googoogjoob

I think that, for the most part, they don't seem to tell time in Avernum, at least to a level of precision greater than a day. I don't think there are any explicit references to timekeeping- that is, characters might say "a few days ago..." or "tomorrow night..." or the like, but they don't seem to have anything much more precise. I'm doubtful of the usefulness of magic or mechanical timekeeping systems in a setting where everyone's circadian rhythms are disrupted by living in a dimly-lit cave for years. All that said: "magic fungus that cycles between light/dark every 24 hours or so, and which is somehow omnipresent enough and bright enough to keep the humans of Avernum roughly diurnal," while kind of a handwave, is the explanation most in the spirit of the games' setting. There are also problems with larger-scale timekeeping in Avernum (that is, on the scale above the day). Avernum follows a calendar which marks time in days, weeks, and months (280 days to the year, divided into 8 months of 35 days apiece)- and, curiously, the calendar seems to be a mixture of surface-specific and Avernum-specific features. The year is oriented on the anniversary of the first exiles' arrival in Avernum- this day, the first day of the month of Remembrance, is the first day of the year. It doesn't seem likely that surfacers would commemorate this event in the same way, or use it as their new year's day, or name an entire month in commemoration of it. But other months have names that clearly refer to surface seasons, which Avernum does not experience- "Suncome," "Leafloss," "Icefall"- indicating that the month-names, at least, must come from a calendar devised on the surface, though I don't think there's any reason to expect that the months of these names, as observed in Avernum, correlate to the relevant seasons on the surface. Bizarrely, though they must have named/renamed the month of Remembrance in memory of the first exiles, one of the months of the Avernite calendar retains the name of "Empire." The first wave of remakes actually brought this problem into existence (the Exile games don't have the calendar system, and only E3, set largely on the surface, counts days), and the re-remakes sort of retcon it back out of existence: they no longer reference the calendar, and AFAIK the holidays observed in A1 no longer have any effect in A:EftP. A3:RW keeps track of how many days have passed, but doesn't relate them to an explicit calendar.

More books. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. Not good. Lots of literary fireworks, amounting to not much. I think the absurdity and paranoia of the story are meant to feed back into each other, and reinforce each other, but for me what happened was that the absurdity made the paranoia feel less pressing or threatening, and the paranoia made the absurdity feel forced and unfunny. A mess. Civil War Short Stories and Poems, Bob Blaisdell, ed. What the title says. Takes kind of a documentary approach, meaning the major, really good stuff (eg Whitman, Bierce, Howe) sits side by side with lesser works, which are generally illuminating in their own way. Classic Ghost Stories, John Grafton, ed. Sort of a sequel to Great Ghost Stories, above. More of the same, basically; again inevitably uneven; some really good ones, though (eg Robert Louis Stevenson's atmospheric "The Body-Snatcher," Fitz-James O'Brien's Poe-esque "What Was It?," and M. R. James's best ghost story, "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad,'"). The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition, by Herbert Asbury. Really a history of the American temperance movement + a history of the Prohibition era. Very informal, as the title implies; Asbury was a journalist rather than a historian, and leans more on the "who" and the "what" than the "why." Lots of anecdotes and details gleaned from primary sources, relatively little analysis. Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore. Justifiedly a classic, and probably the most important and influential alt-history work ever; apart from that, I was surprised by how writerly it was- it's relatively brief, but character-focused, and strong on characterization and thematic patterning, in ways uncommon for its time and place (being a science fiction novel from the early 50s). Selected Stories, by Sherwood Anderson. The cream of Anderson's second and third collections of short fiction; not everything here works, and some stories show Anderson sort of groping for a way forward from his success with Winesburg, Ohio. But the good stories (The Egg, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, The New Englander) are spectacular. Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon. This was breezy and enjoyable; I appreciated how Chabon emphasized the (entirely historical) cosmopolitan nature of his setting (the Khazar Khaganate)- the book features not just Khazars (of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim persuasions), but also early Rus', Radhanite traders, Azerbaijanis, a couple Sorbs, a Wend; the mercenary protagonists are a Frankish Jewish physician from Regensburg, and an Ethiopian Jew who had served in the Byzantine army. But on the other hand, it's written in a deliberately atavistic style as a throwback to the historical romances and adventure fantasies of the 60s and earlier, and it was written in 15 brief serialized installments, such that it ends up being pretty shallow and ephemeral (and very atypical for Chabon), so it ended up leaving essentially no impression on me after the two days it took me to read it. I got 12 books for $16 at the Friends of the Library fundraiser sale on Friday. It's time to dig in.

