Erickson (season 4), the private military contractor who is willing to have his own men tortured and killed to keep things quiet; inwardly tormented, he desperately tries to convince himself of the lesser-of-evils through religion and scripture. For that matter, the CIA stooge played by Dylan Baker is also as much sympathetic as despicable, having, as we learn in the end, launched an illegal operation for no other purpose than to rescue his own son fathered on an Afgani woman, then murdering his fellow soldiers in the field when they refuse to extract a 12-year old.

Each season escalates the bizarre relationship between Patty and Ellen, who maintain a guarded respect without ever really trusting each other, especially after Patty tries to have Ellen killed in season 1. Some have charged that Ellen's willingness to have anything to do with Patty after this undermines the show's credibility, but the unlikely relationship is the whole point, and is handled believably in its dramatic context. There's a difference, after all, between hyper-realistic and unrealistic. An example of the latter would be Luke and Laura from General Hospital, still rated the #1 soap opera romance of all time, but fundamentally incredible: Laura is raped by Luke and falls in love with him. That's evidently an appealing fantasy to many women (according to a study in '04, 52% of all Harlequin romance novels published that year involved the plot of a heroine falling in love with her rapist and transforming him into a more decent man), but Ellen Parsons is no Laura Spencer equivalent. She does not bond with Patty so soon after being almost murdered. She's driven by revenge to take Patty down throughout the entire second season, and even when she is able to transcend herself by forgiving Patty, it's as much a self-serving forgiveness as a self-empowering one -- and she certainly never goes back to work for her. In seasons 3 and 4 she allies herself with her former boss to exploit the resources of Hewes Associates for her own gain, partly out of respect for Patty's goals which align with her own, but also because she now has a certain power over Patty knowing her worst secret. As the show writers have said, there is something mythic about the power of forgiveness and what it does to people in unforgivable cases, and that's really, as I see it, the key to Damages's success. Without it, it would be a just another legal thriller.

Indeed, this is why seasons 3 and 4 are so compelling: there is a constant subtext to everything Patty and Ellen do in the wake of the failed murder and abandoned revenge. They never speak of the ugliness again, but it hangs between them surreally as they use each other for their own ambitions. They oddly like each other for all their contempt. I knew things were going too smoothly in their season-4 team up against High Star, however, and Patty's betrayal in the final episode was inevitable when Ellen tried throwing the case and cutting a deal to save the life of a soldier. Where season 3 ended on uncertainty ("Tell me, Patty, is everything worth it?"), this season's epilogue points ahead to renewed conflict, as Patty, on rotten ice, extends a hand of partnership to Ellen, only to have it spat back for her treachery.

Season 2, while good, is somewhat an anomaly. As mentioned, the corporate villain is too one-dimensional, partly due to lazy writing, but also because there wasn't room enough to flesh him out. The season is all over the map. The toxic-dumping storyline is supplemented by that of the William Hurt character who murdered his wife; he also happens to be (wait for it) the father of Patty's 17-year old son. Then there are dangling threads from the previous season, with way too many returning characters. Much as I love Ted Danson's performance, bringing back Arthur Frobischer was a mistake, and I didn't buy him hiring Patty who so vindictively destroyed him a year before. Nor did I like the romance between Ellen and Wes -- the dirty cop planted in her grief therapy sessions to get close to her -- not so much because the concept was bad, but because Timothy Olyphant can't act his way out of a bag. No, the most engaging plot of season 2 is the one we didn't get enough of: Ellen's revenge on Patty. Even here there's a problem, however. While obviously understandable, Ellen's fury and decision to work with the feds to bring Patty down is perhaps too believable, and thus less interesting. It's the volatile alliances of the other seasons that sell Damages so well, though there are some admittedly tense moments when Patty suspects Ellen of being a mole. That being said, the wrap-up to season 2 is brilliant, and I really thought Ellen shot Patty. All seasons use the flash-forward technique to paint a puzzle of imminent catastrophes, but season 2's piecing is the most genius.

Where Damages goes in its fifth and final season has only been hinted at, but it promises open war between Patty and Ellen, and Ellen's ultimate decision to let go of her need for Patty. I can't wait.

