Timmy's House of Sprinkles

Eeeyew!

2012-01-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

Now. At long last. It isn't exactly realtime, but it can FEEL like I've spent over four hundred years playing EU3. It's a truly massive game, incredibly involving, and just as complicated and ambiguous as history itself.

As I headed into the endgame, I was increasingly attacked by my neighbors. I fought almost a half-dozen wars against Aragon and Portugal; I think that Aragon had finally gotten fed up by my endless espionage against them, and once they snapped, they didn't let up. Each war followed a predictable path. Aragon would cross the border into my southern portion of Africa and lay siege to a border province. I would raise new regiments, or muster the ones from the previous war, and slowly march them to the front. I would break the siege. Then, I would embark on a long, painstaking march up the western coast, besieging each of the Portuguese and Aragonese provinces that I reached, driving back or destroying their armies. This was always the main encounter; if Aragon had mid-European allies in a war, I would evacuate my two Germanic provinces to avoid battle; in all cases, I would usually destroy Aragon's fleet in Vietnam, and occasionally land troops there as well to occupy their provinces.

This would continue for a few years. Eventually, Portugal would send down a mega-army of 25,000 or so troops. Once I saw them coming, I would sue for peace. I usually had a War Score of around 10-30% by this point, but could rarely get good concessions; I would often ask Aragon to release their Asiatic nations, and could sometimes squeeze a few extra ducats out of Portugal. Aragon would still hate me, though, and would attack again once our truce was up.

I finally got fed up with it after Aragon declared war on me for the fifth or sixth time. It was all so pointless; they could never muster a threat to me in my seat of power in Asia, and I had no interest in chasing them back to their Iberian strongholds. This time I accepted a white peace from them, and afterwards I stopped dispatching spies to Aragonese territory, and embarked on a diligent campaign of bribery. Aragon's opinion of me was always stuck at -200, and Portugal at around -100; by regularly gifting, I could get those up to 100. Annoyingly, once I got much higher they would start issuing insults to me, driving the relationship back down; I partly suspect that they might have been doing it on purpose, to keep the flow of funds coming.

Paying tribute doesn't come easily to me; I don't know that I've ever paid tribute in any game of Civ, since it usually just weakens you financially and at best will slightly delay an inevitable assault. Here, though, I've finally gotten used to it. By this point in the game, it isn't like I need the money for anything else; if anything, it's just the use of a diplomat that I'm losing. I actually had paid tons of bribes in the early stage of the game; back when I was still a monarchy, after I had married all other monarchs and signed open border agreements with everyone, I would pick a one-province ally and spam them with gifts to get our relationship up to 200. I was trying to diplomatically vassalize them; I never succeeded, and eventually stopped bribing, except for when I was trying to open markets or get military access. I was now rediscovering the utility of a well-placed bribe. After that, Aragon never declared war on me again, and eventually their opinion of me improved from "They expect us to break every deal and alliance" to "They trust us to uphold our bargains." They did seem to move towards war a few times - sending insults, canceling military access, and so on - but I kept the cash flowing and kept it under control.

I feel like most of my strategic advancement in this game has been a direct result of me un-learning lessons that I've learned over 20 years of playing Civilization games. One core principle that I've always clung to in the Civ games is to follow the Powell Doctrine: never enter a military conflict unless you bring overwhelming superiority, have well-defined goals, and are sure that they can be swiftly achieved. In the world of Civ, a single long, drawn-out war can kill your hopes of winning the game. The longer that you spend on a war footing, the more of your industrial production you're diverting towards building new units, instead of building structures that can improve your economy, science, and infrastructure. If you're in a war, and your rivals aren't, by the time you emerge from the war they will have advanced ahead of you. The only time a war is worthwhile is if you can capture several of your opponents cities. This will multiply your nation's economy and resources, and that in turn will strengthen you for later in the game. So, in most of my Civ games, I either avoid wars altogether, or else put off wars until I've built up an overwhelming technological superiority, at which point I can hopefully mow down my opponent with a small but highly advanced army, and either annihilate them altogether or take a good number of cities from them.

For the first several hundred years of EU3, I've mostly adhered to that strategy. I've avoided entangling alliances that could force me into a war that I didn't want, and I've previously complained about how the Holy Roman Emperor seat obligated me to fight opponents. If anything, war in EU3 seemed even more pointless than in Civ, because of how hard it is to take provinces from an enemy, and how much trouble they are once you have them. I'm still ambivalent about my conquest of Brunei, because it saddled me with a large cluster of provinces with the "wrong" religion and culture, which have required more care to avoid revolt and which don't contribute as much to my economy.

In the final century of the game, though, I was forced into many wars that I didn't want. After the Aragon/Portugal wars in Africa, I had a few decades of peace, and was delighted to see that those two nations eventually broke their alliance and started attacking one another across the battlefield of Castile. Soon afterwards, though, I was surprised by an attack from Russia. Russia has been the Big Bad Wolf of the second half of this game; they've steadily expanded, and built up quite a terrible reputation in the process. For a while I'd been insulated from them, thanks to Persia's peculiar colonizing of western Siberia; but an earlier war between Persia and Russia had left Russia with a crucial province on my border, and eventually they struck. Now, throughout the whole game I've been de-prioritizing my Land technology in favor of everything else, so Russia was about ten levels above me in tech, and had larger armies to boot. Fortunately for me, their border armies were a bit on the small side, so while they were besieging my provinces I was able to raise about 10,000 troops across Siberia, form them up, and march them up.

Russia's peculiar expansion program had left them with provinces scattered throughout coastal India, and here I had my greatest triumphs. I had a substantial navy, in order to maintain my tariff income, and had recently upgraded to Threedecker ships, the most highly advanced naval units. I fought a series of battles against Russia's fleet in the Indian Ocean, eventually defeating them all. I tried to blockade them, which had worked well in other wars in the pass, but for whatever reason Russia's "Blockade" always showed as 0% in the war progress summary; again, I'm not sure why.

In Siberia, I eventually broke the siege, but had a very scary main war. Russia's armies were HUGE, finally larger than even France's, and I was doomed in a straight fight. I tried to take every advantage that I could: I would goad his main army away from me while a second force attacked his smaller units; or I would choose battlefields where I was confident of gaining defensive terrain bonuses; or I would scorch the earth on my own lands so his armies would suffer huge attrition, then I would jump in to beat them back once they had diminished in size.

I didn't win, but I finally got to the point where I could negotiate a peace in exchange for a few ducats and relinquishing claims on some territories that I didn't even want. And you know what? It felt kind of like a victory. Partly because it was fun; partly because in the process of fighting the war, I'd been winning prestige, building up my tradition, and generally improving my lot. Even though I arguably "lost" the war, I was coming out of it a bit better than when I'd entered.

For the rest of the game, I've been more open about fighting wars, and have been pleased at the experiment. I no longer cancel alliances with newly released nations; instead, I'll keep them around, and if they need my help, I'll send my armies their way. Often I'm big enough to become the leader of our alliance, even though I never start the war. I've learned that, unlike Civ, I don't want these wars to end with me claiming a bunch of new territory; instead, I usually fight until the enemy is totally defeated, and then negotiate punitive terms of surrender, ordering them to release a bunch of nations and give up cores. If they're small enough, I'll vassalize them, but I won't annex them or take territory. (The one exception: after Manchu declared war on me twice, both times without any cores or nations to give up, I ended up demanding a few border provinces from them, then immediately turned around and "sold" them to Ming for 0 ducats. This diminished the border I shared with Manchu, and let Ming deal with the casus belli Manchu had on those provinces.) Besides giving me a lot to do, this has also given me a steady source of prestige, often carrying me up to near 100 by the end of a conflict. I've also been happy to see that I'm no longer getting attacked by my more powerful rivals; I'm not sure what causes this (my higher maintenance, or having a few [weak] allies, or just having been in a war recently), but it's been very appreciated, as I would much rather fight a bunch of small, easy wars than one or two big scary ones like the war with Russia.

It's been interesting throughout the course of the game to see the realistic-but-fictional rise and fall of major empires. At the start of the game in 1399, the Golden Horde controls a mindbogglingly (wow, I can't believe that's a word! Spellcheck says it is!) large share of the world, stretching from Manchuria out to eastern Europe. Only Ming was a similar size, although Ming was content to stay within its borders throughout the game. As Russia and the Ottoman Empire expanded, they cut down the Golden Horde, until eventually they were reduced to a mere four non-contiguous provinces; I vassalized them after they attacked me in the 1700s. As the Golden Horde declined, Persia grew HUGE, expanding from the Middle East to envelop much of western India and Asia Minor; Persia even embarked on a massive colonizing effort, settling much of western Siberia. Persia declined once Russia started attacking them, and after they were weakened, most of their acquired provinces broke away in independence. The Ottoman Empire crested later in this game than they did historically, making their concerted push into central Europe in the eighteenth century; they also controlled all of northern and eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia Minor, and swaths of the Middle East. I was forced into a few wars with them; after those were over, their navies had been destroyed, and they lost most of their African holdings, and eventually succumbed to Russia and Austria; Austria blocked their western advance, and Russia swept down and gobbled up their core holdings around the Black Sea.

As for the major European powers: France grew big and powerful early on, swallowing up Burgundy, the Rhineland, Westfalia, and a good chunk of Spain; however, they seemed to reach stasis around 1600, and never became the juggernaut I feared. They came to colonizing very late in the game, but made up for lost time, settling much of western North America and the southernmost part of South America. Great Britain was a good, if distant, friend throughout the game, and probably the most major power who I never worried about fighting. They colonized Canada, and after a war with Castile conquered most of the eastern part of North America as well. Castile was the earliest power in the Americas; as in history, they conquered the Aztecs and Mayans, taking military control of central America before investing the time and effort of colonizing. Even though they lost most of North America, they held on to their central American territory. Castile also held on to the island of Aceh throughout most of the game. Portugal was another early American power, although they seemed to strictly colonize rather than conquer, and as a result controlled much of south America. Portugal also had significant colonies in western Africa, along with some territory on the northern coast that it took from Morocco. Finally, Aragon came late to the colonizing game; they tried for some in the Americas, but seem to have lost them; they were another major player in western Africa, and as previously noted, they were fairly active in Vietnam.

Late in the game, some North American colonies start rebelling against their European masters. While the names are historic, the locations seem flexible; "Venezuela" was actually located on St. Martin, for example. Haiti did break away from France, which seemed appropriate. "Guatemala" was another Caribbean island, in this case declaring independence from Portugal. By the time the game ended in 1820, Great Britain was fighting against Canadian and American patriots, who had captured some territories but didn't seem to yet have their own nation. I never had to deal with this, although I think it may have more to do with my choices than with my choice of territory; I would occasionally get some events about a "founding father" or a "corrupt governor," and always made the peaceful choice that would keep my colonists happy; I'm guessing that if I had gone the other way, I might have had to deal with my own revolution. (Though it may help that none of my territories had alternate cores, like Canada or America do.)

I kind of doubt that I'll play another EU3 game - it's utterly terrifying to think of how long I've spent on just this one - but I'm already thinking a little about what I WOULD like to do if I decide to play again. I'm currently thinking that it would be really fun, and really challenging, to try and play a game to unify Germany. This is possible in EU3, but extremely difficult (and rightfully so, since historically Germany wasn't unified until almost 60 years after the end of EU3). Most of the provinces that make up Germany are member-states of the Holy Roman Empire, so if you attack any of them, you'll likely face the Emperor and his huge armies; not only that, but because there are so many of them, and because you need to actually take ownership of the provinces, you'll rapidly build up a horrible reputation.

That said, I am already thinking about how to do it. I think the key would be to become the Emperor. In this game, I hated the way it was constantly plunging me into war, but with the goal of unification, I think it would actually be a benefit; instead of pursuing my own self-directed strategy to pick off opponents, I would wait until one member attacked another, then accept the call and join the war. I think I'd still get some bad reputation from annexing the aggressor, but at least I'd avoid the stability penalties, and so long as I waited a few years between wars the reputation shouldn't hurt too much. (Becoming the Papal Controller would help here, too.) I'm not sure yet which province it would make the most sense to play as. Mecklenburg would actually be pretty tempting again; they have a really excellent economy, and are fairly defensible. On the other hand, I'd be a bit interested to try playing as a landlocked minor province; that way I could eschew naval research altogether, and focus on building up my Land tech and economy.

One other game I'd like to play is a "race to the new world" type of game. I've had a lot of fun colonizing Asia and Oceania (other than the International Date Line bug), and it's been much easier thanks to having the land to myself, but I'd like to try colonizing America proper sometime. As I'm currently imagining it, I might try playing as Norway; they start with a settlement on Iceland, and from here it would be possible to explore, settle Greenland, and from there make landfall in Canada. If I can do this quickly enough, and pick the right National Ideas, I think I might have a shot at colonizing the Eastern seaboard prior to the other European powers coming within colonizing range, at which point I could expand inland at my leisure (perhaps leaving them the Caribbean to play with, depending on whether I have spare colonists).

I've also been interested to figure out other strategies that don't match what I'm doing, but would be successful in other circumstances. The best example of this may be the Free Trade / Mercantilism slider. As previously noted, I maxed out my Free Trade early on, and was kind of baffled as to why someone would want to pick Mercantilism. After all, even though it does help you dominate trade in your own CoTs, there will be far more other CoTs that you don't own, and it didn't seem worth trading in the money you would get from placing 5 merchants at every CoT in the world. Or so I thought, until I started competing in Muskogee. Great Britain had founded this CoT in North American after their colonies there had started to mature. It became the wealthiest CoT in the world; close behind was my own Ambon, which was the center for all my Asian and Pacific provinces. Now, in Ambon, I had just as much competitiveness as anywhere else; I could occasionally run a monopoly there, but for the most part I was content with just holding on to one quarter of the available wealth. In Muskogee, though, Britain fought fiercely to maintain their monopoly. They weren't content to just be in the monopoly position; they would keep dispatching additional merchants there.

Eventually, I figured it out. When you have a monopoly, and send a new merchant, it will compete out one of the other merchants; in other words, if you're in a monopoly, and there are 4 empty seats, and 10 nations with 1 merchant each, then your new merchant will compete against one of those 10. If you're playing as a full Mercantilist country with decent trading technology and bonuses, you'll probably outcompete him. Now, there will be 5 empty seats. So what? Well, instead of owning 50% of the trade, you now own 55%. And, if you're doing this in the wealthiest CoT in the world, and have high trade efficiency, that can be EXTREMELY lucrative.

To put it another way: if you could somehow get every seat in one CoT, that would be equivalent to getting 5 seats in 4 other CoTs of the same wealth. And, since Mercantilism gives a 40% compete bonus in your own CoT, versus the 20% from Free Trade in foreign CoTs, you may end up with a better chance at competing and keeping your position. Over the long run, then, you could end up with a lot more money, with less expense involved.

This strategy does have its risks, though. As I inadvertently discovered, all it takes is one country outcompeting you to seriously crimp this strategy. If you owned all the seats, and then lose your monopoly, your share of income is instantly cut in one quarter, from 100% to 25%. What's worse, though, is that until you reclaim your monopoly, there are now suddenly 14 free seats available for anyone to claim. Since your CoT is so wealthy, everyone will dispatch them, and may snatch them up before your own rescuing merchant can arrive. Then, it won't just be a matter of reclaiming the monopoly and driving out the usurper, but dispatching another 15 merchants to get rid of everyone else.

So, it's a high-stakes gambit, but one that would be fun to try for myself sometime.

Random thought: I really like the national missions, which give a nice focus to playing the game and offer some good but not balance-breaking rewards. However, every once in a while you'll get a mission which you just don't want to do - like to vassalize a friendly neighbor or to build an enormous and expensive army. The game does let you cancel a mission, but the price (5 prestige) feels too high, plus you can't cancel another mission for several years after. I think that the game should let you cancel a mission without penalty if you've already gone for, say, 50 years without accomplishing it.
Another random thought: the very last Idea I took was "Humanist Tolerance", and boy, what a stinker of an idea! I chose it almost at random, since I already had all the Ideas I actually wanted; my thinking was that, since Brunei was still Muslim, I could hopefully squeeze some extra happiness and revenue out of them. Well, the effect on that half-dozen provinces was marginal, but what was worse, after I picked the Idea I had to suffer a frequent parade of provinces abandoning the Reformed faith. Some became Protestant, some back to Catholic, and some Orthodox (!). That far outweighed whatever marginal benefits I might have received on Brunei; I'm never picking that Idea again.

Incidentally, this game's politics are really fascinating. Again, I'm used to a Civ-ish strategy game perspective, which tends to reflect the casually liberal view most often subscribed to here in America: multiculturalism is good, variety is good, plurality is good. That's good as a personal philosophy, but it's death in Europa Universalis 3. In Civ IV, for example, encouraging multiple religions in your city can let you build more cathedrals, expand your Cultural influence, etc. In EU3, there's no benefit to allowing any dissent from your official state religion. It only brings lower tax revenue, higher revolt risk, and more headaches. I'm very tempted to wonder if this reflects the different perspectives we get in polyglot America versus monocultural Sweden, home of Paradox Interactive.

Oh, yeah: the endgame. I was riding high after my last war against Russia, coasting on about 80 Prestige. Sadly, it didn't last; I entered a long period of peace, and without any warfare or Philosopher advisor, my prestige slumped, finally reaching a stasis of around 50 (thanks to Patron of the Arts and the Anti-Piracy Act). I was ranked #4 by the end of the game. The top two spots were occupied, bizarrely, by Corsica and Sardinia. I was never able to figure out just how they got all the prestige; they were never involved in any wars that I could see, they didn't have a Philosopher, and they only had one or two Royal Marriages. I guess they might have gotten some Prestige from cardinals (I couldn't see who was in the See after I left the church), but neither was ever the controller, so I kind of doubt it, and in any case that wouldn't explain how they got up to 80+. I suppose that they must have been fortunate with their missions. The third spot was held by France, which was more reasonable; in the last decade of the game, they had finally gone to war against Russia, thus pitting the world's two largest armies against one another, and doubtless providing ample opportunities for valorous combat. I like to convince myself that, since I was #1 for most of the game, I can still count myself as the winner, even if I lost the crown in the game's last few decades.

And with that, with little regret, it's time for me to clean out most of the 13GB of saved game files on my disk, and clear my mental space for the next round of gaming. Star Wars: The Old Republic beckons, and should I ever grow bored of that, I have the entire world of Deus Ex to tempt me. Not to mention the return to Fall from Heaven 2 that I've been dreaming of for years. The world of wonderful gaming need never end.

Res Publica

2012-01-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

I was recently delighted/infuriated to receive "Star Wars: The Old Republic" as a gift. SW:TOR is the latest MMORPG to attempt to take on World of Warcraft (WoW), the undisputed champion of the genre for nearly a decade. I've been having a blast, and will probably write a more in-depth post at some point, but I wanted to share a few initial thoughts while they're fresh.

First, the vitals. I'm playing on Lord Ieldis, a West Coast RP-PvE server. When picking a server, I was a bit surprised to see that, at the moment, there seem to be nearly twice as many East Coast servers as West Coast. Now that I've thought about it some more, though, people from both CT and ET will probably play on East Coast, while PT and MT will play West Coast. There are (probably) way more people in Central Time than on Mountain Time, so I guess that makes sense.