Mechanically, the (re-)remakes are very different from the original games. In particular, the RPG mechanics are overhauled, and substantially streamlined. The old Avernums' system, where you spend points to increase stats and skills, is replaced with a system where stats/skills/perks are separate progressions (and, obviously, perks are added relative to the older games); the player receives a fixed number of points for each per level. Skills are arranged into a tree, but not a very "deep" one. This means that characters grow more powerful at a steady, linear rate over the course of the game, unlike the jerkier leaps and bounds that characters tend to advance in the older games. (It's also, frankly, a shallower and less interesting system, with fewer meaningful choices for the player to make- there aren't many decisions to make in levelling; you increase your character's primary statistic, and then whichever skill(s) get you closer to filling out the right branch of the tree for your build.) There are many little quality of life changes in the remakes. There're in-game world maps. There's a robust quest log, and you can see quest locations on the map. The inventory system is reworked such that encumbrance is based on equipped gear, rather than your entire inventory, cutting down on the need to stash items and juggle inventories. There's a "junk bag"- essentially a bottomless secondary inventory, used for accumulating vendor trash without having to take up inventory slots. There's a hotbar, to which frequently-used items or spells might be assigned. There are innumerable little changes to things like how spells work. Player characters have access to combat skills- non-magical special abilities, access to which is based on combat skills, which at least theoretically make non-magic characters more interesting in combat. In terms of content differences- The (re-)remake of Avernum 1 has relatively substantial content additions- a new "town," several new questlines, a decent amount of added or rewritten dialogue. Avernum 2 and 3 have very little in the way of new content, and what changes there are are mainly to accommodate what are presumably budgetary limitations (as in, commissioning new sprites costs money)- eg, the hydras of Avernum 2 are replaced in the remake with hellhounds, and dialogue is changed to accommodate this; you can no longer buy/ride horses in Avernum 3. Technologically, the remakes have the advantage that you can choose to run them in different resolutions, in a window, etc, which is nice to have. If you're on OS X 10.7 or later, you can't run Avernum 1-3 anymore anyway, and have to play the remakes. I think that whether it's worth it to you to play the remakes mostly comes down to how much you care about the quality of life stuff- both the in-game stuff and the technical stuff. I personally prefer the old Avernums' game mechanics, but I find it easier to go back to the remakes because of the QoL changes. Anyway. My favorite Avernum is probably 2 also. It does everything 1 does better, and creatively develops the setting established in 1- it's everything a sequel should be. 1 is very good, of course; 3 isn't bad, but it's too big and empty compared to 1/2, and the story just doesn't work as well. 5 is my favorite of the second trilogy, as it introduces a somewhat different perspective (as the player characters are Imperial adventurers), and new territory, which neither 4 nor 6 do.

A couple months later, and I have read a bunch more books. Collected Stories, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A compilation of Garcia Marquez's first three short story anthologies, collecting works from 1947 to 1972. Underwhelming, I'm afraid. Like most "post-Chekhov" writers (if that's the right way to put it), Garcia Marquez aims for poignancy and ambiguity, and prioritizes tone, striking images, and a sense of just-out-of-reach feeling over plotting or often even characterization; but for Garcia Marquez, as for most authors, this results in a few excellent stories and many duds. He is not a bad or incompetent writer, and the sense of place in his writing is very powerful, but only a few of these stories actually "worked" for me. The collection ended with the longest of the stories, "The Incredible and Sad Story of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother," which was also maybe my least favorite, being essentially a shaggy dog story with a lot of misery porn on the way to the ending. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. Probably I can't say anything about this novel that has not already been said. It's a deeply weird, messy book, and it's easy to see why it was the modernists who rehabilitated its reputation. I maybe respect it more than I actually enjoyed reading it, but it's an incredible piece of work. The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, by S. A. Smith. Exactly what it sounds like; I found this lying around, having neglected to read it when I got it years ago. It's decent, but as the title indicates, really only just an introduction. Covering a decade or so of history is probably preferable to covering just the events of 1917, but it means that everything is covered super-briefly. Life's Lottery, by Kim Newman. Another book I got years ago, and have attempted to revisit. The conceit is neat: it's a choose-your-own-adventure-type gamebook, but for adults. Unfortunately it's more potboiler than proper literary fiction, with a tendency towards the sordid and absurd; it's also overloaded with references to British pop culture of the 70s and 80s (there's a glossary, which only serves to highlight how alienating this aspect of the book is, and how irrelevant it is to the meaning of the text), and also references to the author's other books and stories. My understanding is that all these things are sort of characteristic of Newman's work, which is unfortunate, as the conceit had promise. Oh well. A Short History of the Civil War: Ordeal by Fire, by Fletcher Pratt. An excellent, albeit relatively narrowly focused (military campaigns above all else) history of the war; concise, punchy prose, solid analysis, a storyteller's eye for character and incident. Impressively honest and pro-Union for the time it was written (1935, 2nd ed 1948); Pratt makes it clear that the war was fought over slavery and secession, at a time when Lost Cause nonsense was in the ascendant, and his frank analysis is that the South was as ill-equipped to win a war by its political structures, social life, and psychology as it was by any blunt economic factors. Very good. Great Ghost Stories, John Grafton, ed. Ghost stories from the 19th and early 20th centuries; weighted towards the mildly spooky, rather than the upsetting or horrific; fun enough.

