The Accurate and True Historical Timeline of FRPGs

For years, I've been reading bloggers talking about the Golden Age and the Silver Age of TSR or of D&D.  Gritting my teeth through such ill-executed attempts, I thought it was time, once and for all, to publish an accurate timeline with unprejudiced year divisions and names that reflected a true understanding of the state-of-affairs.  That's right: mine.  As all things that are self-evidently true once one has grasped the terms, I shall not argue for it, but merely proclaim it for universal reception.  You can now replace outdated schema: merry third day of Christmas!  :-)

Historical Timeline of Fantasy Role-Playing Games
-1973	Ages of Prehistoric Warfare
1974-1976	The Copper Age
1977-1985	The Golden Age
1986-1999	The Silver Age
2000-2008	The Electrum Age
2009-Present	The Platinum Age

Another One of My Nitpicks -- But in What Kind of Fur?

I have often wondered why the term lycanthropy has been applied to all cases of animal-human shape-shifting when there is a perfectly correct technical term to cover not merely the werewolf, but all such shape-shifters: therianthropy.  So yeah, I am stumping for therianthropy/therianthropes in the vocabulary of all mythopoets.  Update your speech and your bestiaries!

On another level, and this is a broader issue for all who change their appearances -- though the differences between transformation and illusion introduce complications --which form is the true form? (D&D gamers will recognize Gygax's take on this issue by his distinction between werewolves and wolfweres, and other similarly named monsters.) With a therianthrope, the issue could be put thus, Is it an animal that can pose as a human or a human that becomes a beast?  Maybe we should consider the possibility that it is something else, although this too is complicated by the possibility that it was originally one before it became what it is now.  A further complication is therianthropes that have a hybrid form; perhaps that is the true form?  But wherever there are multiple forms, they hold out the possibility that no single form alone is the creature's true form, challenging us to entertain the notion that all the forms are equally true or perhaps that they are true in different ways.

This comes up in particularly humorous ways when discussing the TV show American Horror Story with people.  All the women I've heard talking about it laugh over what it says about men that they would see the maid as she is pictured below, when she is "really" a gross-looking old woman.  On one occasion, my psychologist friend countered by saying exactly what I was thinking: "Why isn't the beautiful form her true form?  Maybe only men can see her as she truly is, and she is disguised in the sight of women."  Oh man, there followed silent and unhappy discomfort from the female faculty involved in that conversation.  Whether spectral or embodied, shape-shifters prey on discomfort and fear -- the basic human fear that when things are not what they appear to be, they are dangerous.

What the @#$%!?

What!


Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Sites

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• sexy (2x)
• bitch (1x)

I guess shit, ass, hell, and phallus get me nothing?  I think I'll make a post tomorrow about oriental massage parlors...

How much XP do I get for post 100?

Coming up on 7 months old, with 63 followers and over 17k page views, I now reach my 100th post (seriously, would it kill you people to comment?  ;-p ).  I had been wanting to do something special for my one hundredth post, but my brain has been too distracted by lots of practical life demands lately to come up with much of anything.  And then it struck, yesterday, when I least expected it: during mass.

I had to go to a neighboring parish so I could go in the evening instead of the morning, and I opened the service leaflet so that my eye fell directly on this:

XP for Men!  What was this advertisement for Experience Points!?  There's an RPG group at a local parish?  I had no idea why it would be male-only, but was dumbstruck at the thought.  At least it wasn't for kids.  Then my eyes continued down:

Ah.  Chi Rho = Christ.  Not XP.  I see.  So no Experience Points.  Listen, Fr. So-and-so, is Jesus your GM, or what?  Well, I better get some XP for post #100, is all I'm going to say.