I picked a roleplaying (RP) server mostly because I figured the game would be more fun if other humans acted more like NPCs and less like over-caffeinated twelve-year-olds. Thus far, people don't seem to be taking the RP designation too seriously; the General Chat channel was filled with discussions about quests and game rules, until I muted it about three minutes in. Finally, I knew I wanted to do a Player-versus-Environment (PvE) rather than Player-versus-Player (PvP). I'm usually much more interested in quests than in combat; I'm unlikely to ever feel like "picking on" other players; and, in any case, even PvE servers have zones where you can engage in PvP, so I wouldn't be giving up that experience, just making it more controllable.

My character is Seberin, a male cyborg Imperial Agent (and, as of last night, an Operative). I'm always drawn towards rogue-type characters in RPGs, so Imperial Agent and Smuggler made the most sense. My brother is planning on playing on the Sith side, so I went with the class that's on the proper side of the conflict.

As with other MMOs, I've been a tad disappointed so far in the Agent. In the best single-playing RPGs, rogues let you play in an entirely different way: sneaking around to avoid combat, charming your way through situations, and so on. However, in MMOs, everything seems to come down to fighting; the Agent does it with a bit more style (firing from cover, shivving enemies who get too close), but it's still about picking what type of damage you want to deal, not finding entirely new ways to accomplish your goals. I do wish that at least a few missions would let you complete them in non-lethal ways, but whatever. Now that I'm playing as an Operative, who does have actual Stealth capability, maybe that will become more feasible.

I was really happy, and surprised, to see that your choice of faction (Old Republic or Sith Empire) is independent of your force alignment (Light or Dark). That lets me role-play as the kind of character I want to play: a devious, duplicitous, greedy rogue who still has a soft spot for innocents and despises hierarchical organizations. At the moment I've collected close to a thousand Light Side points, and just around a hundred Dark Side. So far this doesn't have any impact, but from what I understand, it will eventually affect the types of items I can use, and maybe even my titles and appearance.

At first I'd felt a little bummed that we had a Light Side and Dark Side at all. It echoes the boring, reductive morality found in so many non-Bioware RPGs; I do love games like Fallout and Bioshock, but their "moral" systems are so laughably contrived ("Press X to destroy this box of kittens!") that it's impossible to immerse yourself in the choice. It really ends up not being about choice at all; you'll just pick one alignment, then always follow that choice, not because it fits the story or your personality but because it leads to the biggest in-game bonuses. Once I got farther into the game, though, I was happy to see that, while the Light Side and Dark Side do function as one-dimensional moral choices, the game ALSO layers on a relationship-based moral system strongly evocative of Dragon Age, which has by far my favorite moral system of any RPGs. In this system, your companions will react to decisions you make. They aren't driven by simple black-and-white, good-and-evil choices. My current companion, Kaliyo, is a mercenary; she likes it when I taunt people, or when I make unexpected decisions, or when I betray my employers. It's totally possible to finish a conversation and be rewarded with both Light Side points, as well as positive affection from her. The more I think about it, the happier I am with this system. After all, you couldn't have Star Wars without the Light Side and the Dark Side; they're integral to the canon. Within the game's universe, those things exist, and they're presented well. At the same time, the game makes room for characters like Han Solo, who aren't "good" but live by their own code.

I think that's it for now. I started playing Tuesday night, and hit level 11 on Saturday night, so in the early part of the game I'm gaining perhaps around 1 level per hour, though I expect that will slow down significantly as I continue to advance. I'm playing solo at the moment, but now that I'm off my starting world, I will probably have more opportunities to meet up with other classes and possibly do some party-based missions. So far, my favorite part of this experience has been the vast scope of the game world, and the Bioware-quality dialog. If they can manage to improve the mission variety, then I can see myself staying hooked for a long time.

All That Is

2011-12-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

"That Is All" is an excellent book, but really hard to write about. It's a funny book, but many of the most memorable parts come from a very dark and disturbing Cthulhu-inflected mythos. It doesn't really have a plot, except that it does. It includes long lists that tend to be amusing as snippets, and hilarious in aggregate.

The book follows the same general form as John Hodgman's two earlier compendiums of knowledge, "Areas of My Expertise" and "More Information than You Require." They tend to read a bit like almanacs, with a collection of short pieces offering advice, or relaying anecdotes, or categorizing certain items, or whatever. Where the first two books summarized all existing world knowledge, That Is All completes all world knowledge, by explaining everything that happens between now and the end of the world, which will happen on December 21st, 2012. (Arguably, it's actually over on the 20th, but technically Ragnorak itself happens on the 21st after the human race and most of the planet has been extinguished.) A lot of the book deals with the end times. Every single page has a section from "TODAY IN RAGNAROK", an Almanac-ish prediction of what will happen on that day. These are often short, just a sentence of two (Jonathan Franzen delivering a mysterious manilla envelope to a Hollywood celebrity, for example), but they often accumulate over multiple days and weeks into fairly epic stories; and, all the stories together create the horrifying, tragic picture of the world rushing towards annihilation.

The body of the book covers much more ground, including hilarious bits on foreign etiquette, ocean cruises, types of wine, and so on. However, it also includes an astonishing number of pages listed to enumerating the names of the Ancient and Unspeakable Ones. (This part is very reminiscent of the Hobo-focused lists of Areas of My Expertise, but way more disturbing, which remaining mostly funny.)

There's also a strong autobiographical slant to the book. As usual, much of what Hodgman writes about himself is fiction, but particularly at the beginning and the end, he reflects a great deal about the success that he's found in life (through the earlier books, his role on the Apple commercials, and stints as a character actor on TV shows), what parts of it have changed him, in what ways it's been transient or fleeting, etc.

This is a strange book, in keeping with the previous two, but definitely worth reading. You have a little under a year until the world ends, so if you'd like to give it a shot, now's the time!

Pedantry

2011-12-17T14:49:00.000-08:00

This is more of a mini-rant / unhelpful lecture than anything. I recently read an article in The New Yorker that was ultimately about the Eragon series of young-adult fantasy novels, but touched on fantasy in general and some of my favorite authors in particular. I'm always pleased when fantasy is taken seriously by the press, especially a publication like The New Yorker, but reading the article made me reflect on a few things. (The article is already several weeks old, so it will probably be disappearing behind a paywall soon.)

I'll jump to the good part first: I think that Adam Gopnik absolutely nails the appeal and value of fantasy to its most devoted fans. He comes to this realization organically: he initially notes that the writing in these books is often quite poor, and wonders why fans are so passionate about them. The answer, he explains, is that fantasy doesn't primarily offer a story: it primarily offers a world. Tolkien was the master at this, but almost all modern fantasy pays a great deal of attention to sketching out the details of its own private fictional world: the species, the cultures, the rules for magic, the history of kingdoms, wars, famines and booms. As I've repeatedly noted, this is one of my favorite thing in the world: when someone does such a good job at this, and manages to make a fully-realized world that feels believable and livable, which operates by its own internally coherent set of principles, where I can imagine hundreds of stories taking place in addition to the one I'm currently reading. I do find this in good fantasy books, but I can also find it in certain video games (currently thinking of Fallout, the GTA series, Grim Fandango), some science fiction novels and series, a few serialized TV dramas, and occasionally literary fiction.

Gopnik also presents an interesting theory for why certain people become fantasy fans. It's a bit of a stereotype, but imagine a teenage boy, who has known almost nothing but going to school, and has to prepare for a college career. Most of this boy's path to success will depend on him being able to absorb, memorize, and synthesize vast amounts of information: math, science, history, writing, etc. Gopnik's theory is that reading a fantasy novel is kind of a primer for this sort of education. People who are reading these books are exercising their brains: sure, the specific facts they're memorizing are completely useless, and knowing whether Cirion was a King or a Steward of Gondor won't get you anything, but by learning this stuff, people can gain confidence in their abilities and strive to do more. It becomes a virtuous circle: smart kids read fantasy books, and so get better at learning stuff, and so get smarter, and read more fantasy books.

It's a cool idea, and much more generous than I had thought Gopnik would be. I got to wondering how one would test the theory, and decided that a good check would be adult fantasy readers. My initial thought was, "Well, I've been out of school for almost a decade, and I still read and enjoy fantasy (if not as much as I used to), so that doesn't seem to explain why I like it." On the other hand, though, the way I came to fantasy could arguably be explained under Gopnik's theory, and once I developed a pleasure for it, it's natural that I would continue to carry it with me, even after the original "reason" had lost its purpose. (Perhaps in the same way that someone who started running to lose weight might continue running after they reached their ideal weight, not because they need to but because they've discovered a love for it.) Anyways, that got me to wondering, are almost ALL adult fantasy readers people who were once teenage fantasy readers? Or do some people get turned on to it later in life? I don't know the answer, but it would tell us a lot about Gopnik's idea.

Now, on to nitpicking:

Gopnik does a phenomenal job at laying out the evolution of English fantasy books, and particularly Tolkien's rightful place in its center. He avoids the blunder of thinking that Tolkien "invented" fantasy, pointing out his predecessors and inspiration; he correctly identifies the extremely derivative books that have filled the market since The Lord of the Rings appeared, including the particularly egregious Terry Brooks series The Sword of Shannara. (It's kind of amusing that one thing most authors copy is Tolkien's sense of decline, where the rich culture and proud accomplishments of the past have faded to an inferior remnant in the present. It's hard to think of a better metaphor for MOST of the fantasy of the 20th and 21st century.) However, I think Gopnik overstates the case: yes, a majority of fantasy simply copies Tolkien, but the most beloved series strike their own path. Gopnik mentions, but doesn't really examine, A Song of Ice and Fire, which has been representing on the best-seller lists even before the HBO adaption arrived; this series practically inverts Tolkien's formula, with a basis in history instead of legend and a strong sense that evil can, and often does, prevail. A comparison that I think would have been even more interesting for Gopnik's angle would be the Thomas Covenant series by Stephen Donaldson, which is unquestionably fantasy, unquestionably adult, and has some incredibly intense and un-Tolkien struggles with morality.

Speaking of morality - I keep flogging this horse, but I get so frustrated when people repeat the assertion that Tolkien's Middle-earth was a black-and-white world. It was even more frustrating in the Gopnik article, because he even bothers to call out and summarize The Simlarillion. I'm guessing that he hasn't actually read it, though, because it would be impossible to maintain that Tolkien was a moral absolutist after reading that book. Was Feanor a good guy or a bad guy? How could Aule be good if he disobeyed Eru? The Simarillion is filled with a range of characters that include the nearly-perfect (Beren is practically spotless), the purely evil (Ungoliant), and quite a few in the middle (prideful kings, vengeful warriors, jealous suitors). Heck, even if you only know The Lord of the Rings - and I'm sure it has several orders of magnitude more readers than any of Tolkien's histories - you still have some great examples of men trying, and occasionally failing, to be good. Boromir sought power for himself, and broke the Fellowship, yet died to save the others and is, in my mind, a hero, if a flawed one. Denethor has devoted his life to the struggle against Mordor, yet his well-intentioned actions have played into the hands of the enemy.

I think what confuses people is that Tolkien does include SOME moral absolutes in his book. Sauron is pure evil, without any hope for redemption inside him. Sauruman is not pure evil; he could have made different choices, and emerged as an admirable guardian instead of a threat. Eru, Elbereth, and Manwe are pure good. Gandalf is good, but not perfect; he makes mistakes and can be tempted. And men, of course, sit in the middle: some are better than others.

Okay, that aside, one other small thing that I feel like writing about:

Gopnik often uses the term "sword and sorcery" throughout the article. I can understand why he would want a synonym for "fantasy", just to make the article scan better and punch it up a little. Unfortunately, the use of this term isn't just wrong; it actually runs counter to the point he's trying to make. Within the genre of modern fantasy, almost all novels can be placed into one of two sub-genres: "High Fantasy" and "Sword & Sorcery." Pretty much everything that Gopnik describes in his article, particularly the centrality of world-creation over storytelling, belongs to the province of high fantasy. This is the sub-genre that directly descends from Tolkien; it always includes an original fictional world, and usually contains a subset of other qualities of The Lord of the Rings: a multi-character party of adventurers, a conflict between good and evil, a low-magic world, invented languages, non-human species, objects with magical properties. In contrast, sword & sorcery books are descended from Robert E. Howard, the American author who created Conan the Barbarian. Sword & sorcery books are sometimes set in original worlds, or sometimes in Earth's past, but the world itself is always purely scenery; it really only exists in order to provide a setting for the story. These books are all plot; Gopnik might still not care much for the writing, but they're totally focused on advancing the story, and almost never include the interludes you get in High Fantasy when a speaker pauses to expound on local history, flora, or the nearby ruins of an ancient fallen civilization. Most sword & sorcery books will include a subset of other qualities from Conan the Barbarian: strong focus on a single, heroic protagonist; personal quests (of revenge, conquest, or exploration) rather than the world-risking quests of high fantasy; love interests (which can appear in both, but are often omitted from high fantasy). Perhaps the most interesting contrast is the way each sub-genre views entropy and civilization. High fantasy often is set in a declining civilization; there's often a sense of melancholy, a belief that dissolution is inevitable but regrettable. In sword & sorcery books, though, civilization generally exists alongside barbarism (wastelands, jungles, or other regions with no kingdom established); not only that, civilization is often portrayed as decadent, corrupt, and sinister. Here, there's an active struggle between civilization and the uncivilized world, and you're often rooting against civilization.

Aaanyways... that doesn't have a single thing to do with Gopnik's article, but if he ever wants to expand it into a book or a later treatment (and despite my gripes, I do think that he may be on to something here, and could have valuable insight as an outsider examining this insular literary universe), he may want to just ditch the phrase "sword and sorcery" altogether, to keep nerds like me from getting in a lather.

Adieu, Adieu

2011-12-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

I just realized that, what with 100% of my leisure attention being directed towards EU3, I completely neglected to mention my recent return to Susanna Clarke. Her book "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is one of my favorite books of the past decade, and I've found that my appreciation of it has continued to grow since I finished it. Clarke has such an amazing voice within that book, at once innovative (it sounds unlike any other book published recently), and traditional (it sounds like a book you might have been assigned in an English Literature class). It's wonderfully highly elevated fantasy, and is one of the only books to combine my love of wholly constructed, self-realized worlds with my love of clever, elevated writing.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell stands alone, and I doubt that we'll see another book quite like it. However, Clarke has published another book, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, that should appeal to anyone who enjoyed that first one. It isn't a sequel, and isn't even really a novel; instead, it's a collection of short stories, all set in the same alternate world that she created for Strange & Norrell. Each individual story works quite well on its own, with well-drawn characters (I'm particularly fond of the newly appointed rector who must contend with a faerie relative and a bevy of eligible young ladies) and good plots (some meander, but do so entertainingly). However, I think the collection is absolutely brilliant when seen as a comment on English literature itself. I was originally going to write "satire", but that isn't quite right... Clarke has too much love for the subject matter to mock it. Each story, though, manages to perfectly capture the tone of a particular strain of English writing. One of the later stories is a kind of reinterpretation of Rumpelstiltskin, and is told in the first person in language that perfectly echoes that seen in The Canterbury Tales, down to the use of archaic terms. The aforementioned story about a young minister just perfectly nails Jane Austen, down to the dialog from each of the young ladies and the obsession with incomes and standing. Other stories read like traditional folktales; another is a morality tale; others are histories.

There is a limited bit of overlap with some of the characters from Strange & Norrell in at least one of the stories; what's even cooler, though, is getting to learn more about the incredibly rich backstory that Clarke created for that book. The most dramatic example of this is probably getting a first-hand glimpse at legendary characters like John Uskglass the Raven King, who looms large over the bigger novel; here, we just see a slice, and probably not a very representative one, but it's still thrilling to read. The book is a great treat, reminding me of what I loved about Strange & Norrell while making its world even larger, deeper, and more believable.

Don't Meckle in Europe's Affairs

2011-12-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

In response to universally absent demand, here's what I've been up to lately in my Europa Universalis game.

When we last left off, I was struggling with the decision of whether to remain focused on my trading empire, or to switch into a colonizing power. I eventually decided to do both: I would primarily rely on my trading supremacy to drive my economy; but since that would generate a lot more money than I could really use, I would invest my gains in building up a colonial empire in East Asia. The other big option would have been going to war, which I'd like to do in some game, but it doesn't sound all that appealing for a first game. My neighbors in Europe are easy to get to, but tend to either be dauntingly powerful (France, England), or else entangled in an elaborate web of alliances that would prove very difficult to extract myself from (the Holy Roman Empire states). I now think that it would have been interesting to wage war against another technologically inferior power, like one of the African states, but that will be a task for another time.

I had established my toehold on Indonesia while pursuing the East India Trading Company, and later I received a mission to conquer the sole remaining province of my opponent, which gave the reward of core control over the province. This is HUGE: it usually takes 50 years of consecutive control of a province before you get core; core ownership doesn't just give significant bonuses to your economy and military, but it also serves as another potential origin for your colonists. Now, instead of dispatching my settlers from Mecklenburg (aka Boondocks, Europe), I could send them out from the heart of the Asian archipelago.

I started sending out settlers to islands, both tiny one-province spots of land (most of which were either totally inhabited or had a mere 500 natives), or one of the larger multi-province islands like the main Philippines island. Over time, I gradually developed a strategy for my colonization. First of all, I decided to focus my expansion within Asia, but also to send colonists to grab islands in defensible positions that could be at risk of colonization from other European powers; for example, one of my first colonies was in Bourbon, an island just east of Madagascar, which was virtually depopulated and would be a tempting target for Portugal, which had recently taken control of Kongo's provinces. I wanted to focus on Asian territories because I was already developing a long-range plan: I would relocate my capital from Lubeck to Bali-Lombok, or another suitable island province. This would mean that, instead of having a tiny set of two European provinces which provide direct tax and production income, and a vast array of island colonies that only provide tariffs, I would instead have a vast Asian empire that gave me tax and production, and could include my European holdings along with other possessions in Africa and Oceania.

Incidentally, I had long since given up on becoming a presence in the Americans. I was actually pushing pretty hard for this for quite a while: I was investing as much into Naval as I was into Government and Trade, and taking the ideas and advisors to maximize my colonial range. Frustratingly, I would finally get within one sea zone of a province I wanted to colonize (Greenland, the Azores, Barbados), only to have Portugal, Castile, or England snatch it up shortly before I could reach it. It isn't all that surprising - Mecklenburg sits at the gateway to the Baltic Sea, and is very poorly positioned in the race for the New World - but it was still a bit of a bummer, given how far ahead of the others I was in naval tech. Anyways, by the time I could finally reach some available Canadian provinces, my western neighbors had already managed to colonize huge swaths of the new world: there was a bit of intermixing, but for the most part England held Canada, Castile controlled the former Indian lands of both North and Central American, and Portugal ran the defunct Incan empire and a few provinces in northeast Brazil. Not too far from what happened historically, really. Anyways, I disliked the idea of a prolonged land-grab against three aggressive neighbors, plus I feared the outcome of a military conflict. There are FAR more uncolonized provinces in the Americas than there are in Asia, but I'd have the Asian ones to myself for a while, plus I liked how defensible they seemed - yeah, they were scattered on multiple islands, but I was building up a good navy anyways to boost my tariffs and stave off pirates, plus I could fight decisive battles on small islands instead of the endless chasing you can get in continental wars. So, Asia it was.