Back again after an interregnum of a month (my girlfriend was visiting, and I did not get very much reading done). The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason. Miserable. Poor handling of tone, gratuitous gore and cruelty, and a historical setting that's wasted. Instead of giving the reader a palpable sense of the time and place, historical figures (Darwin! Wilberforce! Marx! Prince Albert!) pop up into the narrative, Mason clunkily and anachronistically infodumps about them, and then he treats them in the shallowest, most sensationalist ways possible, instead of bringing them to life. Then he gets back to the dull by-the-numbers "howcatchem" story. I tapped out of this book something like a hundred pages in. Very bad. Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements, by Jay Kirk. Another miserable one. This book is framed as an experimental memoir. In reality, it's plainly two subpar long-form pieces the author couldn't get to work on their own. Neither ever gets its wings and takes flight, and neither is quite book-length. He tried to rectify these problems by just kinda smushing them together. The transition between the halves is abrupt and jarring, and there's only been very perfunctory work done to stitch the two halves together. The first half is about the supposed potential mystery surrounding a Bartok autograph, bouncing between Kirk's investigations in Pennsylvania and his journey across Transylvania to look for... some vague sense of the folk music Bartok drew from, I guess. This story fizzles out, and it turns out there wasn't much mystery at all. The second half features Kirk and a friend futilely trying to shoot a half-baked horror movie on an Arctic cruise ship. It's stultifying. Kirk paints himself as a loathsome, unsympathetic protagonist, abusing drugs and ogling women, constantly, laboredly, shallowly ruminating on life and death and his relationship with his dying father and whatever in an increasingly mind-numbing attempt to pad this sucker out to book length. I soldiered on to page 250 of 370 before giving up. This is terrible, and should not have been published. Astonishingly, the author teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. The Other Europe: Eastern Europe to 1945, by E. Garrison Walters. Another bad book! But I managed to finish this one. Extremely, frustratingly presentist- written in the 80s, Walters defines "Eastern Europe" to mean "Soviet satellite states," excluding the Baltic states and Greece. Pre-1848 history is barely covered at all, and pre-1914 history scarcely more so; much space is given to analyzing the economics of and history of communism in the region, at the expense of coverage of cultural, religious, linguistic, etc affairs, which are scarcely mentioned. It's bleak, featuring many little factual errors and typos; even the maps are incompetently done (eg showing Ostrava occupying a nonexistent salient into Poland that places it directly northwest of Katowice- when in reality it's more or less directly southwest). Currently reading: Collected Stories, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Not really exactly answering your questions, but maybe sort of commiserating- I've always found combat in the second trilogy games to be... maybe not harder per se, but a lot more tedious and exhausting, than it feels like it should be. Every combat feels like it takes a few rounds too long; I feel obliged to run back to town to heal more often than I'd like (especially given the zoomed-in map that makes long-distance travel a pain). I think the biggest (but not only) issue is the HP/resistance bloat that late-00s Spiderweb games generally suffered from (and which continued to be an issue, at least intermittently, till the late 10s). Enemies just have too much HP, and resistances increase across the board with level in a way that blunts your ability to keep up a consistent amount of damage in the mid-late game, making the HP problem worse. It's common (especially in 4) to run into mook enemies (especially eg slime-type monsters) who take more than a single round of concerted attacks to down, in drastic contrast to the snappy combat of 1-3 (where you can often just bluntly plow through mooks without even entering combat mode, and will often wipe out multiple enemies with a single multi-target attack, at least on easy/normal). In the later Geneforges, it's possible to build your character and creations to be so strong that you can still easily overcome most of the combats, despite the HP/resistance stuff, but I feel like the gap between a weak and a strong party in Avernum 4-6 is narrower than in Geneforge, and no matter what you do, combat tends to feel like trudging through molasses, you have less room to slip through encounters by being tricky (or cheesy), and exploration is often a matter of finding the one place you can currently make your way through. Maybe it's possible to do some crazy minmaxing and end up with a party that can trounce any encounter in a couple rounds, but with my what-I'd-like-to-believe-are-near-median skills and playstyle, this has struck me every time I've played the second trilogy games. Anyway I usually just play 4-6 on easy instead of normal because of all this, since difficulty directly affects enemy stat scaling, and I feel no shame in doing so.

I believe sell prices are a fixed fraction of the base value of an item, and don't ever increase or decrease.

Not a terrifically exciting month of book-reading. The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant. Biographies, summaries, and critiques of major philosophers. Very good for the most part; acknowledged limitations are that Durant's focus on select major philosophers (the original subtitle being "The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers") limits its view of the history of philosophy as a whole; and its limitation to Euro-American philosophers rather shortchanges eg East and South Asian philosophy. Unacknowledged limitations include Durant's undue sympathy for (and apparent subscription to) a vitalism that would be more or less totally discredited within a decade of his writing, and the fact that Spencer gets a whole chapter- Spencer's repute was already in eclipse when Durant was writing (in the 1920s), and despite Durant's optimism, it's only declined further since then. Worthwhile overall, and kept readable by Durant's palpable enthusiasm, and his distaste for epistemology. Ruin's Wake, by Patrick Edwards. A pulpy dystopian sci-fi thriller. Not terrible, but sort of noticeably a debut novel- Edwards tries to get clever with the storytelling, bouncing between three concurrent plot threads, and this unfortunately creates pacing issues. It's alright once the threads link up in the last quarter of the novel, but it's a problem with the first action scene in your thriller novel happens on page 120 of 406. Otherwise- competent but unexciting. No big ideas that haven't been seen before. Another standard "revolutionary secretly just as bad as regime" story. Oh well. The Battles that Changed History, by Fletcher Pratt. The title and publication date (1956) sort of let you know what you're in for, but the book is at least somewhat redeemed by Pratt's skill as a storyteller (he's a better storyteller than a historian, really), and by his idiosyncratic selection of battles and campaigns to cover. He insists on choosing only "positively decisive" battles, via vague and inconsistent criteria (read: he seems to have just wanted to write about things that interested him), such that, while he covers obvious material like Gaugamela/Arbela, the Siege of Vienna, Rossbach, Trafalgar, Austerlitz..., he also decides to cover the Pyrrhic War but not the Punic Wars (on the grounds that, while battles might have come to different conclusions, the outcome of the wars as a whole was a foregone conclusion), the Nika Riots, the Siege of Leiden; in his chapter on the American Revolutionary War he gives as much space to Anglo-French naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean as to mainland North American operations; he opts for Vicksburg over the more-feted Gettysburg; and Midway over Stalingrad or Normandy. Overall: pretty good, all things considered. For the past two weeks I have been slogging through two underwhelming books: The Darwin Affair by Tim Mason, and Avoid the Day by Jay Kirk. Hopefully I will escape soon.

Something nobody's mentioned here- and this is the biggest difference between the classes- is that, due to a bug, the Shaper classes in Geneforge 5 accidentally have higher innate damage resistances than the Rebel classes. In Geneforge 4, you can only select Rebel classes for the PC, so Shapers/Guardians/Agents only appear as NPCs. Since NPCs don't use equipment in the same way PCs do, their stats scale with their level differently (and usually more dramatically) than for PCs, in order to keep them challenging as enemies and reliable as allies. Due to an oversight in the development of Geneforge 5, the Shaper class resistance stats were unchanged between 4 and 5, meaning that the Shaper classes in 5 have pretty substantial damage resistances that the Rebel classes don't. These resistances scale with character level, so by the end of the game, a Shaper-class character is going to be much more able to tank damage than a Rebel-class character. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's substantial enough that it means the game is unintentionally much easier, at least later on, as a Shaper class. It more than offsets the minor HP/Essence/Spell Energy deficiencies the Shaper classes have relative to the Rebel classes, in terms of effects on game difficulty. This bug wasn't caught for some time after release, and has never been fixed.

