Dragon Age Origins: Implausible Battle Outfits

I’ve been playing the enormously enjoyable “Dragon Age Origins” lately, and like most RPGs, you can get a variety of armor and robes for your character. However, some of the outfits verge on the ridiculous. Like, here is a female mage wearing the “Reaper’s Vestments”, the most powerful mage robe in the game:

Like, you see that costume, and it doesn’t immediately say “mage of surpassing power and skill”. No, it says “high-end Russian call girl.”

The leather armor is a bit better:

But why the huge exposed area on the chest and shoulders? I don’t think the heat of battle is precisely the best place to wear a tank top.

Plate armor makes much more sense, both practically and aesthetically:

Now that’s the sort of thing you want to wear when people are trying to kill you with swords! And it looks impressive, too. It’s the sort of armor that says “this woman is the Commander of the Grey Wardens”. Whereas the mage robe says “this woman is available for hire in fifteen minute increments.”

-JM

art imitates life

I’ve been playing Dragon Age Origins, and like all BioWare RPGs, it comes with a built-in romantic subplot. If your character is male, you can attempt to seduce this hot nature witch who joins your merry band of adventurers.

Anyway, I happened across a forum posting about this particular subplot. The poster complained at length at how hard it was to successful woo Ms. Hot Nature Witch, how she seemed to take offense at almost random things, and how you could quite easily terminate the romantic subplot, almost by accident.

Dude…in what way is that not accurate? Seems to me the game developers modeled it precisely.

perhaps the very worst thing you can do to anyone…

…is to simply tell the truth.

They just don’t make computer games like this any more.

-JM

“The Hour of the Dragon”, by Robert E. Howard

Perhaps the original sword & sorcery novel, and indeed one of the best.

The plot: a band of disaffected nobles and a fallen priest gather together to overthrow King Conan of Aquilonia. The fallen priest uses sorcery to summon up Xaltotun of Acheron, once the chief sorcerer of a hellish empire now three thousand years dead. The conspirators plan to use Xaltotun’s powers to overthrow Conan and divide Aquilonia among themselves. With Xaltotun’s aid, the conspirators succeed, but quickly discover that Xaltotun has own ideas, and plans to resurrect his ancient empire of horror and necromancy. Conan manages to escape from Xaltotun, and it’s up to him to save both his kingdom and indeed the entire world from Xaltotun’s infernal grasp.

Howard wrote with a vigor and an energy that few modern writers can match. The popular image of “Conan the Barbarian” is of a muscle-bound Schwarzenegger-esque dullard, but the real Conan is cunning, prone to gloomy pondering, and a man of action. No postmodern angst for him; if Conan were to encounter postmodern angst, he’d split its head with his broadsword, loot the corpse, and keep going.

Consequently, the books crackles with narrative tension. Conan’s up against enemies his sword cannot harm, but he’s not about to let that stop him, and he jumps from greater danger to greater danger in his quest to save his kingdom. Xaltotun makes a formidable foe for Conan; the conspirators who summoned him from the dead seem to represent every idiot politician who conjured up a force (war, demagoguery, reform, whatever) that he can no longer control.

Modern readers might find Howard’s level of racism off-putting. “Dragon” isn’t anywhere near as racist as some of the other stuff Howard wrote (the “Vale of Lost Women” comes to mind), but there’s still some element of it. Of course, nowadays “racist” has been so overused that the word is virtually meaningless, but Howard actually was racist, in that he grew up in early 20th-century Texas, and was therefore quite steeped in the racial Social Darwinism that was mainstream American thought at the time. It would be funny to watch the people who see racism & sexism everywhere in modern SF/F (much in the same way that Torquemada saw heretics everywhere) read “The Hour of the Dragon”. It might give them some healthy perspective, or their heads would explode. One of the two.

But books are products of their time and place. Really good books manage to transcend that – people still read “A Christmas Carol” even though Dickensian London is long gone. “The Hour of the Dragon”, I think, is one of those books.

-JM

Fridays of Sword & Sorceress 24

Lately complete strangers have been walking up to me on the streets, grabbing me by the lapels of my coat (it was 85 degrees out today, I don’t know why I was wearing a coat), and shouting in my face:

“Jonathan Moeller! Your short story ‘Ghost Masks’ is in ‘Sword & Sorceress 24′! Does that mean you’ll be interviewing your co-contributors this year again?”