Back to my strategy… running colonies is fairly expensive; each one costs you about 20 ducats a year in maintenance. At first I was only getting 1.1 colonists a year; I'm now receiving 2.2, thanks to eventually taking the Colonial Ventures National Idea and spontaneously receiving a new Center of Trade. Anyways, that isn't a whole lot. I'm totally swimming in dough now, but back when I started colonizing Asia, I actually had to pay attention to how much I was minting. So, it was in my interests to have as few colonies as possible - ideally just one - and send every colonist I received there until it matured into a self-supporting province.

For the small and peaceful islands, this was very straightforward. I soon learned, though, that it could be dangerous when there are aggressive natives around. Periodically they will rise up, and if there aren't any regiments in your province, they will slaughter some or all of your colonists. So, for any province with an aggression level of above 3, I would move regiments in there. At first I would do this prior to sending my first settler; however, you have far lower support limits at this point, so my regiments would suffer painful attrition while they waited for the colony to establish. Now, I will send a colonist in, then have my regiments arrive after they have successfully established the colony. Most times, especially when the natives are at Aggression 9, they will rise up and attack your army. I found that, when it's a small grow of natives (say, 500 or so), I'll usually have to slaughter them all. That's kind of a bummer, but it does mean that the Aggression drops to 0, which in turn results in much higher population growth and better success odds for subsequent colonists dispatched. When there were more natives around, I would often kill, oh, maybe a thousand or so of them. The remaining ones would hang around aggressively, and would OCCASIONALLY rise up again (this seems to sometimes happen in tandem with a failed colonization attempt, though I can't tell for sure whether it's coincidental or not), but still, I'd often be left with a few thousand natives by the time my own settlers reached a population of 1000. This is actually great, as the surviving natives are instantly assimilated into your province: they take your culture and your religion as well, which gives you a big boost out the gate as you build up your tax base. I think that there might be more provinces in the Americas that have fairly high populations and low aggressiveness, but at least in Asian islands, the two variables appear to be strongly correlated.

The colonial planting project was thus moving along at a nice clip - since I was focusing all my colonists on one colony at a time, I was expanding at a clip of a bit under three provinces per decade (depending on my growth rate within each colony). Once I had assembled significant holdings of perhaps a dozen provinces, a few of which were starting to get their own natural core status, I decided it was time to commence Operation Relocate My Capital.

This turned out to be a HUGE pain. I was expecting it to be challenging - moving your capital incurs the serious cost of 1000 ducats and a drop of four (!!!) stability points. Which was rough, but my treasury could support the price, and with time I could make up the stability. But, when I got ready to do the actual move, I was frustrated to see that it wouldn't let me do it. It turns out that there's an obscure rule regarding where you can move your capital. If you wish to move it to another province within the same continent, you can move it anywhere you want. But, if you want to move it to another continent, you have to be moving it FROM a province that isn't adjacent to any other provinces you control. So, for example, if your capital was on Crete you could relocate to Xiamen, but if your capital was in London, you'd be stuck in Europe.

According to online forums, the way some people get around this is to first move their capital to another province in Europe that they control and that isn't adjacent to any other controlled provinces (again, a one-province island, or just a random holding you have that's surrounded by other nations), and then move it again from there to your intended destination. That's CRAZY. You have to pay for all moves, and taking an eight-stability-point penalty just blows my mind. And, in my case, I didn't even have that option: I only owned two European provinces, Mecklenburg and Lubeck, and they're decidedly next to one another. So, what would I do?

I suppose you could make a strong argument that what I did was cheat. I'd argue that I proactively fixed a broken game design feature. I turns out that Europa Universalis save game files are AWESOME. They're all in plain text format, and each one contains everything about the game. EVERYTHING. The complete history of every single province, every single ruler, every single advisor, for all of the hundreds of nations and thousands of territories and hundreds of years of the game. Which explains why each save game file can be 20MB or bigger! I'll seriously need to delete my save game folder at some point now that I know this. But anyways, it's pretty great: all that you do is edit the file (I use vim, but you can use whatever you like), find the section that starts with "human=yes", then look under the "variables=" block for the capital. I switched from the old capital of Lubeck (which, it turns out, has umlauts, which was why I hadn't been able to find it by searching in the file), to the new province of Priangan. (Provinces are identified by number, with Priangan being 625 and Lubeck 45.) Then, it was simply a matter of loading the save game, and poof! I was where I wanted! I donated the money I would have spent to a random collection of Indian principalities. I ignored the stability debt. If I Paradox asked me, I'd say that the proper cost for a relocation would be 1000 ducats, 2 stability, and, say, 25 prestige.

Oh: Why Priangan? I'd initially planned on moving the capital to Mataram or Bali Lombock, which were my two most populous provinces in the region and thus could offer the most manpower, tax, etc. However, both of them were Sulawesi, and both of them were Catholic. By this point (more on religion below), I had converted to Reformed. I didn't necessarily mind the thought of my capital being in a heretical province, but I wasn't (and am not) certain how it would affect my further colonization: would new colonists take my national culture and religion, or would they take that of my capital? Priangan had been one of the oldest of my Asian colonies, and it shares an island with Mataram and another five or so of my first provinces. Because it had been colonized, it had the ideal culture and religion, so I wouldn't have to worry about how it would affect colonization. (Oh, by the way, Sulawesi had already become accepted by this point, so I wasn't worried about potential revolt risk, but I was concerned about sharing appropriate cultural flags with my European neighbors.) Anyways, once I figured out how to switch stuff over, it was very smooth.

With my capital in the right place, my income began seriously snowballing. For the first time in the whole game, sources of income other than trade became non-trivial. I had been used to trade easily accounting for 95% or more of my income; it's still high, but now is often responsible for "only" around 80% or so. Tax, production, and "toll" income all rolled in. With my newfound wealth, I even started to run serious surpluses for the first time in the game; before, it had been inconceivable to reach 1000 ducats without some dangerous minting. This effectively removed money as an obstacle in the game: I could colonize as much as I wanted, I could build whatever buildings tempted me, I could cut way back on my minting and get inflation under control. I also bought a couple of manufactories; these are huge buildings that take 5 years each to finish, but offer significant bonuses: a large annual income, direct investment in a specific technology, and even a boost in the population growth rate. Unfortunately, as I soon learned, the cost of manufactories grows higher the more you build; the first one or two were around 1000 ducats each, but by this point in my game, I'm paying close to 3000 for the ones I want most (Universities and Refineries).

Along the same lines, my acquisition of other Ideas further boosted my economy. The most important one was a Central Bank (I THINK that's what it's called), which provides an annual reduction in inflation of 0.1%. This let my inflation creep back down, and finally eventually reach 0, which has the effect of making everything - research, regiments, buildings, colonies - cheaper.

The biggest downside of running a bigger empire? I now need to actually think about stability. Back in my glory days, when I was the Holy Roman Empire and ran a mere 2 provinces, I would laugh as I embraced instability; it would only take a month or two for each level that I bounced back. In my most recent drops, it can take a decade for me to return from Stability 2 to 3. Granted, that's with 0 investment on my part; sometime I should run the numbers to figure out whether a quicker return to a higher tax income would offset the cost in diverting funds from my research.

I started writing this post around 1600; it's now around 1650, and I've largely accomplished my colonial goals. I've colonized every island in Asia, except for the Indonesian isle to my west which Castile has conquer. I've colonized virtually all of the uninhabited provinces in upper Asia (mainly Siberia); only two are left to colonize, and a few of the westernmost were settled by Persia, of all places. I also have colonized Australia (currently have full provinces on the eastern territories and a half-grown colony on the west), and almost all of the island of Oceania, with only the western part of Papua New Guinea remaining. I also colonized the four provinces in southern Africa, and the minor islands east of Africa, except for Madagascar.

The other Europeans have mostly left my sphere of influence alone. Portugal and Castile did engage in adventures out here; Portugal conquered Ceylon at one point, and Castile ran on ongoing war against Brunei, Makasar, and other southeast Asian powers until it had a full island and two provinces on the mainland, including the trade center Malakkar (sp). I've recently started taking my slider a few points towards Plutocracy, and so I have some Spies to play around with. That's been a lot of fun; they certainly aren't essential to the game, but open up some new play opportunities for people like me who have lots of funds and don't want to get directly involved in war. I funded a nationalist uprising in Ceylon; Portugal lost a province, then got it back, then eventually lost it again. They finally lost their toehold in Ceylon, which was great; at the time, I'd been concerned that once they got Core on the island, they might compete against me for other Asian territories I had my eye on. Now, the grateful Ceylonese are my loyal followers, and I'm happy to let them keep running their island. Castile has proven more difficult to dislodge; I tried the same trick, but they quickly annihilated the patriots who rose up. Since my control over Asia is now secure, I think I'll just live with having them on my doorstep; Castile is large and powerful, but unlike me they're spread quite thin, all over the world, so I don't think I need to be too concerned. I've also used my spies to snip nascent rival colonies in the bud: as I pushed farther west into Siberia, there were two provinces that Persia had awkwardly taken, which would give me a peculiar and hard-to-protect western border. Fortunately, the colonies were still fairly fresh, and for a mere 10 ducats, I convinced the natives to rise up against their overlords. Since there were no soldiers in the colonies, the natives wiped the colony out, leaving it free for me to take for myself. I've also tried the technique with mixed success against Aragon, which has become a late-game colonizer; for most of the game they were content to go on adventures in Italy and Asia Minor, but in the last few decades they're suddenly popping up in North America, the west coast of Africa, and even eastern China. I eliminated one of their African colonies through the native uprising; in another case, though, they had already killed off all the natives themselves, and so short of declaring was I won't be able to stop that colony from growing into a full Aragon province. Instead, I'm fortifying my adjacent provinces so I can buy time if they try and assault me. I'm a bit more concerned about their Chinese holdings, which border my interests in Siberia. I tried the patriot uprising here too, but they have a significant military in the area, and can put down my rebellion quickly. I think I'll hold off for now on taking any other action against Aragon; the nice thing about owning all of Siberia, including many core provinces and all of which is in my home continent now, is that in the even of a war I can follow the Russian strategy of continually falling back and letting them take land until I've gathered enough forces, and they're stretched thin enough, that I can spring back and destroy them.

Wow, that was an extremely long paragraph. Sorry.

Let's talk a little about religion, shall we?

EU3 has a really cool approach towards history. You can start a game at any date, and on the date you begin, the world will be historically accurate for that time period: countries will have their proper territories, the right rulers, historically appropriate advisors, and so on. From that moment on, everything evolves kind of randomly, but also guided appropriately. One of the best examples of this might be the Reformation. If you start a game after the historic Reformation, then it will have happened in the time and place that it did in our world. If you start the game before the Reformation, then it will EVENTUALLY happen, but you can't know exactly when, where, or how. It will occur sometime after 1500; it will happen in a country that employs a theologian (not necessarily Martin Luther); it's more likely to happen in a Germanic or English country, and less likely to happen in an Iberian or Italian country. Once it begins, that province will turn Protestant, and for the next few decades, it will spontaneously spread to other provinces. It's more likely to spread in nations that are Innovative and have Free Subjects, and less likely in places that are Narrowminded. I think that National Ideas can affect it as well - if you're Catholic and follow Unam Sanctum, Protestantism will almost never spread to your territory; meanwhile, I think things like Ecumenalism may help it spread more quickly.

So, is the Reformation good or bad? Well, above anything else, it's highly disruptive. I was expecting this, yet still surprised by the severity of the impact it had on Europe. It causes a great deal of internal strife, as countries must suddenly deal with the heightened revolt risk that comes along with heretical beliefs. In some cases, these boil over into actual rebellious armies, who don't just attack in their host province but can go on rampages throughout multiple countries. The Reformation also greatly harms international relations; the mutual admiration brought on by closeness in the Catholic faith grows weaker, and the various splinters within Christianity sets up increasingly sour relationships.

Over time, these tensions ease; by the 1600s, and especially now in the 1650s, most countries have worked through their issues. Most nations will eventually send missionaries to re-convert any provinces that have strayed from the faith. In my game, Europe settled as a strongly Catholic region; Great Britain and Castile had many colonies in the New World that were Protestant or Reformed, and a couple in mainland Europe also followed those faiths, but only Holland and perhaps two or three Germanic nations actually converted their faith.

As for myself, it ended up being a much more challenging question than I had assumed. As I was reading up on the rules before getting into this game, I had assumed that I would convert to Protestantism or Reformed; partly because they offer some nice efficiency bonuses, but mostly because of my own personal preferences. When the actual time came, though, I found myself as distressed as much of the other leaders. When the Protestant Reformation began, two of my Indonesian holdings, Bali-Lombok and Mataram, converted. However, I still had about eight provinces that were Catholic, including my two mainland European ones. Converting would leave me with a huge conversion chore, for very little benefit: un-accepted faiths would translate to lower producers, potentially offsetting the production bonus for Protestantism. Plus, I'd grown accustomed to the perks of Catholicism. Only Catholics can gain cardinals in the Holy See and become the Curia Controller. The main gameplay benefit of becoming the Controller is being able to excommunicate other rulers, which I never had any use for; however, it also confers a nice annual prestige bonus, which I did appreciate. The more I thought about it, the more I worried about the effect of taking on the change… would all of Europe's faithful turn against me? Would I be forced into war?

I waited a bit longer, and was glad I did. The Reformed movement started next, and quickly spread to Lubeck and Mecklenburg. I was pretty happy with this - as trade accounts for the most vast portion of my income, and I've gotten in the habit of taking every advantage which can boost it, it felt natural to follow that path. As a nice bonus, quite a few of my Indonesian provinces spontaneously converted to the Reformed faith in the next couple of years. I was running short on Missionaries, so that was greatly appreciated; my Innovative slider was killing my missionary allotment, and I was too reluctant to take the Religious Decisions that could have goosed this amount. Best of all, since I had converted before I embarked on my most wide-ranging form of colonization (switching from one-province-at-a-time to as-many-provinces-as-possible), I was able to plant the vast majority of my colonies as Reformed, and so my empire's size skyrocketed with the "correct" culture and religious settings.

The Counter-Reformation started pretty soon after I adopted the Reformed faith, which I think might be part of the reason why this version of history stayed so Catholic. Although some of my provinces converted from Catholic to Reformed on their own, I never had any province switch back to Catholic, and nobody converted to Protestantism after I switched religions. I'm not sure if that's always the case or not, but it SEEMS to be historically accurate… that's not my best period of history, but I have trouble thinking of examples of European countries which saw big swings from Protestantism back to Catholicism in the absence of a ruling elite that encouraged such a move.

Phew… well, I guess that's [more than] enough for this post. I'm still having fun, but it seems like I'm facing the same problem at the end of my previous post: I feel like I'm in a commanding position in the game, but without a way to actually "win", I'm a bit unsure what I should work towards. Previously, I had "won" the game of trading; now, I've "won" my self-declared game of colonizing Asia and Oceania. And where do I go from here? I don't really relish the idea of suddenly becoming a warmonger after 250 years of mostly peace; I don't want to get involved in the polyglot New World; and, other than that, all I really need to do is periodically adjust my sliders and continue raking in the dough. I might continue my recent experiments with Spies to wage cold wars against my rivals; or maybe I'll try to race to the end of the Government and Trade tech trees as early as I can. We'll see where this world takes us!

Counterattack

2011-11-20T19:38:00.001-08:00

"The Counterlife" is an awesome name for a great book. It continues my erratic wandering through Philip Roth's canon. It hasn't exactly been reverse-chronological, though my overall direction has, of necessity, been backwards. I started with "American Pastoral" in college, which remains not only my favorite Roth book but probably one of my favorite books, period. Since then I've gone through "I Married a Communist", "The Plot Against America," and now, The Counterlife.

Oh, yeah, before I get into Counterlife, I should report briefly on the Roth book that I DIDN'T read. At one point I decided to start reading Roth in chronological order. Not exhaustively, but I wanted to pick, say, his Zuckerman books, and actually read them in the order they were published. I decided to start with his first famous book, "Portnoy's Complaint." Well. I lasted for all of, um, maybe twenty pages, before I gave up and returned the book to the library. I tend not to think of myself as much of a prude, but that book really managed to get under my skin. I think it has much more to do with Roth's brilliant/terrifyingly-gripping use of language, and the insistent voice that the first-person narrator uses, which makes it seem much filthier than it actually is. I mean, I read all of Murakami's books, which have WAY more disturbing sex scenes, but those are conveyed in such a detached, dreamlike fashion that it's easy for me to ignore them. It was impossible for me to ignore Portnoy, and I couldn't imagine putting up with that throughout the whole book, so I gave up. I dunno… I may try again at some point, when I'm more worldly-wise and cynical.

Anyways, the reason I think of this now is that The Counterlife is one of the Zuckerman novels, and it feels much more like a "real" Zuckerman novel to me than the others I've read have. Nathaniel Zuckerman is Roth's alter-ego, a Jewish-American novelist from New Jersey who narrates and appears in many of his books. American Pastoral was technically a Zuckerman novel, but Nathan was hardly in it; he appears in the early pages, describing his childhood with the Swede, and then simply narrates the remainder of the story, disappearing from the action entirely. The Counterlife, in comparison, is almost entirely about Zuckerman. Usually he's on the page, and when he isn't the characters are usually thinking about him. Roth has a great sense of humor about this situation, and he plays around a lot with the author-as-character idea, and much of the book is about writing fiction and fiction's relationship to real life. The in-book equivalent of Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" is Zuckerman's fictional novel "Carnovsky", which does a great job of evoking the same feel as the real book's title. As far as I can tell, Carnovsky's role in Zuckerman's universe is very similar to Portnoy's in ours: it's a shocking, filthy, widely respected book that catapulted its author into literary stardom, and secured him a position as a professional writer. Given this equivalent, it's also tempting and easy to imagine that the other effects of Carnovsky also occurred for Portnoy's Complaint. Zuckerman wrote Carnovsky roughly based on his own childhood; the family in that book is recognizable as his own real-life family, and many (but not all) incidents in that book "really happened." This causes a large rift between Nathan and the other Zuckermans: his parents feel betrayed, and die afterwards of illness without ever having been reconciled. Zuckerman's brother, Henry, also becomes estranged, and they go for many years without speaking to one another. Henry is upset at the way Nathan has betrayed their family's privacy, but he's almost equally as upset that Nathan didn't even faithfully betray it. Nathan uses his family as characters, twisting their actions, putting words in their mouths, in order to serve his literary purposes. This makes people assume that the fictional Carnovsky family's traits are shared by the "real" Zuckerman family, making them seem grotesque.

Anyways… that's almost just background for this book. The plot itself is pretty intriguing, but I should address that under the heading of

MINI SPOILERS
The plot of the story: Two grown brothers, who have spent years without speaking to one another, re-enter a fraught relationship. One of the brothers has developed a heart ailment; this is easily treatable by drugs, but a side-effect of the drug leaves him impotent and unable to please his lover. He becomes obsessed with the idea of undergoing a slightly risky surgical procedure to fix his heart; everyone, including his lover, opposes this idea, but he decides to go through with it, and something drastic happens after the surgery.