Books I have finished reading in the past month: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James M. McPherson. Justifiably feted as the best single-volume history of the Civil War, though as the title implies, it actually covers 1845-1865, and thus goes into great detail about the causes and background of the war. McPherson is in command of his material, very good at explaining complex issues, and very even-handed- though inevitably the South comes off much, much worse in any fair retelling. He does very well at demonstrating, with much reference to contemporary speeches and documents, how the war resulted from the slaveowning aristocracy overplaying its hand (moving the goalposts from "slavery is a necessary evil, to be let alone where it exists" to "territories must be able to decide whether or not they will have legal slavery" to "slavery is a positive good that must be protected and extended everywhere, and no state or territory has the right to take a man's slaves from him"- basically demanding that slavery must be legal everywhere, and regarding any climbdown from this insane position as an affront to their backwards, feudal idea of Honor); and then how, for the North, the war started as one to preserve the Union at all costs, and how this struggle became irrevocably linked and identified with the struggle to end slavery (there was no point in restoring a Union as unsustainable as the antebellum Union; slavery had to be attacked and destroyed, as it was the South's greatest strength and greatest weakness at once). An excellent book. The only shame is that it doesn't go on to cover Reconstruction, though that's necessarily out of its scope. The Wind's Twelve Quarters, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Short stories collected from the first 12 years or so of Le Guin's career. They're almost all very well-written and diverting from day one, but there's also a clear gradient in that she got noticeably better at treating her ideas in short-form writing over time, such that the earlier stories tend to be lighter-weight and pulpier, while the later ones are of greater depth and lasting interest. The Compass Rose, by Ursula K. Le Guin. This anthology collects stories from the subsequent 8 years or so of Le Guin's career. It's much more slanted towards experimental fiction- experimenting with perspective, format, pacing, style, etc- than towards speculative fiction per se. It's also, unfortunately, much weaker overall, with many of the stories being pretty dull, despite some standouts. The Golden Key, by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott. A very ambitious project: a 900-page high fantasy novel which is, functionally, three 300-page novels, each written simultaneously by a separate author, covering about 400 years of directly-depicted fictional history. It succeeds pretty well, though the first third is a bit weaker and more disjointed than the rest. Set in a fictionalized fantasy Europe, and particularly in a fantasy analogue of Spain, where painting is an omnipresent legal and social institution, and certain "Gifted" painters of a certain family (the Grijalvas) can work magic with their paintings. Stylistically it's more historical romance and political thriller than it is epic fantasy; it's not devoid of themes, but it's more successful as a work of escapist literature than a deep exploration of its ideas. Despite the book's length, the number of characters and the two big time-jumps between segments mean that few characters receive especially deep or complex development. It was a pretty solid book, anyway. I guess each author was meant to write her own standalone followup novel, but two of them tapped out, and the only followup to come out was a belated (published 15 years later) prequel. Presently reading: The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant; and Ruin's Wake, by Patrick Edwards.

Favorably, I'd say. In terms of writing, I think the Geneforge games are probably the best RPGs of the 00s. All the games are very cerebral, especially for video games- they deal with big ideas frankly, and force the player to think about them and make decisions about them. Geneforge 1-3 are more baldly about their ideas; their plots are pretty simple, their characters aren't very deep, and their settings are sometimes uneven in how vividly imagined they are. They aren't badly written, though, just very dry. Geneforge 4 and 5 feature noticeably more lively writing, with a greater focus on characterization, and more complex plotting. I would say that it's more typical for contemporary RPGs (though that's a broad field) to have pretty simple stories, with not a lot of big ideas underlying them, and with what vividness is there to be found in their character writing. Geneforge is also atypical in that it does little up-front worldbuilding- it's a high fantasy setting, but you tend to learn about the geography, cultures, technology, etc, of the gameworld in an organic first-hand way, as you proceed through the story, rather than learning about places you will never see, or reading about technology you won't see until much later in the game, if ever. When you do learn about something before you see it, it's normally deliberately foreshadowing, rather than worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake. Very loosely, the Geneforge games are more akin to a series of science fiction novels, interested in exploring the ideas they posit, while their contemporary RPGs (including the Avernum games, also by Spiderweb) tend to be more akin to high fantasy adventure novels, where any exploration of the games' ideas or themes is a rare bonus. Mechanically, by the early 00s many of the bigger CRPGs were RTWP (real-time with pause), or ARPGs of varying lineages. RTWP games play akin to real-time strategy/tactics games, where combat plays out in real time, and you have to give commands to your units (usually by pausing the game to do so) to manage how that combat plays out, in contrast to the turn-based system the Geneforge games (and all of Spiderweb's other games) use, where combat is divided into a series of abstracted "turns." A lot of the "classic" CRPGs of the late 90s through the mid-00s are RTWP- Bioware's games, primarily, and games using their engines (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape: Torment, etc), and Divine Divinity and its followups. ARPGs included Diablo-style ARPGs (eg Diablo itself and its sequels, Sacred, Fate) and then direct-control action RPGs (eg TES: Morrowind and Oblivion, or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines) which combine RPG systems with more mainstream action gameplay. Strictly turn-based CRPGs were relatively uncommon (Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil, both developed by Troika, are examples), though they've made something of a comeback in the past decade (eg the Shadowrun Returns games, Wasteland 2 and 3, Legend of Grimrock 1 and 2, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden; Pillars of Eternity 2 was released as a strictly RTWP game, but later got a turn-based mode patched in). So Geneforge is out of step with most of its contemporaries in that fundamental way; and then on top of that, the Creation system the Geneforge games have is pretty well unique to them. The big-name CRPGs most akin to Spiderweb's games are probably the Ultima games of the 80s and 90s. "Depth" is inevitably sort of subjective. I'd say that Geneforge's RPG mechanics and Creation system give it more depth (in the sense of freedom to make consequentially different choices) than most of its contemporaries; certainly more than any of its CRPG contemporaries using D&D rules. Some people might use "depth" to mean how high a game's skill ceiling is, or how much game there is, or other things. It's kind of a slippery word. Graphically- the Geneforge games use a mixture of pixel art sprites and pre-rendered sprites (series of static images derived from 3D models). This is typical of late 90s-early 00s CRPGs, but by the later 00s, this, along with the games' heavy reuse of assets between games, was enough to mark them as low-budget/indie games. The amount and variety of unique graphical assets the games have are limited by time and budget; but they're all easily readable, and they get the job done. I don't have a closing statement to wrap this post up.