Season 1 -- 5 stars
Season 2 -- 3 ½ stars
Season 3 -- 4 ½ stars
Season 4 -- 5 stars

A Vivisection of N.T. Wright

2011-12-01T04:25:00.000-08:00

Richard Fellows has a sharp post against Wright on the subject of supposed gay marriages, or committed gay relationships as we know them, in antiquity. Well worth checking out. As is too often the case, Wright's claims aren't based on a careful assessment of evidence, but on neo-orthodox views draped in rhetoric.

Is Professor James Gellar real?

2011-11-21T05:23:00.001-08:00

With eight episodes down and four to go in Dexter's sixth season, it's time to take the question head on: is Professor James Gellar real, or the imaginary projection of Travis held by most viewers?

I don't think Gellar is imaginary. I think that's what the show writers have gone out of their way to make us believe, perhaps a bit too obviously, in order to set us up for a twist that may not pay off so well.

Unlike The Sixth Sense and Fight Club where the imaginary reveal comes as a surprise, and later more than sooner, Dexter has been sledgehammering us from the get-go with the idea that Gellar is to Travis as Harry is to his son: the shades of dead father-figures who counsel from the great beyond. The problem is that despite the avalanche of clues pointing in this direction, each clue can be rationalized on the assumption that Gellar is real, and there is actually a clue that does indicate that Gellar is real. Let's consider all the evidence.

In favor of Gellar being imaginary:

* In general, no one ever interacts with Gellar except Travis. This is the prime selling point for the idea that Gellar is like Harry: once a mentor, now dead, but still mentoring inside the pupil's head.

* In particular, when Travis and Gellar are at a restaurant (episode 4), the waitress pours a drink for Travis and talks to him but completely fails to acknowledge Gellar in any way. On the other hand, the waitress does know Travis, that's why she's so chummy with him, and Gellar could have already said that he's not ordering anything.

* When Travis and Gellar are out in public (episode 5), no one notices Gellar despite the newspapers broadcasting his photo as the Doomsday Killer. On the other hand, Gellar does acknowledge that he should get out of sight, and who pays attention to tabloids anyway?

* Travis abducts victims by himself (the Horseman of the Apocalypse, the Angel of Retribution, the first potential Whore of Babylon), or with Gellar remaining in the car (the snake victim, the second potential Whore of Babylon), but never with Gellar getting his fingers dirty. On the other hand, this is typical of cult leaders who manipulate their followers to take the biggest risks.

* Gellar is inconsistent on the matter of free will. In episode 4 he assures Travis that people have free will, while in episode 7 he disdains the idea, declaring that people's wills don't matter. This makes sense if Travis is conflicted about predestination and is having internal arguments with himself. On the other hand, Gellar does not exactly say there is no free will in episode 7, only that free will has no power to stop God's overarching plans.

* Gellar evades Dexter by escaping from a second-floor window of the church (episode 8). But there could be another way down which we (and Dexter) haven't seen yet, or Gellar could just be hiding. And we know that Travis is really chained to the floor.

In favor of Gellar being real:

* Gellar spies on Travis through a door crack when Travis is having sex with the angel of death victim (episode 4). Travis is oblivious to this, implying an objective reality on Gellar's part. Certainly Harry never appears without Dexter's awareness -- that's the whole point of being inside someone's head.

I'm nervous about the upcoming reveal that Gellar is real, because we've been yanked too strongly in the opposite direction. The result is that, in retrospect, all the scenes of Gellar not interacting with the world seem forced and rather unfair to the viewer.

But if it turns out that Gellar is indeed imaginary, then that's even worse, for the entire season has been reduced to a banal exercise, when Dexter has always been more reliable about supplying surprising twists. On top of that, the writers haven't played fair ball: the spying Gellar in Travis' sex scene implies an objective reality.

UPDATE: Episode 9 makes plain that Gellar is imaginary, that he's been dead for some time. So we went through all those episodes of the obvious to get to an unsurprising twist, with an unfair scene in episode 4 that implies Gellar is real. I'm nonplussed.

Blogging a "Waste of Time"

2011-11-20T02:56:00.000-08:00

In what must have yesterday been a thought-provoking SBL presentation, Mark Goodacre suggests that blogs are self-indulgent time wasters:

"It really is a waste of time to blog, to podcast, even to tweet if you are doing it for its own sake, to gain recognition or something like that. But if it's something you enjoy, it does have its rewards."

I tend to agree, though this makes me wonder why I'm not blogging nearly as much as I used to. I still enjoy it, after all.