That's the plot. What's cool, though, is that the details are changed and repeated throughout the story. At first, Henry is the brother with the heart problem, and he dies after the operation. Then, he survives the operation, but becomes extremely depressed, and leaves his wife and lover behind when he travels to Israel to join a militant Jewish settlement. In some of these stories, Nathan lives nearby in New York; in others, he lives in England with an English wife. Then, in the later stories, Nathan is the one suffering from impotence and contemplating surgery. Nathan dies, but leaves behind stories in which he survives, and which imagine his future life with his new wife.

It took a while for me to get what was happening. There are only… I think five named chapters in the whole book, and they often go for a long time between section breaks. Sometimes a section break continues the story, sometimes it switches to a parallel track, and sometimes it takes you into another universe. Anyways, I was a bit confused after the part that ended with Henry's funeral and Nathan's conversation with Carol, when the next part began with Henry having fled to Israel. I had initially thought that Roth was opening up the chronology of the story: where we, as readers, had assumed that the funeral took place very shortly after the surgery, we were now reading about a long coda within Henry's life, between his choice and his death. That would have been a cool approach, and I think it sort of works - it's harder to buy Nathan's changes in situation, but you can imagine the people at the funeral being upset about Henry's operation, not because (as we assume) he dies on the table, but because it snaps something in his mind that makes him go on a years-long jag that ends in his death.

Anyways… that's not what happens, which I eventually figured out. We keep getting multiple perspectives and multiple realities; in one really nice bit, there's a long and surprisingly intense account of Nathan's flight from Tel Aviv airport back to London, where a would-be hijacker tries to enlist him in his plot and they both are roughly interrogated; later, we learn that the flight back to London was uneventful, and Nathan had kept busy by writing the story we just read.

I love the title "The Counterlife," and I love how Roth uses that as his operating framework for the novel. A counterlife is still your life, but a fundamentally differently imagined one: a life where you married someone else, where you made a different crucial decision, where you switched roles with someone else. Each individual life is very richly explored and detailed, and whenever we switch to a new counterlife, we come into the new life with an accumulated understanding of the person and their situation which makes the story even richer.

The book gets extremely "meta" towards the end. After Nathan dies, Henry goes through his papers, where he discovers drafts of the book Nathan has been working on. That book is the one we've been reading: it starts with Basel, which is about Henry's affairs with Wendy (his dental assistant) and other women, and his relationship with Carol and his drive to have the surgery. Within "The Counterlife," Henry is incensed; Nathan has taken HIS problem of impotence and projected it onto Henry, reversing their positions. Henry's greatest complaint, though, is fundamental to Nathan's provision: he's an author. Henry's interior monologue seethes and rages at the way Nathan always had to be on top, and wasn't just content with being the best, but felt the need to control others, putting words into their mouths and thoughts in their head inside his books. It's a view of author-as-tyrannical-God that's pretty fascinating.

Once this perspective gets opened up, Roth continues running with this theme through the remainder of the book. In the next section, which picks up the previous storyline by having Nathan return from Israel and reunite with his (fourth) wife, Maria, we learn that Nathan has died, and Maria describes her own experience of going through Nathan's papers; it's yet another counterlife, Maria and Henry, who never "met" in any of these worlds but whose roles reflect one another. Maria also comments on the various stories that we've already read; intriguingly, she also reacts to a story that we haven't yet read, entitled "Christendom," describing which parts of this story were accurate, which were embellished, and how reading that story makes her feel about her relationship with Nathan. "Christendom" ends up being the final chapter in "The Counterlife," and it's a cool shift to now be reading a story after hearing an outsider's gloss, rather than matching a gloss against a story we've already read. "Christendom" ends up being the trickiest and most meta of the stories. In "The Counterlife," none of the stories are finally "real", but form a sort of Ouroboros, each springing from some other story, each writing another story. Characters throughout this book have worried about BEING characters within Nathan's stories, and it seems as though Maria may have suffered this fate. She ultimately rebels against it (and Roth has a nice hat-tip to the literary tradition of characters turning against authors - I thought of Muriel Spark here, though I'm sure there are other examples), leaving Nathan the final task of arguing with a woman who may be his creation, may be his salvation, may be more real than him.

A few other thoughts:

Wow, Roth (and I suppose Nathan) is a master of honoring individuals' perspectives. There aren't straw men anywhere in his book, which is filled with passionate debate between opinionated individuals. He lets a character go on for pages and pages, building a highly persuasive argument, to the point where you're convinced that this is what Roth intends us to believe; then he lets Nathan or someone else respond, just as eloquently and as long. The authorial weight ends up supporting Nathan's perspectives, but by the end of the book I felt like this was Nathan's authorial weight, not Roth's. The book seems to support the idea that Nathan is kind of a bully, who gets to give himself the final word, even if along the way he tries to craft his opponents as carefully and widely as possible.

To give one specific example: during Nathan's trip to Israel, Mordecai Lippman comes across as a villain, and one of the biggest examples of this is his sneering disdain for Western niceties such as treaties and human rights. To Lippman, all that matters is strength, force, the ability of one group to exert their desires over another group. To Nathan, this is anathema, and one of the most morally dangerous aspects of Henry's association with the group. Much later on, the last few pages of the book deal with the future of Nathan's and Maria's potential, presumed son. Nathan has an interior, and then an exterior, diatribe against the christening of his son; he's horrified at the thought of doing it, and calls out and then browbeats Maria into acknowledging that this superstitious, religious ritual has no place on their son. Then, in the next stage, Maria responds with her own nascent fear: that Nathan will insist on circumcision for their son. Now, from a purely humanistic, secular, disinterested standpoint, there is almost no difference between christening and circumcision. If anything, as Maria gently notes, circumcision is the worse of the two: it's a traumatic pain inflicted on a young child. Nathan isn't religious, so will he be satisfied to spare his child this ritual? The book's last page has Nathan's response: no, absolutely not; as much as he wants Maria back, he will insist on their child being circumcised. He can't even muster a very persuasive argument, arguing that the pain is itself important, a crucial waking-up of the child to the cruelties of the world and the necessity of retreating into your own people-group. Nathan the author is explicitly giving himself the last word in the novel; however, I think that Roth the author expects us to draw the parallel between Nathan and Lippman. Nathan, for all his sophistication, intelligence, and charm, is as much of a bully as Lippman is, and has no more moral justification for what he does. He wants his family's traditions to continue, and not those of his wife's family, because… well, because he's more powerful (richer, older, smarter), and can get away with it.

As with… well, pretty much all Roth books that I've read, Jewishness in general and the American-Jewish identity in particular are important themes to the book. I think it's more central here than anything else I've read; not necessarily throughout the whole book, but certainly the middle chapters in Israel are almost entirely preoccupied with these questions of race, culture, identity, and politics; and even the sections that aren't explicitly about Jewish identity are still mostly about Nathan, and as we learn throughout the book, Nathan has been certainly shaped by his experiences. Most of the book paints a positive picture of American assimilation and the opportunities for Jewish people in this country, which has largely escaped the deeply ingrained anti-semitism of Europe. As Nathan points out towards the end, though, he tends to be in a contrary position no matter where he goes: in Israel, surrounded by Jews, he defends the goyim and downplays the importance of Jewish identity; in England, surrounded by bigots, he passionately argues for a visible and strong Jewish identity. I'm not sure exactly what Roth's main point is, if he has one, but it's a very powerful one. Not for the first time, I find myself kind of wishing that I knew what it felt like to grow up Jewish in a majority-Christian culture; I'm guessing that someone with that background would have a more deeply emotional connection with the themes that Roth likes to use in his books.

END SPOILERS
I have absolutely no regrets about reading American Pastoral, and think it's still my favorite, but I do think that The Counterlife is at LEAST as tempting of a book to use in a college-level English Lit class. There are just so many directions you can go with it, it's such a great (and un-annoying) example of post-modernist literature, so many various themes (political, cultural, personal, relational, familial) that could be plumbed for paper topics… not to mention that it's a fairly easy read (not too light, but not needlessly ornate either), sectioned well to fit into a syllabus. It isn't something like Ulsysses, which I don't think I could have read outside of a class, but I think this good book could get even better with the guidance and discussion of a focused class.

Hmmm, that's a fun experiment… in the unbelievably tiny chance that I ever do teach a college English lit class, what would I want to teach in it? That might be a good topic for a future blog post!

Mecklenburger with Extra Cheese

2011-11-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

There are many things to fear in the world today. Nuclear weapons falling into the hands of rogue states. Encountering a serious medical illness without any insurance. The collapse of the global financial system. Personally, though, I'm terrified of what will happen to my life now that I've discovered that I can install games on my laptop and play it in bed.

Due to reasons too complex to get into at the moment, I've had to temporarily box up my PC, which used to be a combination dual-boot Linux/Windows box for Programming/Gaming respectively, but since moving over to a MacBook Pro for my development, it's pretty much just been a dedicated PC gaming system. I'm really bummed to have put it away, because I'd finally gotten started on the Mass Effect trilogy - yes, I decided to extend my incredibly fun play-through of Baldur's Gate into my first experience with Bioware's other phenomenal RPG series, and am vaguely hoping to finish the second game at the exact same time that the third entry arrives in 2012.

Be that as it may: I'm a geek, I need games. Fortunately, I have an old black MacBook that isn't getting used, so I decided to repurpose it as my stopgap gaming solution. I installed Steam on it, and started clicking around. I had vaguely thought that I might finally get around to checking out those fun Sam & Max games, but good lord, they're still expensive! Well, I guess not too expensive compared to shrink-wrapped AAA titles, but still, I'm pretty sure they cost as much as they did when I played the demo four years ago. I kept looking. The Steam offerings for Mac are much more limited than for PC, but a few titles are available cross-platform. I was briefly tempted by Civ V, which has seen a pretty nice price cut, but eventually decided that a price cut for a sub-par game still isn't that great a deal. I'll be sticking with my original plan for Civ V, and wait for the inevitable "Ultimate" version, which will include all the DLC stuff and hopefully fix all the things that apparently make it not fun. (And, if we're really lucky, maybe even have an ending of some sort!)

My browsing eventually led me to Europa Universalis III, which triggered some dim recognition. It's one of those things where I've heard about the series for a while, without ever being too clear about exactly what it is. I read a few brief summaries, saw some positive reviews, double-checked the cost, and bought it. I got the "Complete" version, which, amusingly enough, includes only two of the four expansions: it has Napoleon's Ambition and In Nomine, but not Heir to the Throne or Divine Wind. Which is totally fine by me - as a complete neophyte to the series, I was happy approaching a (slightly) smaller body of work.

EU3 belongs to a tradition of computer strategy games that... I guess I might call them something like "Historic simulation strategy games". The first game of this sort that I remember playing was Castles 2 for DOS. Interestingly enough, the original Castles does not belong to this sub-genre; it was more like Sim Castle combined with a primitive tower defense game and extremely enjoyable choose-your-own-adventure plotlines. Castles 2, though, was played in western Europe, specifically France and the northeastern portions of Spain. The map was divided into provinces, each of which was owned by a particular faction. Most of these factions were competing against one another for supremacy over France, but there was also a separate (non-playable) faction for the Church, who everyone had to be nice to. Anyways, in the game you would start off with a single province, and over time you would discover your neighbors; make friends with some and allies with others; attack and try to capture other provinces; build castles to defend your own against enemies; raise armies; and kiss up to the Pope so he will crown you the King. I think it also had some stuff with money and taxes and things.

Well, EU3 is basically that same style of gameplay, but much more refined, with much better graphics (though still chunky by today's standards), and applied to a broader span of history and geography. In between Castles 2 and EU3, I would place the "Total War" series of games as well; I haven't played those as much, but they seem to fit into the same general mold of historically-flavored games that let you lead a country's military and diplomacy in a quest for sovereignty.

Now, if you're like me, you're thinking, "Wait, so isn't this like Civilization?" I'd say that Civ is the most abstracted manifestation of this type. Civ games are incredibly broad and incredibly generic: you can play them on any map, not necessarily Earth; they contain the entire span of human existence, from the Stone Age through the nuclear age; and they cover an incredible range of inner gameplay components, not just armies and spies but also scientific research, spacecraft construction, etc. Historical simulation games trade in some of that generic quality in order to get more detail: instead of the world being a map of squares (or hexes), it's a, well, map, with different countries of different sizes, with realistic borders drawn between them. The games don't need to include spearmen or mechanized infantry; instead, they can accurately portray the progressive improvements offered by halberds, longbows, muskets, and rifles. A game like Civ will either omit religion altogether or treat it fairly generically; here, there's a specific game just around Catholicism, which includes influencing cardinals to gain control of the Curia, excommunicating rivals, calling crusades, and counter-reforming Protestantism. So, they're different beasts, and while in the past I've tended to prefer Civ's endless variability, in this game I found myself deeply enjoying the detailed world offered.

That said, EU3 has much more in common with Civ than other historical simulation games I've played. Specifically, it includes a technology investment and advancement path. Unlike Civ, you don't research specific discoveries like "The Wheel" and "Metallurgy". Instead, you divide your investment into multiple general areas: Trade, Government, Production, Naval, and Land. Unlike Civ, where at any given time you're researching one technology to the exclusion of everything else, in EU3 you are generally advancing at about the same pace around each of these lines; although you can certainly adjust your priorities to focus more on a subset of technologies, which means you'll advance in them relatively more quickly, but it's nearly impossible to actually cease research in one field. So usually, you'll be operating at a certain tech level, then will advance in a bunch of different fields around the same time, then operate at that new level for a while level.

The benefits of advancement are a mixture of specific additions, as in Civ, and incremental improvements. The specific additions might be unlocking a new form of government; gaining the ability to recruit a new type of regiment or build a new type of ship; being able to form monopolies in centers of trade; etc. These big additions are usually spaced several levels apart, so you'll need to research a technology multiple times before you start seeing significant differences. In the meantime, though, almost every level you advance gives you an incremental improvement, which seems minor at each level but becomes very significant cumulatively. For example, every level of Trade you learn boosts your trade efficiency/income; new levels of Naval will often increase your colonization range and boost your navies' morale, and so on. Sometimes, as with Government, you might need to take a level that doesn't provide any direct benefit, but is still a necessary step to reach the more important benefits at higher levels.

Man... I could spend hours writing about the mechanics of the game, which are fascinating and complex. I'll try to hold off. There's definitely a pretty steep learning curve. I started out by playing the tutorials, which was kind of a mixed bag. The first set of tutorials are more like an on-screen manual, with nice long expository descriptions of the various interfaces, but not a lot of interactivity.

Next come the tutorial missions. One tutorial has you play as Portugal, and has a good set of well-described progressive goals you need to undertake: basically you need to colonize the Azores, then recruit an Explorer, then send a ship westward to discover Cuba, then build colonies on Cuba. Now, the exploration/colonization game is just one small and largely optional sub-game within EU3, but the tutorial did a really good job of giving you hands-on experience with this task. The other tutorial, though, was just totally flubbed. You're playing one of the minor landlocked Germanic kingdoms, and your very first task is to move an army into an adjacent province. However, it's impossible to select the army to move. After spending several embarrassing minutes wondering what I was doing wrong, I finally started googling, and learned that Paradox had accidentally broken the tutorial when they updated the European map for the expansion - basically, they had created a new independent kingdom, but the tutorial was still set up to use the old kingdom, which now no longer controls the territory with the unit you're supposed to move. I know, it's silly - they should have just removed the tutorial altogether.

After this, I cracked open the PDF copy of the manual. It's a nice, old-fashioned strategy game manual, about 150 pages long and including detailed explanations of the game mechanics, nice big charts filled with data, and some good strategy tips. The manual was actually more helpful to me than the tutorials had been, and also gave some good advice on the overall philosophy and attitude I should take towards the game: there really isn't a way to "beat" EU3, like there are victory conditions in Civ, so they say that most players will set personal goals for themselves for each game. I totally get, and love, this approach. One of my (many, many) favorite Civ experiences was playing the Civ 2 WW2 scenario as Francisco Franco's Spain. It's totally impossible for Spain to "win" this scenario, but it's really fun to play around in that historical period as a minor power and try to come out of it more strongly than they actually did. I also learned while reading the manual that, unlike Civ and most other strategy games, it's nearly impossible to conquer or annihilate an opponent. As with history, there are plenty of wars, and often winners and losers, but very rarely does a loser get swallowed up by a winner; instead, losers generally need to pay some sort of reparations, and perhaps surrender some territories, but will continue to exist in a diminished form. It's basically impossible, therefore, to "conquer the world," so you need to come up with your own yardstick for success: perhaps to become the world's wealthiest nation, or the first to colonize America, or to completely control the East Indies, or whatever. (Personally, I think I'd like to someday play a game as Byzantium in 1399, and simply try to survive into the 16th century.)

While I did generally love the manual, I was disappointed later to learn that Steam was being stingy with the manuals. The two expansions in the Complete game don't just add content, but actually revamp many of the game's rules, as well as significantly rework the technology tree. This actually caused significant problems in my main game (which I'll get to in a bit), specifically because the way they handle the Holy Roman Empire changed quite a bit, and I wasted a lot of time pursuing the emperorship when it actually was a very poor match for the type of game I was planning on playing. I was able to find a PDF manual for In Nomine later online, but it only describes the changes specific to that expansion, and I still haven't been able to find a manual for Napoleon's Addition. It's perplexing that Steam doesn't just have all three manuals in the store.

So, on to the game!

As is generally the case when I'm playing a brand-new strategy game, I tried a couple of games first, going as far as I could and learning the ropes and then stopping once I'd played myself into a corner. I had an idea that I wanted to play as a small trading-focused nation. This is actually an excellent suggestion from the manual directed at new players; they recommend your first game to avoid combat as much as possible, even if it means paying tribute to larger and meaner countries, and to focus on the game's economic systems at first; after getting comfortable with those, they recommend trying out one or two minor wars against weaker countries, and waiting until future games to get involved in major wars. So, based on my vague recollections of European history, I figured that the Netherlands would be a good country to play as.

In one of the many differences from Civ, EU3 does not start with all the nations at the beginning of the game. The first thing you need to do is choose a starting year to play, and then to pick a country that existed at that time. This means that you can't play as the Netherlands in 1399, and you can't play as Byzantium in 1650. Now, the Netherlands came into existence during the Eighty Years' War, which started in 1568, when the Dutch tried to become independent from Spain. I was reluctant to play as the Netherlands during this time, since I didn't want to fight a war right off the bat. Instead, I decided to start in 1650, shortly after the end of that war. However, I soon learned that, while the Netherlands were no longer at war with Spain, they were now at war with Portugal. Furthermore, I realized that the Netherlands had already established significant colonial interests in the New World (including Manhattan!), extending all the way down to the northern coast of South America. Portugal, of course, had significant interests in the same region, particularly massive holdings in Brazil. It looked like I'd have to defend a disparate empire across northern and southern hemispheres, and both in Europe and the New World. Ugh. That might be fun, but not for a beginner.