Always more books. I read a bunch of them in the past month. The High Window, by Raymond Chandler. The third Marlowe novel. Probably my favorite of them, though I guess it'd be tricky to explain why. Very very good. The Glass Key, by Dashiell Hammett. Not entirely successful, but remarkably stylistically bold- Hammett totally avoids describing the thoughts or emotions of the characters in the narration; and since the protagonist is a poker-faced gambler, it's pretty hard to deduce what exactly is going on in his head from his actions. A good book. The Ancient Historians, by Michael Grant. A thorough, respectable, often dusty overview of ancient historians- their style, their thematic preoccupations, their historiography and reliability, their survival. It was fine. The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler. The fourth Marlowe novel, and the last in the omnibus I have. As solid as its predecessors. I guess I'll have to track down the omnibus collecting the remaining three Marlowe novels, though my understanding is that they start unravelling in the fifth, as Chandler became more unhappy as a person and uneven as a writer. The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett. His last novel. Light, pacey, competent. Not nearly as lighthearted or goofy as the movie version. Unfortunately kind of forgettable and slight. Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers, Bob Blaisdell, ed. Exactly what the title implies. Inevitably uneven, being an anthology. The best stories (Pauline Johnson's A Red Girl's Reasoning; D'Arcy McNickle's Train Time; Sherman Alexie's War Dances) were very good; the rest ranged from pretty good to forgettable. Worth reading, anyway. Great Short Stories by African-American Writers, Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell, eds. Another anthology; also inevitably uneven, but the pieces in this one were on average better than those in the prior anthology. There are great stories by big names in here (eg Rudolph Fisher's The City of Refuge; Claude McKay's He Also Loved; Ralph Ellison's Afternoon; Dorothy West's Mammy), but also gems by totally obscure writers who published short fiction in magazines before disappearing from the literary record, such that the book can't even give birth/death dates for them (Emma E. Butler's Polly's Hack Ride; Adeline F. Ries's Mammy: A Story; Lucille Boehm's Condemned House; Ramona Lowe's The Woman in the Window). Unfortunately in a regrettable editorial oversight, 21 paragraphs are inexplicably omitted from the middle of Dorothy West's Mammy, rendering it nearly incoherent. I only discovered this after looking the story up online to try to work out what was going on in it. Oh well. Currently reading: James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which is excellent; and The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is also very good.

Seconding Geneforge 1: Mutagen as the best introductory game. There are many narrative decisions, big and small, to be made, but unless you're trying to powergame your way through the thing, they're almost all a sort of emotive, right/wrong, just/unjust sort of decision, rather than the analysis paralysis sort of decision where you're weighing close, interchangable options.

Another month. More books. The Dain Curse, by Dashiell Hammett. The other, less popular Continental Op novel, following Red Harvest. A respectable novel, more polished than Red Harvest stylistically, although it's also sometimes somewhat goofier, and its episodic nature (like its sibling, it was originally serialized in four parts) is much more obvious, with drastic changes of setting and tone between the sections. It slows down drastically near the end, and the last quarter is mostly, essentially, a drama, with the Op helping the young woman at the center of the murders beat her morphine addiction. Arab Historians of the Crusades, edited and translated into Italian by Francesco Gabrieli, translated into English by E. J. Costello. Dry, as stated above, Usama bin Munqidh aside. Not super enlightening, as I was already familiar with most of the history. Arabic historiography was clearly in a pretty good way in the 12th and 13th centuries, with the historians (despite their pious protestations otherwise) generally favoring rational explanations for events, and sometimes offering multiple plausible interpretations of events. They're obviously and inevitably pretty partisan, but they're also generally not blind to the competence or achievements of those they considered opponents or enemies (who were just as often rival Muslim dynasts as Franks), even if they'll gloss intelligence, bravery, and skill as cunning or ruthlessness. Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler. Even better than The Big Sleep; but I don't have a lot to say about it otherwise. Another convoluted plot pulled off slickly, with tons of atmosphere and character. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett's big novel, and it mostly deserves it. Lots of double-crossing and maneuvering in the dark. Pacey, though there's very little overt action. A solid book. This Is Not America: Stories, by Jordi Punti. Nine short stories, in translation from the Catalan. Unfortunately pretty mediocre. The sort of stories you'd read in a waiting room magazine and forget by the time you were home, mostly. Samey protagonists who all bear more than a passing resemblance to the author (diffident, ruminative middle-aged Catalan men). Oh well. Currently reading The Ancient Historians, by Michael Grant. Which is, as the title implies, a prosopography and historiographical review of historians from Herodotus to Ammianus. It's respectable but dry. I don't know what novel I'll read next. Probably The High Window.