It may have to do with something else Mark touches on, when he mentions the way e-lists peaked in the late '90s. Blogging has likewise dropped significantly in the last few years, abandoned especially among the younger generation in favor of micro-blogging media like Twitter and Facebook. Recently I've lost some of the passion for blogging as I once lost it for e-lists like Crosstalk. Either I've been doing it too long, or it's lost its luster, or -- and I think this really has a lot to do with it -- there's a certain contagion effect. Many of the bibliobloggers who inspired me to start this blog aren't blogging a third as much as they used to, and some not at all. That could just be part of the aforementioned trend, though Mark mentions the irony of an increase in biblioblogs which makes them harder to keep up and interact with.

As for enduring value, Mark is surely leaning on hyperbole when he says: "Blogs are ephemeral. Blog posts do not endure. Even if you keep a full archive of everything you have ever posted, the vast majority of your posts, the great bulk of activity, 99% of your output evaporates from consciousness. Here today, gone tomorrow." I certainly retain a lot more than 1% of what bibliobloggers have put forth over the past seven years!

The Cursed Chateau

2011-11-05T03:53:00.000-07:00

The Cursed Chateau (2009) is a module I could have used back in the '80s when I didn't have the mojo to create something like this myself. In a D&D context, haunted houses can be dreadfully boring, when they should just be dreadful, and the key seems to lie in fleshing out colorful, demented backgrounds to the haunting entities. It is they who should be yawning, and James Maliszewski gets this right: "Though dead, Lord Jourdain is bored. He seeks diversion and (he hopes) release from his earthly bondage by toying with any living beings that enter the ruins of his former home." (p 8) Supernatural bullying owes to contempt and world weariness, when you get down to it, and in Jourdain's case he's been homebound on the prime material plane ever since his suicide. The torment he inflicts on intruders is weird, and in the hands of a good DM can be genuinely frightening.

The module clearly harks back to old-school D&D, which is a treat to those like myself who continue to play by 1st edition rules and lament the loss of gritty, pulp-fantasy adventures that flourished in the late '70s and early '80s. The Cursed Chateau, in fact, reminds strongly of Castle Amber and Ravenloft, not only in the way characters are confined to a morbid setting until a curse is lifted from the place, but more profoundly in the looming personality of Lord Jourdain whose own liberation depends entirely on the actions of the characters. Both of these classics are favorites of mine, so Maliszewski's homage has a lot going for it in advance. Again like these classics, it's geared for mid-level characters (4th-6th), but requiring player as much as character experience, as the house's curse is rather hard to come to grips with.

The chateau is given a ground level, an upstairs level, and a dungeon level, with plenty of tricks that reward and punish in unexpected ways. There are the obligatory undead and demonic forces, and a good deal of creative traps: fountains yielding benison and bane, portraits one hardly dares look at, other nasties. I particularly like one of the "accomplice" spirits (now a spectre), Jourdain's vengeful wife who was jilted and tried teaching him a lesson, but ended up locked and dying in a guest bedroom. Characters will probably be making saving throws as often as swinging swords as they try to figure their way out of the chateau, which isn't obvious, in fact counter-intuitive: the better the party fares, the less likely they'll ever leave; the more punishment they take, the more they gratify the spirit who terrorizes the house in a game of liberation.

Which brings me to Jourdain's Fun. The random events occurring out of nowhere as characters make their way through the house sell this module as much as the rooms' contents, if not more. I've never been a fan of wandering monsters (though The Cursed Chateau has those too), but "wandering events" are far more interesting and less tedious. Jourdain's spirit entertains himself by scaring people -- inflicting them with formication, speaking out of a random painting, making the walls bleed, causing doors to bang open, animating brooms and shovels which attack, etc. They're the sort of little things that make horror novels and films what they are, though in the context of gaming can be trivial if not handled well. As an aside, I can't help but note the similarity of "Jourdain's Fun" to what I called the playhouse of horrors in my own module, Blinding Claw of Torremor: "Pazuzu's Amusement". Like Maliszewski, I suppose I have a penchant for the macabre rooted in boredom as much as active hate.

The Cursed Chateau is a small 48-page booklet that bears no outside resemblance to old-school D&D modules, which is a shame, because what's on the inside scores on every page. It's a near perfect ready-to-run module that doesn't try to reach above itself, doesn't require an over-arching plot or narrative, doesn't contain any filler, and can be injected into almost any campaign requiring a haunted house.

Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5