I decided that I wanted to start in a simpler era, before the New World was found, with a nation at peace with everyone. I went to the earliest possible year, 1399, and started checking my options. The game gives a nice high-level overview of each nation you select, which doesn't just include the nations they're allied with and at war with, but also a summary of their relative military, economic, and diplomatic might, and a representation of how easy or hard it should be to play as that country. The pre-set "bookmarks" on the left side of the screen give you the interesting dates to start playing, and also a set of the interesting nations during that period. After looking through that list, I settled on England, who was bigger than I had planned on playing but who was at peace with everyone and seemed to be fairly well off.

I played as England for several decades, and had a great time - I learned a lot, though I certainly didn't do very well. One of the interesting things that EU3 added to the game was the idea of a national goal. At any given time, your country might have a general goal, like "Improve our army" or "Increase our wealth." However, they can also assign historical goals that are appropriate for your nation and time. The goals are optional, and there's no penalty to ignoring them, but the game gives you extra bonuses if you achieve the goal: for example, building your treasury up to 100 ducats might give a bonus of another 10 ducats, and becoming the controller of the Curia might give you 5 prestige points. Anyways, as England, my goal was to conquer Ireland.

Now, militarily, this didn't seem too hard. I had a nice big navy to move around my troops, and certainly outnumbered the few Irish armies on the island. However, in practice, this proved to be extremely difficult. In EU3, unlike Civ, declaring war is surprisingly hard. The game strongly encourages you to declare a "Casus Belli", a justification for your war, before you start fighting. Valid casus belli can include things like attacks on your allies, or reclaiming a province that your nation previously owned. In the case of Ireland, though, I didn't really have a good excuse for starting a war. The Irish were independent, they were at peace with me and the rest of the world, and we didn't really have alliances that would draw us into conflict. I technically still could have unilaterally declared war; but between the lack of a casus belli, and the fact that we were both Catholic, and that I was the aggressor, would have destroyed Henry IV's reputation, and plunged England into a period of deep instability. To make matters worse, I had to conquer ALL of Ireland, which I think was something like four other provinces besides the one I already controlled, and they were controlled by three or four separate clans (Munster, Ulster, etc.), which meant that eventually I'd need to declare war on all three or four of them, taking an enormous diplomatic hit for each. Yikes.

I decided to focus on Ulster, and spent years sending diplomats there specifically to insult them. This lowered our relationship down, eventually hitting the minimum of -200. It also gave Ulster a casus belli against ME, meaning that they could declare war on me even though I couldn't declare war against them, but they refused to take the bait. Which makes sense - they could probably see the regiments I had massed in Belfast, staring hungrily at their lone defender. So, they gritted their teeth, and smiled, and kept the peace.

While I was busy pulling faces at Ireland, Charles VI of France was on a rampage. He rapidly gained control of the Papacy, began excommunicating his rivals, and sending his armies on the march. Before too long, I found myself at war with him. This was another entanglement thing: I had ownership of a few provinces in France, not just the Normandy that I expected, but also one or two provinces on the southern Atlantic coast. A minor kingdom had a claim to one of those provinces, so it declared war on me; and, since he was allied to France and Scotland, I soon found myself at war with both of them.

I decided to write off those two southern provinces, which I actually hadn't realized I owned until they were already under siege. Instead, I moved to take Brittany, then consolidated my forces for a massive assault on Scotland. I wanted to create a united island, a Great Britain if you will, and after seeing how hard it was to declare war on Ireland, I decided I needed to take advantage of this opportunity to defeat Scotland.

So, that's how I got exposed to the combat of EU3. It's really interesting, quite different from fighting in Civ or other strategy games I've played. For starters, combat takes a long and variable amount of time. Occasionally a battle might be over in a few days, if a powerful army is pummeling a demoralized opponent, but it isn't at all unusual for a major battle to stretch over multiple months. Each side of the fight is composed of multiple regiments of infantry and cavalry (and, in the future, artillery), and each can be led by a general or conquistador. Leadership can confer some extremely critical advantages to the battle, and oftentimes a small, disciplined fighting force will win a battle against a much larger but poorly led enemy.

Fighting itself happens automatically; you can watch a window that visualizes the progress of the battle, but unlike games such as Total War, you don't take any direct control of the battlefield. There are two main variables to keep track of during the fight. The one you would think is most important is the size of each army. As the battle goes on, the two sides whittle down the opposing forces, as each count gradually shrinks towards zero. However, it almost never actually reaches that. The second factor, morale, is actually the most important factor. Each side can gain a little morale when it's successful in an attack; each loses more morale when it loses a round. There are a ton of behind-the-scenes factors that play into morale, such as the morale of the underlying units, their leadership, how much support you've been providing, and any losses they suffered shortly before the start of this battle. Because the battle continues across multiple days (or weeks or months), each side can elect to move reinforcing armies into the province, where their numbers and morale will shore up support on their side. Once one side's morale reaches zero, then it breaks and flees into an adjacent province. The victorious army takes the field. At this point, if the enemy owns the province, the winner can settle down and lay siege to the capital, hoping to eventually gain control of the province; otherwise, it may elect to pursue the enemy to continue the fight.

So, much like territorial exchanges are much less absolute in EU3 than in Civ, so are military conflicts much less absolute. Suppose that you have an army that consists of five infantry regiments led by a general. This army is defeated. In Civ, depending on which version you were playing and whether you were defending a fortress, either all five units would be wiped out or one unit would be permanently eliminated. In EU3, though, a likely outcome is that your 5000-man force has been diminished to only 2000 survivors, perhaps (for the sake of simplicity) 400 survivors in each regiment. The general might die after losing, but usually he'll survive. If your army moves back into friendly territory, then over time it will automatically, albeit slowly, repair itself: it will recruit new soldiers from the local populace, its morale will gradually recover from the punishment it took, and finally it will be back at full strength.

Therefore, unlike Civ wars, which are almost always wars of attrition, where you try to eliminate an enemy's units and capture their cities, wars in EU3 are more about gaining strategic position: figuring out which battles to fight, spending the time to subdue local populaces, keeping forces in reserve so you can respond to the shifting demands of the battlefield. Depending on the nature of the conflict, sometimes it will be more important that you chase the King of Scotland all the way across the highlands so you can definitively eliminate his army; or it might be more important to lay siege to Brittany to secure your claim to that province while the King of France retreats home to lick his wounds. I do like this kind of decision-making challenge.

In my case: I fought a LONG and epic battle with King Robert III (who was both the ruler and the general of the Scots), which stretched over multiple months and actually gave me time to recruit entirely fresh regiments and add them to the battle before it was over. He finally fled, and I settled into a pattern where I would leave a few of my troops behind to lay siege to the province, while the remainder of my forces would chase Robert as he fell back to another province. We finally won a decisive victory over him after six or so battles, and then settled in for the long and painstaking task of capturing his castles. He kept sending me emissaries with increasingly frantic terms for his surrender. I held out until I'd captured every last one of his provinces, even the dinky island in the northwest, and then finally sent a diplomat to finalize the war's outcome.

That's yet another interesting factor within EU3: it draws a distinction between "controlling" a province and "owning" it. During a war, you can gain "control" of the province after a successful siege; this means that the enemy will no longer be able to reinforce there or issue build orders, but it isn't actually part of your realm yet. Ownership can't change hands during a war, it can only happen as part of the negotiated end to a conflict. And, even though I had CRUSHED Scotland, defeating all of their armies and taking all of their provinces (well, at least the ones in Britain; I think they still had some in France), I couldn't just take all their territory. It turned out that I could take everything except for two provinces: they couldn't surrender their capital, and I decided to also give them that dinky little island. We signed the peace deal. Next I negotiated with France, who was leading the alliance against me. Even though I had done rather poorly on the Continent, I think some of my victory in Britain added to their overall perception of me, so I was able to negotiate for a "white peace", which basically meant that everything went back to how it was before - I got back my southwestern French provinces, and nobody owed anybody anything.

That was all pretty fun, but I felt like I'd gone about as far as I could in that game and still have fun. I still wasn't making any progress on Ireland, I was close to broke, and had neglected everything else while I learned the ropes about combat. England is pretty huge, and I found myself longing for the simplicity of learning on a minor power. So, I started a new game.

This time I also started in 1399, but skipped the list of suggested/interesting nations, all of which were too big and/or too poor for my tastes. Instead I manually clicked around on the map, paying particular attention to each country's economic rating. I finally found something that sounded pretty perfect - a tiny little northern Germanic country called Mecklenburg, with virtually no military, some minor diplomacy, and a pretty substantial economy. I realized that Mecklenburg was the country that controlled Lubeck, one of the major Centers of Trade in Europe. I haven't written yet about CoTs; they're pretty important, though there isn't a huge advantage to directly owning them, at least I wouldn't need to worry about anyone banning my merchants from there, which had happened a few times when I was playing as England. It looked like Mecklenburg would give me a solid start on my goal of becoming a strong economic power, without making me micromanage a bunch of wars or a large territory.

I could tell after playing for just a short while that EU3 was delivering the goods: it could actually be fun to play as a tiny little country. This is something that was impossible in Civ up until Civ IV, and even then, you still needed to hit a certain size in order to be competitive. (Apologies for the constant references to Civ, by the way - it's by far the game I've played most often, and so it's my closest frame of reference to EU3.) Part of this comes down to the economy - without getting into too much detail, part of your economy comes from production, which measures how much stuff your country actually produces. Large countries, like England and France, will have a large production; similarly, medium-sized countries that produce very valuable resources will also make a lot of money from production. However, there's also a parallel economic system, one based on trade. Trade is conducted in major financial cities, known as Centers of Trade, each of which is the locus for economic activity in a geographic region. The Center of Trade produces income from all the buying and selling of resources that happen within that center's region. Your country can capture some of that income by dispatching merchants to set up shop there. If your nation's values prioritize cut-throat market competition, then you'll be able to capture a portion of the trade for your merchants, and your country will tax some of their income.

That's all pretty complex, and it took me a while to really grok how it worked, but once I did, I loved it. As with all good strategy games, you need to choose between multiple good options: is it better to send your new merchant to the wealthiest CoT like Lubeck, where he'll need to compete against a crowded market? Or should you send him to a quieter and relatively poorer CoT like Lisboa, where he'll certainly be able to get a seat at the table but will produce less income for you?

I started focusing on optimizing my trade income. Part of this was a patient and steady process of sending out merchants to the best centers of trade. There are quite a few in Europe at the start of the game: Lisboa, Andalucia, Ile-de-France, Antwerpen (which, amazingly, includes all of the modern UK in its region), Lubeck, Venetia, Genoa, Alexandria. I had a slight advantage in Lubeck, which was also the richest CoT, so I soon had maximized my presence there, and was climbing up the ranks in the other cities. At the same time, I was adjusting my national policy. Part of this had to do with adopting the proper "National Idea" - these are powerful bonuses that you can choose from; early in the game you can only select one of about 20 options, but as your Government level advances you can start picking more. Anyways, I found one that boost my Trade Efficiency by 10% - that doesn't sound like much, but that's 10 basis points, which in the early part of the game effectively doubled the income I was receiving from my merchants. That allowed me to pour much more funding into my research, which in turn helped me improve my Trade level, further boosting my efficiency and income still more.

You can also adjust a series of sliders, each of which offers choices along a continuum between two extremes. These are pretty fascinating options, for the most part; they include stuff like Aristocracy/Plutocracy, Serfdom/Free Subjects, Land/Sea, Quality/Quantity, and Mercantilism/Free Trade. That last one actually ended up being an interesting choice for me to mull over - Free Trade boost your trade efficiency, and helps you compete for trade abroad, while Mercantilism gives you an advantage in CoTs that you own. Now, since I did control Lubeck, I would actually gain some benefit from Mercantilism; but it was already quite clear that Lubeck alone wasn't nearly enough, and I would be competing in a dozen or so CoTs by the end of the game, so I started moving my nation towards unfettered Free Trade. The game prevents you from moving too hastily towards new policies, so there's a cooling-off period of about a decade after each time you adjust one of your sliders a notch.

Oh, yeah! I knew I wasn't going to talk about game mechanics, but... there's also this thing called a "National Decision". These represent historic choices made by your country or similar countries. You need to meet certain requirements, and then, if you opt for the decision, it has a set of impacts, which may include both good and bad elements. Fairly early on, I was able to make the decision to join something called the, uh, Hanseatic League (that's probably misspelled). This did some nice things, like improve my relations with Denmark and improve our trade efficiency, but it also made further adjustments to my sliders, pushing me even further towards Free Trade. Hooray! I took some time to look through all the National Decisions - even though most of these aren't available early on, and I doubt I'll ever meet the requirements for some of them (like one to unify Germany), I wanted to pick out the ones that I'd eventually want to make, and factor those effects in when I made my choices for the policy sliders, national ideas, and other game choices.

Because I'd been avoiding combat, I'd been able to focus entirely on trade, with the effect that after playing for a while, I was reaching my maximum possible position in the various centers of trade. This was a problem on a couple of levels. First of all, I worried that I'd become stagnant; my economic growth had been rapid, but I was reaching a ceiling for the income I could bring in from trade alone; meanwhile, my more conventional rivals could continue to grow by taking territory from one another or increasing their already substantial populations. Secondly, the game places a limit on the number of un-dispatched merchants you can keep around, so after I had 5 of them in my pool, I wouldn't gain any more. This meant that I'd just be wasting that resource, similarly to how I was already wasting my Colonist and Missionary specialists, neither of whom I could really use.

And so, I was delighted to see that I was very organically being pulled by forces that absolutely mirrored those affecting 15th-century Europeans, with exactly the same results. Namely, I needed to find new trade routes, and expand into new markets. Just to emphasize: the game does NOT force you to do this, and I could certainly have contented myself with fooling around inside Europe for the next hundred years or so. But, my trading-centric game had picked up a serious momentum, and I felt like the invisible hand of the free market was pulling me out to explore the unknown.

Now: Mecklenburg is in northern Germany, and at the start of the game your map includes all of central and western Europe, the north coast of Africa, the Mediterranean, and Scandinavia. By clicking on each province, you can find the Center of Trade that it trades in. For most provinces, these were well-known locations like Antwerpen and Venetia. Provinces at the edge of Europe, though, traded in cities that I had not yet discovered: Novogrod for central and eastern European countries, and Samarkand for Asia Minor. Those seemed like worthy goals for me: they were likely close to my known map, and once I found the cities, I'd be able to start sending my merchants there. And so, unlike the westward-driven expansion of Christopher Columbus and his ilk, I initially pressed eastward, drawn by the riches of the Orient, much like Marco Polo had a century before.

Like Civ, each area of the map can be in one of three states. Provinces that you own or have units stationed in will be visible to you: you can see details about the land and adjacent armies. Provinces that you have previously visited will be covered by the fog of war; you can see details about the territory, such as who it belongs to and how wealthy it is, but not see what units it holds. Provinces that you've never visited are invisible to you; in EU3, they're labeled as "Terra Incognita". Unlike in Civ, discovering these provinces isn't as simple as just moving a unit inside them. Instead, you'll need to recruit a special type of leader: a Conquistador for land-based armies, or an Explorer for navies. Once you recruit them, you'll assign them to an army or navy (basically a stack of units), and then you can issue orders for them to enter the new lands. The initial discovery takes quite a while, but once it's on your map, you'll be able to move regular armies in there as well at a quicker rate. Of course, discovering a new province will then reveal further terra incognita beyond its borders, so your exploration tends to get drawn progressively farther.

I recruited a Conquistador and attached him to a small army of Latin Knights and Men-at-Arms. Some earlier national goals had directed me to build up an army and a navy, so I was happy to have some units available to do something other than sit at home. I'd previously negotiated Military Access agreements with all of my immediate neighbors in the Holy Roman Empire, and as I moved east I signed new agreements with farther powers like Hungary and the Ottomans. In many cases, particularly where we practiced different religion (typically Orthodox for eastern Europeans and Islam for everyone else), I would first improve our relations by making several generous monetary gifts; again, with my enormous treasury, I could easily afford to do so.

My conquistador wandered for a bit, eventually discovering Novogrod and then pushing south towards Astrakhan, the economic heart of the Ottoman empire. By now I had started seeing some references to Samarkand, and so I started looking for that, only to soon be startled by the discovery that it was already on my map. All the provinces around it were still Terra Incognita, but Samarkand itself was visible; not only that, but some of my European rivals had already sent merchants there. Interesting. As far as I can tell, when one nation in your geographic region has discovered a new province, it will automatically be made visible to other nations after an interval; I must have just gotten lucky to have seen this.

My conquistador continued to press farther into Asia. Aided by my modern sense of geography, I could usually intuit roughly where each named Center of Trade was likely to be found; for example, I looked for Tehran at the south of the Caspian Sea. At each new center of trade, I quickly dispatched all of my available merchants, and instructed the game to keep on sending more traders until I had reached my maximum penetration. Few of these new centers of trade were anywhere near as wealthy as Lubeck, but each had a total trade value of at least a hundred or so ducats, and since competition was much less frenzied than in Europe I knew I'd be able to make back my investment over time. My coup de grace came near the end of my decades-long march eastward, when I finally discovered the economic center of the Ming dynasty: this was the richest CoT in the entire world, bigger even than Lubeck, and I was the only European with a seat at the table. Within a few months I had dominated that, too, and thus had tapped the wealth of the largest and richest empire in the entire world.

Around this same time, I decided that it would be good to start exploring overseas as well. I was discovering new CoTs rapidly enough to keep my merchants busy, but sooner or later I'd dominate all of them, and then be back to my old risk of stagnation, albeit at a higher level. So, I recruited a couple of explorers, made some small navies, and sent them off. One of them consisted only of Galleys, and was sent westward across the Atlantic. A larger one had both Galleys and Cogs, and I sent this one down the coast of West Africa, with the goal of eventually circling the Cape of Good Hope and reuniting with my conquistador army. This larger navy also carried a small army of its own, led by a new Conquistador, with whom I planned to explore the interior of Africa.

Exploring water areas follows the same mechanics as exploring land provinces, but the strategy is quite different. When your armies are marching across peaceful, civilized lands, they can keep on going forever without stopping. Ships, though, are constantly at risk: they're less likely to encounter combat, but every month that they spend at sea they will take damage and weaken. Once it weakens enough, a ship is destroyed, and any land units on board will perish. So, where my land explorations are a steady progressive march, my sea explorations are a steadily lengthening yo-yo. A ship will venture into uncharted waters slowly, expanding my visibility into the sea lanes; once it starts taking too much damage, I'll order it to quickly return to the nearest safe port. (Fortunately, you can repair in any water-bordering province with which you have Military Access; it would have been unacceptably slow if I'd needed to return to Mecklenburg after each expedition.) The ship will spend several months repairing damage, then head out again. This time, it will be able to move more quickly through the previously-explored territory, spend a bit more time driving farther into the void, before returning back again. After a couple of iterations of this, my ships got to the point where it made more sense for them to keep pushing across the Atlantic than to return home. Fortunately, we had entered the Caribbean, then found provinces controlled by the Mayans. I gifted them some ducats, then a month later desperately asked for access. They acquiesced. My ship gratefully docked, and spent nearly a year repairing its hulls, but I was satisfied to have opened a passage to the New World.