Geneforge 2 lets you recruit several Creations into your party, but you can't control them directly- in combat, they're AI-controlled. They're also gone forever if they die. There is. His name is Khur, and he joins you relatively early in Geneforge 4. Unlike Greta or Alwan, or the recruitable NPCs in 2, you can't keep him until the end of the game, though. Later in the game, there's another NPC (Shotwell) who can join Shaper-aligned protagonists.

I don't think there's any reason to assume any of these changes are economically motivated, or "selling out," or "pandering," or whatever you want to call it. I think that requires one to assume that the older a Spiderweb game is, the closer it is to some Platonic ideal RPG, and that over time Jeff Vogel has progressively caved in on his ideals and made increasingly-degraded games that deviate ever-further from that ideal. Which is silly. One might be used to drawing maps by hand or trudging back and forth between a dungeon and town to carry out all the loot, or the like, or one might feel nostalgic for these aspects of a CRPG, but they're not objectively "better" things, and they can't be meaningfully measured against an objective ideal. Jeff's writing on games has, I think, shown a general disdain for "dead time" and busywork in games, and an impatience with games that get in the way of themselves with such. And I think his designs have, over time, simply gotten closer to bearing out his developing ideas on these things, and reflecting his developing tastes. Maybe it would in fact be somewhat harder to sell a CRPG with no quest log, but old-school CRPGs like Spiderweb's are already kind of a hard sell to a general audience anyway, and I think most of the decisions made in their design just tend to reflect the sorts of games Jeff Vogel himself would want to play. Spiderweb's games have had automaps since Exile 1; rudimentary fast-travel systems first appear in Exiles 2 and 3, and the Geneforge games have let the player travel freely and instantly between cleared areas for over 20 years; they've had quest logs for over 20 years too, and junk bags for over a decade. I don't think these things are necessarily concessions to anybody, so much as they reflect that Jeff's more interested in the core explore-talk-fight-loot-level loops of his games, and that he's gotten less patient over time with the stuff that gets in the way of the player doing those things. I don't think any of these changes are "concessions," and I think he's remained willing to make pretty bold, potentially-playerbase-alienating design decisions in other realms- cf the drastically different skill system in Queen's Wish, and its free respeccing; or its base-building elements, or its forcing players to clear dungeons in one go, or even its shift to a top-down perspective. Mutagen has some pretty bold choices too, from the new Creation control mechanics to removing experience gain from Creations entirely.

Living Tools are kind of tight in the early game. Later on, if you consistently invest in Mechanics (ending up with, say, 10+ at the end of the game), you can pretty easily end the game with several dozen spare tools. If you don't invest in Mechanics, they remain relatively tight, and you have to prioritize which locks you want to get past, versus the ones you have to pass by or find other ways around.

Another month. More books. Father Brown Crime Stories: Twenty Four Short Mysteries, by G. K. Chesterton. Contains the first two (of five) collections of Father Brown mysteries Chesterton wrote. Very, very uneven as mysteries- only in maybe one-third of the stories is the solution genuinely clever or fun. Very, very uneven as pieces of writing- beautiful passages abut clumsy, hastily-written stuff. Chesterton himself copped to these issues, as he was consciously writing many of these stories quickly and sloppily to make a living. In addition to being imbued with Chesterton's religious and philosophical views, the stories are also, regrettably, imbued with his racial views- bluntly, they're often passively racist, but some of them are just extremely, painfully, actively racist. The better stories were, I guess, diverting enough as escapist light fiction; the worse range from mediocre to genuinely reprehensible. In any case, I don't really feel much motivation to read the further Father Brown stories, especially as the later stories have a reputation for being worse (Chesterton stopped writing the stories for almost a decade after the stories in these collections, then returned to them because they consistently made him money). India: A History, by John Keay. A very solid history of India from prehistory to the early 21st century; respectable and readable throughout, though Keay sometimes struggles to make the first half or so of the book interesting. Starting with the Mughals, though, it gradually becomes much more lively and engrossing as it gets nearer the present. I intend to read Keay's sister history of China at some point, as well. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Maybe the ur-hardboiled novel. Terse, blunt, sometimes crude, often brutal, but also very honest-feeling and readable. I got a nice book club edition of all five of Hammett's novels at the used book store a few weeks ago, and I intend to work through the rest too. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. The other big name in hardboiled detective fiction. A much smoother and more mannered writer than Hammett, a lot more emphasis on (and skill with) atmosphere and characterization. Also a hellishly convoluted plot. A very good book. I found a nice book club edition of his first four novels at the same time as the Hammett (both from the same previous owner, seemingly), and I'm gonna work through them too. Still slowly working my way through Arab Historians of the Crusades (edited and translated into Italian by Francesco Gabrieli, then translated into English by E. J. Costello). Inevitably mostly dry; little I don't already know from secondary works, but it's always nice to go to the sources, and there's historiographical interest, too, in seeing what they choose to emphasize or deemphasize, etc.

There are scattered references to the Shapers ruling, or at least having settlements on, two continents in the narration of the first three Geneforge games. Eg, IIRC, the ending of Geneforge 1 describes the protagonist's landing site, Dillame, as being on "the less-settled of two continents," or something to that effect. You never explicitly see the second continent in the games, and it's never given a name (and neither is the other continent, for that matter). Geneforge 4 radically retcons things such that there is only one continent known to the Shapers, and names said continent "Terrestia." 4 and 5 also roughly incorporate the geographies of the earlier games into the new, retconned geography: you visit Dillame in-person in 4, implicitly setting Sucia Island somewhere to the east of Terrestia; the Ashen Isles (where Geneforge 3 is set) are said to be some ways to the north of Terrestia; and Geneforge 5 establishes that Drypeak Valley (where Geneforge 2 is set) is in southwestern Terrestia.