Yes. Yes I am. Once again I will be running interviews with all of my Sword & Sorceress 24 co-contributors. At least, those contributors who didn’t immediately brandish a sprig of wolfsbane and a revolver loaded with silver bullets when I contacted them, since it’s remotely possible that I may need a haircut.*

But anyway! One interview will go up every week, barring technical difficulties or zombie attacks. Should everything go smoothly (and the environment remain zombie-free), you’ll see an interview every Friday until November, when SS24 actually comes out.

So, tune in again on Friday for the first interview. It will be amazing.

-JM

*That didn’t actually happen. Everyone was very nice.

bargain

Started a new story, “Wizard’s Bargain”. It features dazzling sorcery. Villainous treachery. And even a hint – yes, just a hint – of romance from BEYOND THE GRAVE!

Kind of gross, really, if you think about it.

-JM

double predestination

Started a new story, “Double Predestination”. It’s not like anything I’ve done for a while, because everything I write almost always seems to fall into one of four categories:

1.) Chicks with knives.
2.) Guy with a sword. Now available for free!
3.) Technology-related.
4.) Weird stuff set in modern times.

I haven’t done any weird stuff set in modern times for, oh, quite some time. Since before “Demonsouled” came out, certainly. So it’s nice to come back.

The term “double predestination”, incidentally, is a Christian idea that people have been arguing about for ages. Basically, the idea is that God predestines some for salvation from all eternity. “Double” predestination is a Calvinist variant on the same idea, wherein God predestines some for salvation and others for damnation. This bothers people, since it negates free will, leaving you essentially as a preprogrammed meat robot speeding along to your inevitable fate. It also makes God seem arbitrary and cruel, since selecting people for heaven or hell before they even exist seems rather capricious.

Of course, it’s only capricious if the present cannot change the past. Or if time isn’t actually linear, but we only perceive it that way. I don’t actually buy double predestination, but I got to wondering if certain actions in the present could in fact change the past, and from that came my story idea.

-JM

free books! get yer free books!

Four years it’s been, since my book “Demonsouled“ came out. In fact, more than four years, and it’s been officially Out Of Print for a while now. Alas, that’s not likely to change any time soon. So why not make it available to the public for free?

So I did. Follow this link to get a PDF copy.

I also put up a PDF of the sequel, “Soul of Tyrants”. Since “Demonsouled” it is out of print, the prospect of “Soul of Tyrants” ever seeing publication is rather low. I probably have a better chance of finding a million dollars in my sink, but that always bothered me, because I rather like “Soul of Tyrants”. To be honest with you, and myself, in hindsight “Demonsouled” was really rather mediocre. First books usually are, I suppose. But I think “Soul of Tyrants” is a much better book. I even like the love story in that book.

So I recommend that you check it out. Immediately!

-JM

ice sculpting

Started a new story, though I haven’t decided on a title.

It opens with a young woman on the eve of her wedding dancing with an old man. Their conversation ends with the young woman (with good cause) stabs the old man in the chest. Except no blood comes from the wound, but only dust. Things get worse from there.

I have to write this story as fast as possible. Sometimes writing a story is like carving a sculpture from a block of ice – if you don’t do it fast enough, the entire thing will melt into nothingness.

-JM

plot crutch AND plot spackle!

Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To ‘Quantum Flux’

Key quote:

At the beginning of The Eclipse Of Infinity, a catastrophic quantum flux event on a nearby moon is threatening to destroy the planet Magnus 9. When the planet’s shields suddenly become inoperable due to a quantum flux surge, the inhabitants frantically evacuate. At the end of the first chapter, the novel’s protagonist, Cutter Van Dusen, clutches the hand of his dying mother, who before succumbing to quantum flux poisoning tells her son that an oracle has chosen him to travel back in time through a quantum flux rupture and save the planet by harnessing the power of a strange, mysterious force known as “quantum flux.”

Early on, years before I ever got published, someone observed that all the characters in my stories resolved every single problem through the use of magic. Every one. It’s like on Star Trek when they solve their problems every week by reversing the polarity of something or another.

Eventually I realized that was the result of lazy thinking and poor plotting, and so moved away from it. It’s like cheating the reader, and who wants to be a cheater?

-JM