Meanwhile, my other navy had sailed past some uncivilized provinces in the west of Africa, but then encountered Mali, which was fairly friendly. We came to an agreement, and I sent out my conquistador to start exploring while my ships prepared for the next push down the coast. Mali and its neighbors actually had two Centers of Trade, including one in Gobir and neither of which was worth much at all. Still, I went ahead and started dispatching additional merchants there. I had decided that a worthwhile goal would be to dominate every center of trade in the world, no matter how puny.

Most of Africa is uncivilized, and actually available for colonization once your range is large enough. Not only that, but the vast center of Africa - Darkest Africa in turn-of-the-century parlance - is Permanent Terra Incognita, which you can never explore during the game. Once I had mapped out all of the provinces actually occupied by African nations and found my CoTs, I re-boarded my conquistador on the ship and kept sailing. Coming up the east side of Africa, we found a port in Somalia, where I rested before continuing into the Indian Ocean and meeting up with the people previously encountered by my Asian Conquistador.

Out of all the National Decisions available to Mecklenburg, there are actually only three or so that seemed appealing to me. One of those, though, was VERY appealing: founding the Indian Trading Company. This would provide some massive benefits to my trading-centric country, like increasing my trade efficiency, improving my chance at competing for new trade, and giving me a permanent boost to my Trade Research, along with some other goodies. In order to make the decision, though, I needed to own an East Asian trade port province. Now, if you're like me, when you hear "East Asian", you probably assume that means "Oriental", right? As in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. Well, it turns out that the game thinks that "East Asian" means south Asian - the "East Asian Trade Ports" region consists of India and the islands to its south.

There were some uncolonized islands out here, but they were on the opposite side of the planet from my capital, and I knew it would take ages, if ever, before I'd be able to colonize them. Hmm... how about a war, then? My entire army was now in Asia, and some of them had proven themselves well when fighting against African natives. I wouldn't need to carve out a large empire, only a single province, in order to take this Decision. I saved the game, and started looking for targets.

As we all learned from The Princess Bride, the most-known classic blunder is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Fortunately, many of the eligible "East Asian" provinces were located on islands. I initially considered Ceylon, which was a nice single-province island that would be easy to defend; unfortunately, Ceylon had alliances with several Indian states, and I didn't want to get involved in a major war. I kept looking and exploring, trying to find an island-based country that was diplomatically isolated. I finally found a target: one of the islands of modern-day Indonesia. It consisted of about six provinces, two of which were uncolonized, three led by another nation, and a small island hanging off the far east. I unloaded my army into the uncolonized area, canceled our military access (to avoid a blow to my reputation), then declared war and marched in.

My opponent had a substantial navy, which led to some interesting and difficult fighting. I had an explorer with mediocre combat bonuses, leading a fleet of 7 galleys and 5 cogs. Cogs, of course, are useless in a fight, and galleys get a substantial combat penalty when fighting on the ocean like we were doing. He had a decent admiral and a fleet of four carracks, which are larger and more powerful ships. So, his navy was made of more powerful ships, but mine was larger. I eventually decided to cash in some of the substantial Naval Tradition I'd been accumulating as I mapped the ocean, and get an Admiral. This guy had AWESOME combat bonuses. I split my fleet, sent the explorer to keep mapping the area around Malaysia, and assigned the Admiral to lead my galleys in combat. In the very first battle, we managed to capture one of his Carracks. I hadn't lost any ships, but they were all pretty weakened, so we retreated to Brunei to repair. By the time I had recovered, he was also at full strength. I didn't manage to capture any more of his ships, but we kept winning each skirmish we had. Each time he would retreat farther, and in our subsequent fights, his low morale would cause him to quickly flee. At last, we were finally able to sink all his ships. With the naval threat out of the picture, I reinforced my explorer's fleet, finally giving him a Carrack appropriate for what he was doing; my admiral took a smaller fleet and hunkered down in Indonesia to observe the main conflict.

The land fight wasn't particularly tough, but the war did last longer than I had expected. Both of our armies were of roughly equal size, and led by generals of roughly equal skill. I beat him soundly at first, then settled in for a siege, and captured his capital. After this, though, the war got trickier. I could chase him and beat him, but if I ever started besieging one of his other provinces, his army would circle around and lay siege to reclaim the capital. I could keep chasing him, but he was able to draw on more reinforcements than me, so he would grow progressively stronger as I weakened. It was a quandary.

I ended up resolving it by following another one of the classic blunders: dividing my forces in the face of a superior foe. Half of my army stayed in the captured capital, where they could reinforce. The other half started conducting the siege. He struck at the weaker half that was sieging his province. As soon as I saw his armies starting to march in, I directed my main force to rush in and join us. Because he was attacking us, we got a defensive bonus from the jungle cover. Once my army reunited, that terrain bonus gave just enough of an edge for us to beat him. His army still survived, but it was too weak to siege, so he ran off to recoup. We were also weakened, but had enough to siege, so we took that province, and then the third one on the island. We were gradually reinforcing while we sieged, so by the time we'd taken the island, we were back almost to full force. He started another attack on the capital, but now we could come in and strike him without worrying about the other provinces. After a defeat here, we chased him around the island for a while until we won a total victory. Finally, our fleet of cogs that had been waiting in a nearby port swung around so we could invade and capture the final tiny island.

We opened up peace talks. I had a War Score of 100%, which one would think would mean I could get everything I wanted, but that wasn't quite true; the capital province didn't even show up in the list of items available for negotiation. However, I was able to take his other three provinces, as well as all the ducats he had. And so it was that a tiny northern Germanic kingdom became the first European power in the Indian Ocean. I proudly declared the founding of the Indian Trade Company, and my already-significant economic prowess was now unmatched. It was around this time that I noticed that the game had started ranking me as the #1 country in the world; I'm not sure exactly when that happened, but even if it came before the founding, I'm sure that helped secure my position.

Since that time, I've been steadily progressing in the game, mostly building on my existing strengths, continuing to explore, investing in new CoTs in the New World (which unfortunately are so poor that they keep disappearing), and marrying everyone in sight. For a long time I was both the Curia Controller and the Holy Roman Emperor. I was actually a bit miffed by the HRE election - I had initially thought that it would be awesome, based on the description in the manual, but it turns out that In Nomine added the "feature" that the HRE automatically guarantees every member state. This means that if anyone is attacked, they'll ask you to come to their aid; you can refuse, but this destroys your relationship. What's truly idiotic, though, is that you're expected to make a choice even if both sides of the conflict are HRE member-states. So, that was all annoying, and required that I ruin some relationships I'd spent time cultivating. However, that experience did prompt me to invest some time in tracking down and fully reading the In Nomine manual, and also discovering the phenomenal EU3 Wiki, with the ultimate effect of making me far more knowledgeable about the game's mechanics and strategy.

Since Mecklenburg is located in the northern heart of Europe, it's been impossible to colonize anything yet, even though I've discovered plenty of promising-looking territories. It seems like just before I get enough range to colonize a province I want, like the Azores or the Canary Islands, Castile will swoop in and claim it. The next one that will open up for me is the western coast of Greenland, and I need to decide whether it makes any sense for me to colonize that. I am pretty excited, though, to see what happens once my Indonesian provinces become cores of my realm; I'm not too clear on whether colonization range is calculated from the nation's capital or from its nearest core, but if it's based on the cores, than I have a good shot at colonizing all of Asia long before any other Europeans will gain the ability to do so. More generally, I need to decide whether I want to pursue a colonization strategy or not. Part of me really wants to do it, both because it seems like a good way to continue growing my economy now that I've taken over all the centers of trade, and also because it just seems like a fun game mechanic. However, I'm also a bit reluctant to do so, because it seems like it will require fundamentally changing my strategy: I'll need to start emphasizing production over trade in order to derive the most benefits from a larger land-based empire, and I'd need to pay to maintain larger standing armies to defend against uprisings and larger navies to protect my sea-lanes against pirates. That flies in the face of my lean-and-mean strategy that's served me so well up until now, and I'm not sure whether the extra cost will pay off with sufficient additional revenue.

Oh, yeah: I've also been experimenting with government types. It took me a little while to figure out why I couldn't switch to a Noble Republic after I had discovered it: for some reason, you can't directly convert from a Feudal Monarchy into a Noble Republic. Instead, you need to first convert to a Despotic Monarchy (at a -1 stability penalty), and from there convert to Noble Republic (at a -4 stability penalty!). I was a bit nervous at first about making the switch - my monarch had been serving me well - but I'm glad I made the change. For starters, since your king apparently dies when switching governments (I'm not sure if it's any switch, or just between a monarchy and a republic), I was finally freed from the mantle of Holy Roman Empire leadership. (The one downside to losing the crown: I could have really used the HRE's stability bonus in digging myself out from the -2 stability hole.) And on the whole, a Noble Republic just seems like a perfect government, with all the advantages of both republics and monarchies. Like a monarchy, and unlike every other form of republic, you can still form Royal Marriages with other nations, which can really help boost your relations in Europe - I've married everyone in sight for the whole game, and have yet to get involved in a single European war other than the ones the HRE dragged me into. And under a Republic, you get to choose your leader - you won't see his exact stats, but you can pick between three candidates, each of whom will be focused in one area, so there's a Military Candidate, Diplomatic Candidate, and Administrative Candidate. I went with the Administrative one, nacht, for the economic boost, and was delighted to get my best leader of the game so far - I think he has something like an Economic rating of 9, Diplomacy of 8, and a Military of 6. As a final bonus, the Noble Republic also gives a boost to your Tolerance, which makes it easier for me to stay friendly with the Eastern religions that dominate Asian trade, and the Muslim religion that rules trade in Asia Minor and Africa. I found a really good chart that shows the forms of government, how you can move between them, and what benefits each offers. I'm really not sure if I'll ever want to use another form of government... I suppose I might eventually go with an Administrative Republic, for the nice trade efficiency modifier, but it would be tough to give up the benefits of increased tolerance.

Phew... well, that's where I'm at now in the game. I'm having a blast, still not totally sure exactly what I'm doing, but loving every moment of it. It's got those deeply addictive hooks into me, which I remember so well from a lifetime of playing Civ, although the mechanics of the game make it manifest in new and terrible ways. With "Civ", the mantra was always "Just one more turn..." where I would promise myself that, after I moved my units, and pressed Enter to advance to the next year, I was going to save and stop playing for the night. Of course, something cool would always happen then: I would discover a new technology, or a neighbor would declare war on me, or I'd learn that an opponent was close to finishing construction of a Wonder I was building. I'd need to take take of that problem, "While I'm still in the zone," and play for "Just one more turn..." until it's three o'clock in the morning and I can barely keep my eyes open. Well, in EU3, there are no turns! The game keeps steadily progressing, and stuff is always happening everywhere. You can adjust the speed so time moves more quickly or slowly, but without "turns" as such, it's even harder than before to tear myself away from the game. I'll think "Oh, I'll stop playing once this ship returns to port safely..." but then I'll learn that a Cardinal has died, and then I'll start bribing the new Cardinal - who is from FRANCE, so I have a 48% chance of winning him over, so of COURSE I'll risk it - and then I'll realize that I have 5 diplomats, and then I'll hunt down people who need to marry members of my royal family, and by the time I've done that one of my Conquistadors has found a new province, but also been attacked by natives, so I need to check and see if he's okay, and then monitor the fight so I can send him back to civilization to reinforce but only if he needs it, and then I suddenly remember about that ship I was waiting for, well it turns out that it's back in port and already repaired, so of course I'll send it out to explore some more sea lanes...

Ahem. Like I said, pretty addictive stuff. Steam has this AWFUL feature where they show how many hours total you've played a game; I won't even tell you how long I've spent playing this so far. And I'm only up to 1465! Columbus wouldn't even discover America for another 30 years in our timeline! The game goes all the way up to frickin' 1822, for crying out loud! I badly need to find an excuse to end this game before it completely envelopes the remainder of my life. But, when something is this addictive and fun, that's awfully hard to do.

Private Vote? Hah!

2011-11-08T08:35:00.000-08:00

Whoops! I voted nearly a month ago, and I forgot to betray the confidence of the ballot box here. Mea culpa. I'll do as best I can, and spill the beans before the results come in tonight.

This was just a local election, without any fun state-wide ballot initiatives, so it's a much smaller set of choices than usual. Without further ado:

This was my first vote for Millbrae city council. Three four-year seats were up for election, meaning we'll be electing the majority on the five-seat council.

My first and easiest vote was for Robert Gottshchalk. Millbrae is kind of interesting, in that the council is term-limited to two consecutive terms, but there's no limit on the total number of terms a member can serve. Someone can serve for eight years, then sit out for two or more years, then run for re-election, which is exactly what Gottschalk is doing. I've never lived in Millbrae while he's been on the council, but he was still the mayor when I started my homehunting expedition, so I'm fairly familiar with his prior work as councilmember and mayor, and I was really impressed. He's an excellent example of someone who has a big, positive vision for the future of the city, while also being well tuned-in to the day-to-day realities… he can decide the small steps we should take today in order to get where we want to be a decade from now.

My second vote was for Wayne Lee, who is the only Chinese-ancestry candidate in the race (Paul Seto decided not to run for re-election after serving just one term). Lee seems to want to invest in the city, strengthening our (already pretty nice) downtown and helping make the city better. That might sound like meaningless boosterism, but it's actually pretty significant in the present economic and political climate; a lot of people get overly focused on the short-term present pains, without thinking about how they can help grow revenues over the long run.

I actually agonized for a while over my third vote, before deciding to cast it for the one incumbent seeking re-election, Marge Colapietro. On the investment/thrift continuum, she skews a little more towards fiscal conservatism than I personally do, but I think that's a helpful perspective to have represented on the council. Plus, on the whole I've been very happy with the way the council has performed, so it makes sense to keep that going.

The Millbrae school district put a bond measure on the ballot, primarily to improve Taylor middle school's cafeteria and also to help with some other infrastructure needs. I gladly voted in favor. I would have preferred a parcel tax to a bond (it's always better to pay money than to borrow and spend), but in the current political climate taxes are very difficult to pass, so I'll accept the form of a bond.

I feel a bit bad about this, but I voted against the community college issue… I totally get why they're going for it, since the state has been slashing its share of funding. Still, I had a hard time swallowing the price tag for what they had planned for improvements. The infrastructure improvements sounded good, but not critical; and as with most of these things, it doesn't look like the measure would help with operations, just with expansion. I'd certainly be open to revisiting the community college issue if it comes back next fall or later.

I don't know enough about the community college district to make informed decisions about the board elections. I THINK I voted to re-elect the incumbents, but had a third available vote that I didn't cast.

And, that's that! Hooray for democracy!

Up to It

2011-11-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

Okay! Now that I've finished reading Terry Pratchett's excellent new Discworld novel, "Snuff", I believe I can go back to my standard reading habits for the next few years while I wait for another batch of glorious new books to descend.

Snuff isn't just a Discworld novel, but a member of the most prized strain within that corpus, known as a Watch/Vimes book. I've enjoyed all Discworld, but the books set in Ankh-Morpork are always the best, and the Watch books (along with the nascent Moist books) tend to contain the highest proportions of things I like: Vetinari, CMOT Dibbler, Nobby Nobbs, the media, hordes of chaotically coexisting races, and more. I have to say that Snuff isn't my favorite of the Watch books - it's probably towards the middle of the pack, or maybe a bit lower - but still one of the more enjoyable Discworld books.

MINI SPOILERS

It's pretty amazing to consider, given the sheer number of entries within Discworld, but the series does maintain overall continuity, with each new novel set chronologically after the ones preceding it. In many cases, such as novels with the Witches, this tends to have a subtle effect, since events tend to return more or less to the status quo at the end of each book. However, Sam Vimes has gotten a really incredible arc throughout the course of his series. He regularly gets promoted to higher positions of responsibility; the Watch regularly adds new, and memorable, characters, who become permanent parts of future books; Vimes always grumbles against admitting a new race to the ranks of the Watch, only to admit a book or two later that they're among the most useful coppers; and over time he has sobered up, gotten married, and had a son. In Snuff, Young Sam is now old enough to walk on his own, and is quite talkative, particularly on the subject of poo.

Snuff really only has two failings, so I'll get them out of the way now. First, it badly needed more editing; particularly in the first third of the book, there are an embarrassing number of mismatched quotation marks, typos, and places where the word used is simply wrong. (For some reason, a publican is repeatedly referred to as the "landlord," a term that certainly must refer to Vimes.) Secondly, while this is a Watch novel, it continues the recent trend towards dispatching Vimes to a far-off locale, and so there's a shortage of Ankh-Morpork humor to be found, and much less of the other Watch members than we would usually see. There is some tradeoff here - in particular, we get to see a born-and-bred city boy's perception of life in the country - but on the whole, life on the Plains isn't as target-rich as life in the city.

Sam is ostensibly on holiday, but sure enough, he stumbles into evidence of a crime, which may be connected to a larger conspiracy. He reasonably suspects, but we can never prove, that Vetinari was responsible for his dispatchment here. We do eventually get some brief time with other Watch personnel - Carrot serves as interim Commander (and manages to complete all of Vimes' tardy paperwork within one day); Fred gets infected in a very minor plotline that gets loosely tied in with Vimes' investigation, and Nobbs, Angua, Littlebottom and Wee Mad Arthur all help him get better. Wee Mad Arthur's parts were the best of the bunch. I still haven't read Pratchett's children's novels Wee Free Men, but it sounds like he has retconned Wee Mad Arthur from being a gnome (which he was at the time of Night Watch) into one of the Nac Mac Feegle. I approve of crossovers, particularly in a universe as broad and varied as Pratchett's, and we get a bit of dialog explaining the Feegle and their habits. Honestly, the whole section with the Watch felt a little extraneous - it could have been cut entirely and the main Vimes story would still have made sense - but I'm glad that Pratchett kept it in there, because I love those characters so much.

Other than those quibbles, though, I had a great time with the book. Moving to a new location allows Pratchett to introduce a larger than usual new cast of characters, which allows for some nice speculation as to who can be trusted and who is guilty. We also see much more of Vimes' home life than I think we've gotten before; instead of pecking Sybil on the cheek before he rushes out on a pursuit, we see several long exchanges between the two over dinner, in bed, and at a variety of social functions. It's quite funny (and Pratchett is still the master at the two-level double-entendre), and further enriches our understanding of already well-developed characters. It's a hoot to see Young Sam growing up, too; he seems well on his way to combining the most admirable qualities of his mother and his farther, while often baffling both of them.

The Watch (and Moist) books tend to contain Pratchett's most pointed and effective satire, and you can usually summarize a book pretty accurately by identifying which humanistic theme it conveys. Thud! was about race relations, how mutual distrust grows over time, and how to break the cycle of retribution. Night Watch was about the division between the Law and Power, and how the civil authority's highest responsibility is to the institution of the law itself, and not to the officials on top. I feel like Snuff doesn't really break open a new theme, but mingles several from earlier books. That sense of division between power and law is a strong one, this time playing out in a small tight-knit community rather than the chaos of an urban rebellion. It feels like the treatment of the goblin race is the latest of a process that has previously been played out for trolls, golems, vampires, and werewolves. The goblins' problem seems to be that they are sub-human (unlike, say, the vampires, where the problems was that all were seen as dangerous), and so people can get away with treating them like animals. As usual, we learn to differentiate from the mass of "the goblins" and get to know one or two in particular, see their admirable qualities (while still getting to laugh at their unusual habits), and eventually one becomes a member of the Watch and Discworld moves one step closer to racial harmony.