Mechanics works multiplicatively, not additively. Every locked item in Geneforge has a given lock strength. This value is hidden, and there's no way to see it directly in-game. What you're seeing when you try to open a lock that will require tools to open isn't the lock's strength, but a derived value. When you try to operate or open a locked item, if this lock strength is equal to or less than the level of your Mechanics skill, you open it instantly. Otherwise, you need to use Living Tools to operate/open it. The number of tools you have to use is ((Lock Strength / Your Mechanics Skill) - 1), rounded up- basically, each Living Tool you use multiplies your Mechanics skill +1 times for the purpose of your unlock strength vs a lock's strength. Thus: when your Mechanics skill is 3, you can open locks with strength 3 or under without using any tools; using 1 tool, you can open locks with strength 6 or under; using 2 tools, you can open locks with strength 9 or under, and so forth. With Mechanics 5, you can open locks with strength 5 or under without using any tools; using 1 tool, you can open locks with strength 10 or under; using 2 tools, you can open locks with strength 15 or under, and so on. One can thus deduce that Ham's box has a lock strength of 5: with a Mechanics of 2, it'd take 2 Living Tools to open (lock strength 5 vs unlock power 3x2); with a Mechanics of 3 or 4, it takes 1 LT (lock strength 5 vs unlock power 2x3 or 2x4); with a Mechanics of 5, one can just open it without using any tools at all.

I wish I had a more useful answer, but the truth is, I've never really encountered any other developers that manage to consistently do all the things I like about Spiderweb's RPGs; and most consciously "old-school" RPGs tend to turn me off in some way. (EG- Eschalon's bewildering design decisions, like randomizing the contents of every container or forcing the player to spend skill points to have an automap; Underrail's combat systems that regularly allow for characters to get stun-locked across turns.) There are lots of games that manage to do some or most of the things I like about them, though, which I can recommend. For very similar games- story-focused party-based RPGs with turn-based combat: Pillars of Eternity 1 is a nearly-unplayable mess due to its RTWP combat and idiosyncratic, unintuitive RPG mechanics. But Pillars of Eternity 2 mercifully adds a turn-based mode that makes the game very playable, and has excellent writing (both high-level plot stuff and low-level character/sidequest stuff) and worldbuilding (high fantasy Polynesia) overall. I think that it comes closest to what I want from an "old school" plot/character-heavy RPG. The Expeditions series of games (or at least the two I've played) are very good. They have historical/alt-history settings and a focus on resource/party management. The first, Expeditions: Conquistador, is more of a tactics/resource management game; the second, Expeditions: Viking, is a more straightforward RPG, with fleshed-out, scripted party members, and more focus on ground-level exploration and encounters. They're both great. (The third game, Expeditions: Rome, just came out a few days ago, and I have yet to play it.) Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a turn-based party-based RPG with a strong focus on its story and worldbuilding. It's very good, although also very short for an RPG. Somewhat farther afield: Dungeon crawlers, of the first-person party-blob type: The two Legend of Grimrock games are very solid- good mechanics, fun dungeons to explore with lots of tricky puzzles and secrets to find; but they're also extremely sparse with the story. Vaporum and its followup, Vaporum: Lockdown are also excellent; they're much heavier on the story elements; but in both of them, the player controls a single protagonist, so there's no party management. Operencia: The Stolen Sun is another great dungeon crawler; it has fleshed-out party members and a heavy story focus in addition to cool dungeons; it draws its settings and characters from Hungarian mythology, which is unique and fun. Hard West is a story-oriented turn-based tactics game/RPG; it's relatively light on the RPG mechanics, but the story is good, and the combat is serviceable. Cosmic Star Heroine is a very good indie JRPG- more heavily story-focused, heavily streamlined RPG mechanics, less focus on exploration, simplified turn-based combat with no tactical positioning stuff. It's a fun ride.

AFAIK- and I might be misremembering- Drakons cannot actually reproduce naturally, and must reproduce either via new Drakons being Shaped, or via Drayks being re-Shaped into Drakons; all the original Drakons were transformed Drayks. So it's not impossible, but it'd be radically out of character: in Geneforge 4, Isss-Ta is shown as de facto leader and representative of the Drayks, who are in conflict with the Drakons over their treatment and the leadership of the rebellion. It wouldn't really make sense for her to willingly become a Drakon. Very probably her name was just reused for a Drakon in error. Explaining this in detail gets kinda involved. The geography of the original Geneforge games is sort of weird and contradictory, and reflects that it was made up on the fly as the games went on. At the beginning of Geneforge 1, the protagonist is said to be en route to a Shaper academy (IIRC) for further training. Then, in the ending, the protagonist makes landfall near the town of Dillame. Geneforge 4 shows that Dillame is in the southeast of continental Terrestia, implying Sucia is a ways offshore nearby. This is problematic in that eastern Terrestia is much less densely settled than western Terrestia, and if the academy the protagonist was travelling to was the one in the Ashen Isles (shown in Geneforge 3; said in Geneforge 4 to be north of eastern Terrestia; presumably this is where the protagonist was going, as there don't seem to be any other Shaper academies in the eastern half of Terrestia, and there'd be no reason for them to be travelling so far out to sea if they were going somewhere else on the mainland anyway), there's no reason for them to be travelling around the southeastern corner of Terrestia. It's also problematic in that Geneforge 1 demonstrates that the ancestral proto-Shapers came to Terrestia from Sucia Island- but Geneforge 4/5 establish that the proto-Shapers made landfall, set up a new civilization, and began their conquest of Terrestia, from the western coast of Terrestia, which makes no sense if Sucia is to the east of Terrestia. Geneforge 1: Mutagen juggles the text such that in the ending, the protagonist now makes landfall near Poryphra, which is on the northern coast of eastern Terrestia; Sucia Island is now, thus, presumably somewhere off the northeast coast of Terrestia, between the mainland and the Ashen Isles- so it makes much, much more sense for the protagonist to be passing Sucia en route to the academy. The geography is still problematic in that it doesn't quite make sense for the proto-Shapers to have travelled halfway around the continent to settle on the west coast, rather than just settling in the reasonably friendly environs of what would eventually be Burwood Province. But now it at least makes sense for the protagonist of 1 to have been in the neighborhood to begin with. The Shapers are also said to rule two continents in the original early Geneforge games, before this is abruptly retconned to one continent in 4/5. Mutagen scrubs any references to a second continent from the script of 1. I don't think this is especially relevant to Serviles, as very, very few Serviles are actually Shaped- almost every Servile in the games was born naturally of Servile parents, and in any case the Servile "pattern" seems to have been unaltered since ancient(-ish) history. I think one could reasonably argue, though, that the Sucia Serviles might have a lower life expectancy than Serviles in more developed areas, just because they live in a much more hostile environment, have a harder time obtaining food (especially the Takers), and don't have access to Shaper medicine. The Sucia Serviles Clois and Amena both live to extremely advanced ages, so I don't think there's likely to be anything about their genetics making them live shorter than other Serviles.