Up late today: Mythopoeic Monday

Mythopoeia and the Public Domain

I got it into my head that J. R. R. Tolkien's poem, "Mythopoeia," written in 1931 (after one of those BIG conversations that changes the life of intellectuals, in this case, Tollers, Jack, and Hugh Dyson) and dedicated to Lewis, was in the public domain.  I'm not sure how I got that impression, perhaps because it was on Wikipedia at some point?  Anyway, apparently it is not freely available.  And thanks to Sonny Bono, the Walt Disney Co., and various other corporate lackeys in Congress, it will not be in the public domain in the US any time soon.  Now, I'm all for the rights of creators, but at some point, it is reasonable that the creator and the family that she or he provided for have been taken care of, and the culture of which they are a part have a claim on their creation as something that now belongs to a people.  You know, like all those stories that Grimm and Perrault and others published, but then were later available for Walt Disney to adapt in animations that made them tons of money?  So yeah, I'm one of those disgruntled people that thinks that copyright was plenty long already and didn't need a greedy extend that keeps things out of the public domain even longer.  Even if it was simply occasioned by the fact that I was going to republish "Mythopoeia" today until I discovered I was all wrong about its copyright status and that made my life more difficult this Mythopoeic Monday.  Yet another reason to appreciate things like the OGL, Creative Commons, the sharers in the OSR community, and artists like Nina Paley.  I might also mention Paizo's community use policy (found by scrolling down the page, right hand panel).

The problem with grumpiness is that it calls for connections.  Like a connection to the fact that I love the Tolkien volume Tales from the Perilous Realm, illustrated by Alan Lee.  It's an almost perfect collection of fairy stories together with Tolkien's seminal essay "On Fairy-Stories."  Almost perfect, except that it left out the other major work on mythopoeia in Tolkien's corpus: the eponymous poem that is the subject of today's grumpiness!  Ugh!  Another link in the grumpiness chain.  Truly, everything in this life is marked by dukkha.

So you will not be treated to a reproduction of "Mythopoiea" in today's post.  For that matter, any lengthy quotation opens up the tricky question of how much of it I can quote under fair use.  But if you haven't read it, I highly recommend that you seek it out (even though you can't find it in the book I'd love to point you towards buying).  Aside from its literary quality and its historical importance (Lewis' corpus would be utterly different if he had not converted), it is a statement of the nature and value of myths.*  There have been at least two attitudes towards myths other than they are literal statements of historical or natural realities.  One is the view of Plato, that they are dangerous, foundational lies, only justifiable as a necessary evil in the maintenance of a good polis or society, but hence demanding careful and strong social control.  The other is that they are the bearers of deep truths, hidden but of great importance to the cosmos and the individual.  This attitude is at least as old as Plutarch and dominated the thought of ancient Alexandria.  This was the perspective, broadly speaking, to which Tolkien and Dyson belonged and to which they hoped to win their friend, the atheistic Lewis.  Hence its dedication:

"To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver'."

I recommend it to your enjoyment, study, and contemplation.  Finally, the anthropology of the poem sees sub-creation, or the building of secondary worlds, as a part of human nature by virtue of humans' being made in the image and likeness of God.  So, did I setting out complaining about the distortion of human good that keeps people as a group from participating in certain pieces of mythic material so that I could arrive at the point that joining in mythopoesis was a participation in the divine nature?  Yeah, let's say I planned that.

* For that matter, it is also full of keys to what Tolkien is up to in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

What is Wrong with the Comments Feature, Blogger?

I've been getting complaints recently that people can't comment on my posts.  Are people having this problem at other blogspot addresses or only here?  Very annoying, I wish Blogger would get its act together.

What the Hell is Wrong with Taliesin?

Allen Taliesin, aka, the Clockwork Gnome, should be working on character generation for our Ygg (S&W) play-by-post game.  He should.  Instead, he is doing this:

 And this:

What is he trying to be? A river flowing to gamerdom?  (Or maybe a gnomish clockwork mill on a river flowing to gamerdom?) The point is, he needs to get his priorities straight.  I ask that all loyal readers of this blog go to his site (linked to the covers above) and post demands for the same there.  And sure, if you want to read his press release about his intriguing new products while you're there, fine, whatever.  Just don't get sucked in.  It's all about priorities, people.

By Heiids: Click Image for Designer's Posting

Nothing is More Important than Correctly Pronouncing Fantasic Words!

golem \GOH-lum\ 

DEFINITION from Merriam-Webster

noun

1 : an artificial being in Hebrew folklore endowed with life

2 : someone or something resembling a golem

The above are GO-lems.  

Not GOL-lums.  Not this guy:

If you can't hear the difference between the long O and the short O in English, please seek help.  If you can't be helped, please refer to them as "an artificial being from Jewish folklore popular in D&D games" and "Smeagol," respectively.  Stop stabbing my brain through my ears.

This rant was brought to you by the last podcast I listened to where one of the speakers kept calling the magical constructs, Gollums.  Have your own pet peeves about the mispronunciation of fantastic words?  Let us hear about them in the comments!