One oddity of this book: Death never makes an appearance. I hesitate to say that it's the first book where he doesn't show up at all - there are a LOT of books, and I could easily be overlooking something - but we almost always get a glimpse of him, even if just for a sentence or two. It's a puzzling absence; my immediate thought would be that Pratchett's current situation would discourage him from wanting to get too close to Death, but he's been quite vocal in real life about getting comfortable with death, so it doesn't seem like that's a likely reason. Maybe there just wasn't room for him, or maybe Pratchett wanted specifically to focus on life (particularly as seen in Young Sam) rather than death.

END SPOILERS

I'm delighted that we got another chance to meet Vimes and see how he's doing in the world. He has been the most consistently enjoyable member of the widespread Discworld saga, and this entry does not disappoint. Like all of Pratchett's best books, this one made me chuckle, made me think, and made me feel. It's a worthy addition to the series.

With her eyes like a flame

2011-11-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

Enough culture - it's TV time!

I've finished watching the two (and, so far, only) seasons of Luther, an amazing British crime import. First of all, I am now even more impressed with Idris Elba than before - he's now entered that rare cadre of actors whose work makes me want to see everything they're in. Between this and his work in The Wire, I've gotten a good feel for his range, which is quite good - each individual character is fully-realized and committed, so you don't get a huge range within Stringer Bell or within Luther, but the union of the two reveals his impressive acting chops.

I've commented on this before, but on a purely superficial level, there are significant overlaps between Luther and House. Both feature incredible performances from talented British actors; both play characters who work in high-stakes, life-or-death institutions; both are rogue agents who make choices that frequently risk the life and health of innocents, but whose superiors have no choice but to accommodate them due to their immense skill; both are fairly episodic shows but have longer serial plots that cover and span seasons; both open with incredible songs from Massive Attack that I'll never get tired of hearing.

That said, House is clearly an American show (if a more cynical one than we usually see), and Luther is clearly a British show. That means the seasons are quite short - six one-hour episodes for the first season; the second season was presented as four one-hour episodes, but it's really two two-hour movies. It has a way darker sensibility, too. The show is relentlessly violent and bloody, not to mention bloody-minded. The characters are all English, and in a few cases I found myself having trouble tracking their accents (Luther and the more cultured characters speak quite clearly, but many of the other detectives and suspects have a strong London accent that makes them hard to understand when they speak quickly).

MEGA SPOILERS

The other great BBC detective show I've seen recently, Sherlock, has its own set of overlaps with this show, mainly in terms of plot. I'm not totally clear on the chronology of the two shows - when each started shooting, when it aired in the UK, when it aired here - but I'm guessing/hoping that they weren't aware of each other during their first seasons, because both of them rely on a twist about how nobody would ever suspect a London cabbie of being a murderer. They both use pretty much the same reasoning, too - it's someone who people would trust implicitly, even if they don't know them. In both shows, the actual cabbie turns out to be a thoroughly ordinary-looking person. In Sherlock, this elevates the chilling scariness of the whole sequence - he seems like a harmless man, even though he plays the role of evil incarnate. In Luther, he becomes an amazingly pathetic villain. He's a failure at life, and a failure as a killer, and his miserable little life is ended.

The first season seemed to draw from a highly varied and memorable list of villains: some were very high-class, like Alice and the guy who's a best-selling author and leader of a Satanic cult. Others, like the cabbie, were very low-class, memorable in their squalor. The second seasons' villains, though, were creepy because of just how ORDINARY they looked. I doubt anyone would look at those people twice if they passed them on the London streets. There's a huge gap between our image of these people and the atrocities they perform. To me, it felt like we weren't just watching some super-genius outsider criminal; we were watching the decay of English society itself, the birth of a culture whose very foundation could be twisted to evil.

Speaking of which... I found myself thinking a LOT about the differences between English and American culture presented in the show. At the start of the final episode in the second season, there's a long sequence where a policeman is chasing down a murderer who has struck in a public train terminal. The policeman keeps shouting, "Stop that man!", but even though they're running through a crowd, nobody stops, nobody wants to get involved. The citizenry seems cowed. I have a hard time imagining that happening in a major American city - we still have enough cowboy in our veins that SOMEONE would have intervened and helped out a policeman.

That was the most dramatic example in the series, but looking back over it, it seems to be in keeping with the show in general. There's a very clear demarcation between law and crime, and also a pronounced role for those who don't fit into either camp. I don't think we once see a citizen volunteering information that helps in an investigation. Obviously, I don't know enough about London culture to say whether that's realistic, or if it's a grim noir atmosphere contrived by this show for a strong effect.

One similarity I found was the protection of suspects' rights. I was a little surprised to see this; I don't watch a whole lot of British detective shows, but from the ones I have seen, I don't recall suspects being advised of their right to silence, etc. I know that this sort of thing isn't universal - in particular, in France police can arrest someone without a warrant, and have much more flexibility in how they conduct interrogations. The more I think about it, though, it makes sense that we'd have this similarity. The UK and America are both common law countries, after all, and the American judicial code is basically a direct descendent of the Magna Carta. Details will always vary, but the idea of the law itself as a supreme institution that's above everyone, even the most powerful individuals, binds our countries together, and informs the way we pursue justice.

Topic hop: Alice was arguably the best part of the show, maybe even more so than Luther himself. She's absolutely captivating every second she's on screen; her combination of beauty and danger takes everyone's breath away, even someone as thoroughly capable as Luther. I was really hoping that they would join forces more directly in the second season. One of the advantages of the British shorter-form television season is that they can be more experimental; it's more like a mini-series than a series, so they can do dangerous things and take a program in an unexpected direction, and not need to worry so much about writing themselves into a corner. (You would think that an American show with 23 episodes would cover more plot ground than a British show with 6 episodes, but if the American show shakes things up halfway through the season, they need to fill another 11 episodes that all have to acknowledge that change, while the British show can just treat it naturally and then end things.) All that to say, I think they could have gotten away with Luther actually leaving the police force... probably not leaving London, but perhaps becoming a private detective (do they have those in England? Would he be the world's second consulting detective?), or even the shadowy underworld figure that the various criminals want him to become. As it was, I was very sad that Alice didn't make an appearance at all in the last two episodes, which were otherwise quite good.

I guess that Mark dropped out, too. Ah, Mark. I really liked the way they handled him in the first part of the second season. I was never quite sure of what to think of him in the first season - we're supposed to hate him, since he stole Luther's wife away from him, but he's such a thoroughly decent person and such a good match for Zoe... but he's also overly passive and a bit too calm... well, we see him again once his world has been broken, and my heart breaks for him. It makes no sense that he and Luther would be friends now, and yet it also makes perfect sense - they're united in their love, not for one another, but for someone who's forever gone.

END SPOILERS

Quick thoughts on a few other shows. I'm actually pretty happy with The Walking Dead so far. None of the episodes has been as good as Season One's premiere, but I feel like the average quality so far has been better than the average quality last season. Most of the annoying characters have been eaten off, and we're getting a good chunk of zombie mayhem each episode, along with some good ongoing development.

MINI SPOILERS

In particular, the major non-zombie plot so far has revolved around Carl's accident. I'm struck by how much of the zombie atmosphere and design has infected these scenes, even in the absence of any infection. Carl's deathly white skin pallor... his sudden shifts between seeming death and animation... his uncontrollable jerking movements in bed... all very creepy, and it thematically links his private ordeal to the global crisis, even when there's no direct tie between the two. There's also, of course, a big obsession with blood. That might be a bit more appropriate in a vampire drama than a zombie drama, but it still fits. Carl has an insatiable desire for fresh blood to remain among the living, while the many zombies we see have an insatiable desire for fresh blood to remain among the walking dead.

I have trouble remembering everyone's names, so I use nicknames for everyone. Rick is Good Cop, Shane is Bad Cop. Boy, Shane has been on a tear lately - that reveal at the end of the third episode was just chilling. Just when I think I can like him again, he has to destroy it all. Rick seems to be pure goodness, and it's easy to root for him, but man, his opening monologue at the start of this season was probably the most annoying thing the show has ever done. I like all the other male characters, but other than Lori, all the women are seriously aggravating me. Which is, of course, well in keeping with zombie fiction practice: we're supposed to have at least some idiotic characters who make bad decisions that cause us to slap our heads and yell at the screen. Well. Part of me is hoping that Andrea and Carol get eaten, and the women from the farmhouse take their place. I'm a bad person.

END SPOILERS

Dexter is... fine. I'm surprised at just how much I'm enjoying Mos Def's Brother Sam character, who seems like he should be insufferable (given the really tone-deaf treatment of religion in the first episode), but has taken off. We'll see if he sticks around for the season. Edward James Olmos seems to be wasted as half of the villain team. I'm liking the new cop character, and am curious if he'll become a less-caffeinated version of Doakes in a season. Last week's episode didn't have any LaGuerta at all, which means it's automatically one of my favorite episodes. So far the show seems to be handling Deb's promotion well, using it to expand her character in believable ways. We'll see where the show goes. There's definitely a lot of amazing potential in using Revelation as a kill gimmick, and so far the show hasn't shied away from maximizing it.

Kyuu

2011-11-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

Phew! I plowed through the last third of 1Q84. It ends quite well - it doesn't wrap everything neatly up, of course (no Murakami novel has ever done so), but I think it will satisfy most readers hoping for some sort of resolution or closure. It's more akin to the closing of, say, "A Wild Sheep Chase" than to "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."

For the most part, the third volume continues the things I loved about the first two volumes. The plot directly continues, we get more exploration into the characters' backgrounds, and a few mysteries are resolved. There are several differences as well, some of which must be structural changes from the original Japanese text, others might be from Murakami or from the translator. In particular, I think that the first part of the book used metric units (certain individuals of short stature are described as being about a meter tall), while the last part used imperial units (those same individuals are about a yard tall). Also, while I loved the language, the last part of the book did seem to introduce some tics that I wasn't as fond of.

MINI SPOILERS

Tengo in particular, and I think some other characters as well, come down with severe cases of echolalia - lots of "dialogs" are more like monologues with an echo, as someone will say something like "Sakigake is searching for a dohta," and Tengo will say, "Sakigake is searching for a dohta." It isn't actually annoying, but is a bit perplexing. It's a bit similar to his conversations with Fuka-Eri in the first volume, though I kind of preferred those, because in those cases he's kind of trying to translate her by turning her statements into questions (or, in the Japanese, adding a "ka" to the end of what she says). Here, I'm not too sure what purpose it serves, either in the story or stylistically. (I'm not saying that there is no purpose, so if anyone has thoughts about what the significance might be, please let me know!)

Other than those very minor complaints, though, I pretty much loved the ending. The biggest and most noticeable change is the introduction of another point of view: in addition to Tengo's and Aomame's perspectives, we now get Ushikawa's as well. This was a really nice way to open up the story a bit, still keeping the focus on the central relationship between the would-be lovers and adding some more perspective on their situation. I thought the choice of Ushikawa was an interesting one; personally, I would have loved to get inside the head of a character like Komatsu, who is already involved in the plot and has a lot of personality. Ushikawa has some great personality too, though. He's definitely an outsider, and I enjoyed the way Murakami treated him... he honors Ushikawa's skills, but makes sure that we don't develop too much sympathy for him. I was vaguely reminded of Flaubert's treatment of Charles - we're getting a full, three-dimensional character with some admirable qualities, but we're not meant to actually like him too much.

So, yeah... Ushikawa has been involved in the story for a while, and we got to know him pretty well through his association with Tengo, and now we can actually peer inside his head, into his sad, slight life. Again, he's kicked around by society, and I do like the way he can plow ahead and do a good, thorough job even with the social impediments caused by his massive ugliness. He occupies an interesting spot, working for the villains but under just as much threat from the villains as the heroes are.

The second volume ended very dramatically, with Tengo and Aomame both perched on the edge of huge developments: Aomame had discovered that she couldn't return to the real world and was a few millimeters from ending her life; Tengo had rediscovered his memory's version of Aomame, seemingly presented to him through the auspices of the Little People. Both of those developments are necessarily backed away from in this last book. Aomame just changes her mind, and gets on with her life; soon, she renews her focus on reuniting with Tengo. Tengo never again sees that air chrysalis with Aomame, though he patiently waits for it for a long time.

Several new elements were very successful. I thought that the NHK fee collector was probably the scariest part of the whole book, right up there with the Little People. Part of that may have to do with some social phobias of my own - I get uncomfortable when strangers come knocking at my door, and the kind of verbally abusive and judgmental ire that the NHK fee collector doles out are the stuff of my nightmares. I really like the way that Murakami spins out this scenario, across multiple doors, multiple visits, and a varying set of tactics that tightly orbit around a very mean core. I also like how Murakami dangles a very intriguing explanation before us - that Tengo's father, whose body is gripped by a coma, is sending forth his spirit to do the only thing he was ever any good at, abuse people to make them pay up. It's interesting how Tengo himself is never visited by the specter, but others close to him are. The collector doesn't seem to have any great supernatural insight - in particular, he doesn't know the actual names of the people staying in the apartments, just the names listed in the building. That makes me wonder if his spirit may actually be making rounds throughout the whole neighborhood, but can only be perceived by those who are aligned with Tengo's story... similarly to how only some people can perceive the two moons.

MEGA SPOILERS

Speaking of which: we get an interesting twist on the whole moons/worlds question in this volume. I'm still not sure what the final situation is, but in the first part of the book, my working hypothesis was that Fuka-Eri initially created the new world by the introduction of the Little People/Story. Then, Tengo entered into that world, and became important to it, by embellishing the story and bringing it to an audience. Finally, Aomame was drawn into it because of her emotional connection with Tengo. In this book, though, it seems more like that sequence is inverted. The world still might have come into existence because of Fuka-Eri, but the novel seems to say that Aomame entered into that world by herself, by her own actions, when she walked down that stairway. This connects nicely with the introduction we get in that very first chapter, of course. Tengo, too, might have followed into the world after Aomame. She presumably was in the new world from the first chapter on; Tengo doesn't seem to have entered it until after he wrote the book. (It's possible that he was in earlier, but given that he invented/discovered the details of the two moons, I place his entrance several chapters in.) In this new reading, it seems like Tengo might have a one-way trip into the world, since he arrived by writing and can't un-write the book; however, Aomame has a two-way path, since she physically entered into it and can retrace her steps back out.

The whole thing is so romantic and lovely, isn't it? It's a little like the myth of Orpheus, but this time it's the woman who travels into a dangerous place, and brings back her beloved.

Minor (but very spoilery) thoughts...

Very creepy that we get more Little People! Now that we've seen two cases of them entering the world, we can draw some conclusions, I guess. It looks like (other than through air chrysalises) they can only enter through being who die, and whose bodies are not disposed of in a timely manner. The goat was left in the cave for days before they emerged; Ushikawa's body had suffered rigor mortis, and they wouldn't be able to cremate it for several more days. I love how this totally invented creepy mythology nicely reinforces our mores and morals about how to handle the dead.

I'm also curious about exactly what world the new Little People are in. Is a new world created each time they emerge? Or have they found a new gateway into 1Q84 after losing Leader and hope of Aomame's child? Or (creepiest of all) have they made it into our world? I'm reminded of the emphatic words of the taxi driver at the very beginning, who insists that there's only one reality. Most of the rest of the book seems to disagree with that; I and the characters spend much of our time thinking about the world of 1984, and the world of 1Q84, and the differences between them and how to return to 1984. But, what if the taxi driver was right? What if, when Aomame went down that staircase, she didn't CREATE a new world, but CHANGED the existing one? In that case, walking up the staircase doesn't transport Tengo and Aomame back to the "real" world, but instead changes the one world back to the way it was before. In that case, though, the Little People have found their way into our reality... into the only reality. Brrr.

I was really, really expecting for the same taxi-driver who dropped Aomame off to be the one that picked them up. I liked the way that Murakami handled this, though. It's a nice call-back to the beginning without being overly symmetrical. And, really, it's very appropriate for what the story has done. At this point, Tengo and Aomame's journey is over; they don't need any more special help from outsiders, they now have each other, and can spend the rest of their lives exploring one another and building a future together.

END SPOILERS

Yep... this was a very, very good book. In addition to all of its other qualities - the amazing language, funny dialog, fascinating plot, surreal imagery - I'm really struck by how well it works as a novel about novels. Not just in the superficial sense of having a book within a book, but it seems profoundly interested in the CREATive aspects of fiction, the way that we build worlds with our words. In the text of this book, it isn't just something to play around with, but a very real and meaningful way that we can touch one anothers' lives, alter our reality, change the course of history, discover our soulmates. In some ways, 1Q84 reads like a love-letter to writing, penned by the master of stories. It's an absolutely remarkable achievement.

1323

2011-10-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

I've been flying through Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It's a really massive book, a bit over 900 pages in a large hardcover. Or, to be a bit more accurate, it's three good-sized books that have been put into one binding for the American market, in kind of an inverse from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Despite the length, it's been an incredibly engaging read for me so far. The plot moves along at a nice clip, with a steady trickle of revelations and explanations and new mysteries, but more than that, the language is as beautiful as always, drawing me ever more deeply into the story.

I've just finished the second book, at a tad under the 600 page mark, and figured I'd take this opportunity to jot down some initial reactions to the book. First of all, my head feels full to overflowing, and I'm worried that I'll lose some of these memories if I wait much longer. Second, from the little I've heard about the book's release in Japan, it sounds like Murakami had initially intended the story to end after the second book. There, the first two volumes were written together, and published separately on the same day; then, after they came out, Murakami decided that he wasn't finished yet, and returned for a third book. (He says that he doesn't plan on writing a fourth volume, but is also unwilling to rule out the possibility.)

I very deliberately stayed away from as much knowledge about 1Q84 as possible during the (very long!) run-up to its US release. This was a LONG process. I've mentioned before that I attended a Murakami interview at UC Berkeley back in 2008, where he announced that he had just finished "... a BIG book." Despite the voracious and growing appetite for Murakami here in the states (a trend which I whole-heartedly endorse), it still took them about three years to translate it, even after dividing the work among two translaters. Jay Rubin translated the first two volumes; Rubin has translated a majority of the most recent Murakami novels, including masterpieces like The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and After the Quake. Philip Gabriel, who translated my personal favorite Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore, handled translation duties on the third volume. Personally, I think it would have been amazing if they could have gotten Alfred Birnbaum to do the first volume, which would have made the whole effort nicely reflect the chronology of bringing Murakami to America's attention. Alfred Birnbaum was responsible for translating Murakami's very first books into English, long before anyone here had any idea who he was, and this includes some of the most touching and idiosyncratic works, like A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

It's been pretty fascinating to consider the various translators and how they interact in creating our perception of who Murakami is and what his books mean. I get the impression that most fanatic Murakami devotees settle on a favorite translator, and that's usually the first one they encounter; the early adopters who "discovered" Murakami before he was "cool" will swear by Birnbaum's style and construction. More recent converts like myself are mesmerized by the intricate yet unadorned sentences found in Rubin. Ultimately, of course, 99.99% of American readers won't ever be able to compare the English with the Japanese versions of these novels, and so it's nearly impossible for us to disentangle what parts that we admire are from the original author, and which hail from the translator.