You're right- he is in the original. No. I think they're just in the game to provide more atmosphere and foreshadowing before you reach Vakkiri. I think this is less of a lore change and more of an oversight. Word of God (that is, Jeff Vogel has said in an email) is that it's one century, though this isn't meant to be totally clear early in the game. But there's still stuff in the game (eg the dialogue with the Servant Mind in the Ruined Docks) indicating that it was about two centuries. This may or may not result from incomplete editing of the original game script- I'd have to compare every instance where it says one/two centuries to be sure. Two centuries actually makes more sense, and one century creates other continuity problems. Sage Clois is described as being over a century old, and later games establish that Serviles regularly live to be over 100 years old. But the Shaper inhabitation of Sucia Island is clearly not in the Serviles' living memory at the time of Geneforge 1- I don't believe any Serviles mention having known Shapers directly, the name of the first Servile to blaspheme the Shapers is forgotten, etc. When Geneforge 1 was first made, the later games hadn't yet established that Serviles regularly live to great ages, and "one century" probably seemed like enough time for the Shapers to have passed out of the living memory of everyone except for some Drayks and Servant Minds. This would not be the first timeline mishap in the Geneforge games: Drayks are established as normally living for centuries. The Drayk Isss-Ta is presented as newly created in Geneforge 2; but by the time of Geneforge 4 (which can't take place more than perhaps 50 years after 2), she's presented as extremely old and decrepit. Then in 5 she's somehow a Drakon, or at least her name is reused for a nonspeaking Drakon.

A relatively minor lore change: dialogue in the Eastern Docks indicates that Wingbolts already exist; in the original games, they are said to have been invented in-between Geneforge 3 and Geneforge 4. They still don't appear in-person in Mutagen, though. A bigger lore change- maybe: Toivo and his entire "Servile Origins" questline are new to Mutagen. Relatedly, I believe some of the game's pre-existing text about the origins of the Shapers and the Serviles has been changed to be somewhat less definitive and more ambiguous, probably because it's a bit odd to frontload such important revelations into the first game of a big series. (The original Geneforge was, I guess, intended as a standalone game rather than to start a series, and so it had no problem tucking such important worldbuilding secrets into it.) All the extra above/below-level mini-areas are new, geographically- including the ones associated with the upgradable items, the Shapers in the Eastern Docks, Janus, and Toivo's quest. I'm not sure if this was something the original engine couldn't do, but it's certainly something it was never used to do in the original game. Not exactly new: the "Quiet Shade" and "Strange Roamer" scripted encounters in the first map of the game were apparently late additions to the original Geneforge 1; they only appear in the Mac version of the original, and, oddly, the WildTangent Windows version. So these have been around for a while, but probably most players of the original Geneforge 1 won't have seen them before.

Oh boy. It's more books. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. I was surprised by how much I did not like this book. The style is thrumming, fervid with life- but also frequently disjointed and disorienting; I found it captivating when it kept to a clear narrative, but frustrating and alienating when it'd elide bits of time or chronology, too-literarily, I felt. Then as a story, I felt it was too consciously literary and allegorical- the alternate-history stuff was too overtly allegorical, rather than believable as history or as a living world, and the characters felt flattened out into symbolic figures in the plot. Disappointing. Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, by Josh Karp. Basically what it sounds like; pretty comprehensive; inevitably lots about wrangling over the unfinished movie; published before it was actually finished and released. Not the sort of subject matter I'd usually read about, but it was another dollar store find, so why not. The Feral Detective, by Jonathan Lethem. Another disappointment. A deeply unlikeable protagonist/viewpoint character (who's clearly meant to be unlikeable at least in some ways, but I couldn't quite judge exactly how much so- in any case, she's unlikeable enough that it was sometimes painful to read); muddy political themes (the book starts out with a bunch of stuff pretty explicitly framing the story as having to do with the 2016 US presidential election, but then that mostly falls away, and the book doesn't really clearly say much about it at all); a meandering plot-tumor sort of story with disappointingly little detection, feral or otherwise. Oh well. Car Trouble, by Robert Rorke. A perfectly serviceable coming-of-age novel about a guy growing up in late 60s-early 70s Brooklyn with an alcoholic father. Never really takes flight, but bumbles along amiably enough. I read several chapters while waiting in bus stops during the holidays. Detective Stories, Peter Washington, ed. An upscale Everyman's Pocket Classics edition; weirdly sparse for an anthology, with no introduction, author bios, publication dates, critical context, etc. Pretty uniformly excellent stories, at least. Now I'm going to read an omnibus of the first two Father Brown collections that I found at the used bookstore today; and John Keay's history of India.