The surprisingly strong publicity campaign for 1Q84 has included a lot of interesting extra information around this book and these issues, including some great interviews with the translators about, well, translating. Rubin and Gabriel had to do their work in parallel in order to bring the book to market on time. Rubin got a head start, but also had more work to do. This sounds like it led to a fascinating three-way collaboration, where the translators would share notes with each other to make sure that they were being reasonably consistent with one another, and checking in with Murakami once a week or so to help resolve any items that they found particularly difficult or confusing. While they were collaborative, it doesn't sound like any one was dictatorial, which ultimately led to more variety and more flavor. A few tidbits that I recall from an interview with The Atlantic: Gabriel tends to use more contractions (like "it's" and "they'll") than Rubin or Birnbaum; but, in this case, he ended up using fewer than usual in order to match the sound of the earlier volumes. There was some discussion around how to translate the slangy name of one minor character who appeared in both volumes Two and Three. One suggested "Buzzcut", the other thought "Skinhead". They eventually brought this to Murakami, who cast the deciding vote for Buzzcut. Even after all the translation was done, it still passed through a final American editor who helped pull everything together and make the work as a whole unified.

It probably helps matters a lot that Murakami is not only fluent in English, but also an avid reader of American novels. He has famously translated many great American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver (all of it!), and J. D. Salinger. I imagine that this significantly helps his engagement with the translation, as he can not only weigh in on the most literal equivalent for a Japanese phrase, but also what words are most likely to convey a similar emotion or sentiment. That being said, all the translators have cheerfully denied any hope of truly capturing Murakami's essence in any language other than Japanese. Which is just incredible - given that Murakami is possibly my favorite contemporary author, the thought that he might be even BETTER than the diminished form in which I encounter him just blows my mind.

Oh, yeah, there's also a fun video out there that describes the design of the book - how they (meaning Chip Kidd) came up with the jacket cover, the endleaf pages, and so on. There are minor spoilers within the video, so if you want to remain 100% pure you should hold off, but this was one of the few things I consumed before reading the book and it didn't affect my enjoyment of it.

Since this book is so new, I'll be more cautious than usual in my spoiler marking. I'm avoiding any plot or character revelations whatsoever up here. I'll generally and vaguely cover characters and a bare minimum of early plot develops in mini spoilers. Mega spoilers are fair game for everything in the first two volumes.

So: just how good is this book?

Pretty darn good. I feel like it's still sinking in, but so far I've just been loving it. I'm enjoying it much more than the most recent Murakami novel(la), "After Dark". At the moment I'd put it at about the same level as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

The book has a lot of the elements that I love about most of Murakami's novels: the realistic world that gradually slips into a slightly askew, dreamlike environment; the pleasant people who are swept up by baffling events; the portentous omens that heighten stakes while remaining opaque. His writing is probably even better than before, and it was already excellent. He perfectly captures emotions, tableaus, the beats of conversation, the silences within conversation. I think it's that combination that makes me most love Murakami: even though the cores of his stories are often mysterious, each sentence is sparklingly clear.

Oh, and he's funny, too. This isn't a comedy, of course - while Murakami has written come flat-out comedic short stories, like The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes, I don't think he's ever written a fully comedic novel - but the characters' wry observations on their untenable situations often make me crack up, as do their musings on the world around them. And, some of those thoughts can also bring me close to tears. The center of this novel is driven by... a kind of lacuna, an aching gap, and while I sometimes feel like this was written specifically for me, I'm guessing that most readers will feel the same way, so effectively does Murakami convey that particular heartache.

Okay, that's all very vague. Let's dip into some

MINI SPOILERS

Structurally, 1Q84 bears some similarity to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. As with that book, this one follows strictly alternating chapters, each told from a distinct point of view. Here, the voice is third-person, and the limited narrator seems to be the same or similar, as opposed to the very different voices in HBW. But still, there's a similar rhythm that the book gets into, and in each chapter, while I'm getting progressively more interested in Tengo's or Aomame's stories, I'm simultaneously looking forward to seeing what the other character has in store.

For both characters, we gradually learn more about each as the story progresses; in a way, we're moving both forward and backwards in time. Both of them are around thirty years old (like me!). We see what they're doing in the present day; as they keep doing it, we learn about the people who brought them into these situations; and gradually, we learn about their experiences in college, in high school, and so on, drifting back to childhood. It's a wonderful, gradual unfolding of the characters, which proceeds organically, constantly offering new depth about each even as the story advances.

Tengo, while not a repeat of any earlier Murakami protagonist, does fit comfortably into the Murakami mold: like the "heroes" of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase, etc., Tengo is a fairly passive individual. At least he has a job, but it's something far beneath his abilities: even though he was a math prodigy in school, and has a passion for writing novels, he contents himself with teaching high-schoolers in a cram school. It isn't much work, and he seems content to do something simple that doesn't require much effort from him. Like those other passive heroes, amazing stuff tends to fall into his lap without any initiative from him. He has a steady stream of attractive young women who wish to be with him, but is content with a long-running affair with an older married woman. The main action in the novel kicks off when he is approached by his editor, who persuades him into a scheme to rewrite a novella submitted by a high-school girl. Much like Toru's search for a missing cat ends up taking away his wife and everything else in his life, Tengo's ghost-writing jaunt will irrevocably remove key pillars from his life and force him into another world.

Boy oh boy... Murakami sure is amazing at crafting three-dimensional characters. At one point Tengo's father describes Tengo as a "vacuum", which is a beautiful phrase, but totally contrary to how I experienced him. Tengo is a large, solid, gentle man, not physically attractive, but who radiates solidity and trustworthiness. He has a good heart, and a strong sense of justice, though they inform his life quietly. Tengo has only rarely asserted himself, and then only in reaction to some external stimulus, though we (and perhaps even he) can't directly draw a line between the two: holding hands with a pretty young girl in the fifth grade gives him the courage to tell his father that he hates accompanying him on his collection route; being persuaded to ghost-write one book, he becomes able to start writing his own book; a visit from a dislikeable and sinister man gives him courage to resist his offer. Tengo has many conflictions - he has never reconciled with his father, and has been unwilling to search for his missing mother or a woman who means much to him - and while he can keep living his normal life without resolving them, they continually percolate below the surface, surprising even him when they bubble up.

The other protagonist, Aomame, feels like a wholly original Murakami character. I guess she has a little of the drive of Crow from Kafka on the Shore, but she is far more self-assured. Like Tengo, she currently takes direction for her assignments, but you get the impression that she would get things done even without the nudges... she's just been lucky to find some kindred spirits who can supply her with useful missions.

I'm fighting the urge to say just what those missions are... I think we find out in the second one of her chapters, so it should hardly count as a mini spoiler, but it was surprising enough that I'd like to leave it unstated for now. In any case, it isn't totally essential for describing her character.

Like Tengo, Aomame is a fully-realized character. At first she seems like she might be a kind of action-movie heroine, and at one point near the end of the second volume she self-consciously apes Faye Dunaway from the (original) Thomas Crown Affair. That isn't what she's really about, though... this is kind of a weird analogy, but she's a little bit like a marine, someone who spends hundreds of days preparing their minds and bodies before a single day of playing with the highest stakes imaginable. We learn a lot about her perfectly toned body, her workout regime (she is an instructor at a health club), and her physical attributes; this isn't just to communicate her attractiveness, although it certainly does so, but also so we can eventually realize that her drive for self-reliance and self-improvement goes all the way down. From her childhood, she has focused on perfecting herself as much as she can, and all the ways she takes care of herself help her ultimate mission of protecting those who are close to her.

Speaking of her body... it's been long enough since I've read Murakami's novels that I had almost forgotten how freaky his sex scenes could be. Well, consider myself reminded! I don't know how one can, or should, rate these things, but this is pretty high up there with what I remember from his other books... the same discomforting scenes of almost-certainly-incest, rape, wildly inappropriate age pairings, and so on. It doesn't really diminish my overall appreciation of the book, but does make me shake my head and wonder if Japanese mores are really that different, or if Murakami comes across as that shocking in the original books.

As I noted above, I had been particularly interested during the run-up to 1Q84's release in reading about the translation efforts. This proved to be oddly fortuitous, since much of the early/middle portion of 1Q84 deals with the publishing process involved in printing a rough manuscript to market. I've experienced a form of this in the technical books that I've worked on, and it was wonderful to see Murakami kind of explore that process in the literary world. Like with translation, there are multiple characters at play: the raw inspiration and creative vision from an author; the eye for quality and the ear attuned to a new voice that a reviewer contributes; the technical skills and writing prowess of an editor/writer; the political and sales work done by a proper editor. In the contest of this book, it's meant to be a slightly shameful thing that Fuka-Eri's name alone appears on the front of Air Chrysalis; but really, any book, even one as magnificent as 1Q84, is improved by the work done by reviewers, editors, copy-editors, and the many other people who work behind the scenes to bring the book to market. Heh... to borrow and mis-use Murakami's excellent metaphor, it's a little like a cocoon: the author creates life, and the author alone can make the new thing, but that new life may initially be weak and unprepared for the harsh world outside. The publishing company builds a cocoon around it, sheltering it, and giving it time to strengthen and grow. Then, once it is ready, and no longer needs the cocoon, it sheds it, and flies off into the world. By the time it reaches our hands in the bookstore, all that we see is the butterfly, the beautiful thing created by the author, but it could never have arrived if not for the care and shelter of the cocoon, built by the editor and no longer needed.

1Q84 has a LOT of GREAT analogies for writing, fiction, and the creative process. Many of these were collected into "Town of Cats," a wonderful short story that ran in The New Yorker a few months back. Town of Cats collects several sections that were scattered throughout the first few hundred pages of 1Q84, all from Tengo's chapters. We learn about Tengo's earliest childhood memory, of his mother with another man; his distressing Sundays collecting fees for the NHK and his estrangement from his father; and, in the core of the story, Tengo's trip on a train ride up to his father's nursing home, where he reads him a (fictional?) German story called "Town of Cats," and gently tries to get answers to some of the questions he's had all his life. The story-within-a-story is powerful, and simultaneously seems like a great Murakami story and like an authentic northern-European legend: mysterious, portentous, both direct and strange. The episode ends on an incredible dialog between Tengo and his father; Tengo's questions receive answers that don't seem to line up at all (such as queries about his biological father being answered with a complaint about how people don't appreciate the importance of subscription fees - "Radio waves don’t come falling out of the sky for free like rain or snow"). For much of the conversation, his father seems totally out of touch, and just plain wrong about the things he does say. But, in the end, he utters words that, I think, may be the best, most concise description I've seen yet for Murakami's writing. "If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation." I think that just perfectly captures what Murakami tries to do, and why he's so effective. People who complain about how his stories lack resolution, or how he doesn't make sense or doesn't explain his plots, are kind of missing the point. Murakami is operating one level higher than that of plot, of story, of logic. When I'm reading one of his novels, I feel like it takes my entire mind, as a whole, moving together, to grok what he's saying. It ends up being just as much about feeling, and experiencing, and KNOWING, as it is about explaining. An explanation would cheapen and diminish the outcome, forcing a big and complicated world to fit into a narrow box that happens to accommodate a bulleted list of action points. Murakami creates these big, great structures, and then floats them up for us to look at and ponder. In some ways, I think that approaching his novels is more like appreciating a fine painting than like reading Hemingway.

MEGA SPOILERS

Boy, the Little People sure are creepy, aren't they? I loved the slow reveal that Murakami used on this. Actually, the whole way he used Air Chrysalis in general was terrific. It's introduced very early on, but at first we get only occasional nuggets of information about its contents. It isn't until close to the end of the second volume, when Aomame finally reads it, that we finally get a full start-to-finish understanding of the story. In between, of course, we're able to piece much of it together, between the little we learn from Fuka-Eri's biography, the elements that Tengo inserted during his revision, and a few brief horrifying incidents like the Little People's invasion of the safehouse.

In some ways, it seems like the Little People are analogs to ancient European folklore about fairies; they aren't necessarily evil, but they certainly aren't good either, and they are so different and so powerful that it's wise to be wary of them. Of course, fairies/faeries have been so diluted by hundreds of years of infantilization that, even if Murakami was European, he would have been wise to create something new to convey that sort of dread, as he has done here. I keep harping on this, but what I love about Murakami is the combination of his incredibly clear prose and his incredibly opaque meaning. Once we do see the Little People, both in Air Chrysalis and walking through the ten-year-old victim's mouth, we see them very clearly: we know that they are a few inches tall at first, that they can change their size but max out at about a meter tall, that they build cocoons in the middle of the air by pulling white bits of fluff out of the space around them. All perfectly straightforward, and simultaneously incomprehensible.

Other than the Little People, I think the two most chilling scenes in the book for me were scenes involving the second moon. Not the part where Aomame first notices the second moon - that was a bit odd, and fanciful, but you don't really know what significance to attach to it, other than a confirmation that she seems to be operating on a different timeline from our own. Rather, I first got shivers in the scene where Tengo describes (I believe it's to his editor Komatsu, or possibly to his girlfriend) how you can tell the world of Air Chrysalis apart from our "real" world: the Air Chrysalis world has a second moon in the sky. That's the point where I realized that Aomame had become a character in a novel, instead of a person in the world. That's creepy enough, but what's worse is that, by that point, we've figured out the connection between Aomame and Tengo. We know that these two people love each other, that they've wasted the last two thirds of their lives apart from one another, and we badly want them to get back together. And now... we know that one of them is, in a sense, no longer "real."

(The way Murakami plays with the second moon in Aomame's world, incidentally, is great. We sense a significant disconnect between Aomame and the people around her, since she notices the second moon and nobody else does. However, we can never be completely sure just what the other people perceive. Does everyone else see one moon while she sees two? If so, that would make her seem a bit more like a crazy person, seeing something that isn't there. Or, does everyone else see two moons, but think that they have always seen two moons and so it isn't worth commenting on? If so, that would make it seem more like Aomame has entered an alternate world. The book treats this very believably, since it's the sort of question that could be cleared up quickly with a single question, but the consequences of ASKING that question are so dire that Aomame doesn't dare do it. I do suppose that she might have tried something else, like checking a star atlas out of the library while she was looking up old newspaper articles, but I'll gladly let that slide. Ultimately, of course, we learn that the truth is somewhere in the middle - I think that Fuka-Eri may be the one who says that only certain people are able to see the second moon. Naturally, this isn't completely explained, but given the logic of the story I presume that the people who can see this are Perceivers, Receivers, and those directly affected by a Receiver. Oh, and that proved to be an unexpected perk of Murakami setting the novel in 1984 - it's kind of refreshing to go back to a world before the Internet, when people's questions couldn't realistically be immediately answered on their mobile phones. I like that Aomame needed to go to the library to find old news stories, and that her policewoman friend needed to contact the appropriate people in other departments in order to find out about potential crimes.)

The second, and bigger, shock comes near the very end of the second volume, when Tengo rests by the slide in the playground, looks into the sky, and then sees the second moon for himself. This is, of course, a huge jolt. How can an author become a character in his own novel? This forced me to re-evaluate my understanding of 1Q84 (the world, not the book). Well, more accurately, I guess it made me realize that 1Q84 is a world, and not a book. I had thought that Aomame was "just" a character, but no, she's really a person, and so is Tengo as well. The act of creativity started by Fuka-Eri and brought to fruition by Tengo, has become that thing that I so often proclaim to like, "a fully-realized world." Tengo's role has now become inverted, moving from the subject of the story to become its object. He has power in this world - since he helped create it, he's safe from the Little People - but he's also trapped in it, just as thoroughly as Aomame. Hmmm... I wonder if that might somehow be tied to the "purification" ritual that Fuka-Eri insists they perform? What was the importance of "going to the Town of Cats"? Was it his meeting with his father, or was it his absorption into another work of fiction? If the former, then the danger might have been that Tengo was leaving the world of fiction he had created for the "real" world, and so slipping out of the realm he controlled, and into a place which the Little People could penetrate and harm. In that case, the importance of the ritual might have been to bind Tengo's memory with Aomame, who is now in 1Q84 with him, and so keep him from the real world. Or, if the latter, then the problem might have been that Tengo is bringing another work of fiction into 1Q84, a powerful one that affects him, but one that he did not create and does not control. If so, that could have caused the dissonance (thunder and lightning) that he experienced, and by weakening his authorial privilege, he might have made himself vulnerable. In that case, the purification ritual's importance might have been more to distract him from the father-oriented concerns of A Town of Cats, and return his attention to the female-oriented concerns of Air Chrysalis.

I'm sure I'm way off-base on those ideas... but hey, I'm an English Lit major, and I do love my literary theories!

END SPOILERS

There's lots of other great stuff in this book... oh, even if you haven't picked it up yet, you should totally check out the wonderful Spotify playlist that Knopf put together for the book. It has a bunch of the many, many pieces of music referenced in this book. The list is long, and still isn't exhaustive - for example, there are quite a few more Rolling Stones songs mentioned in the book, including some more purely bluesy ones. As with Murakami's other books, the music is far from just background or scenery. At the least, it conveys important insight into characters' personalities; at most, though, it can powerfully drive the story. The single most important piece of music is "Sinfonietta" by Janacek, which plays a prominent role in the very first chapter, and returns and repeats throughout the remainder of the book as its significance amplifies. I'm feeling more regretful than usual about my lack of classical music knowledge, but this is inspiring me to rectify that situation... at least where central European composers are concerned.

Anyways! I must wrap up this post quickly so I can return to Book Three. I'll weigh in again on the entire novel after I've finished it. Right now, though, I'm pleased to report something that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to say: it was worth the wait.

Ascend

2011-10-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

Hooray! After overcoming a horde of enemies, incredibly difficult bosses, and even more difficult programming bugs, I have successfully concluded my second run through the Baldur's Gate saga. Throne of Bhaal is sometimes considered as the weakest link in the tetralogy, but I think it's immensely satisfying as the capstone to the Bhaalspawn saga - if you look at the individual encounters and plot points, they're not quite as cool as those in SoA, but everything is elevated by the cumulative force of everything that has led up to this point, and the stakes are so high that you can almost feel the ripples your actions send out through the Realms.

Throne of Bhaal starts immediately after the conclusion of Shadows of Amn - the final video of SoA is instantly followed by the first video of ToB, and your party arrives in the Grove without any further interruption. It's a nice touch that makes everything feel congruent in a way that the transition from the original Baldur's Gate to Shadows of Amn lacked, but it does mean that you'll never see the SoA credits unless you specifically click the options to view them.

Before I got far into ToB, I wanted to tweak my mod setup - specifically, I wanted to give Ascension a run. Throne of Bhaal had an incredibly rushed production schedule - Bioware basically had six months from when they started thinking about the expansion until they had to ship it - and while they did a good job on it, some people think that they could have improved it if they'd spent more time on it. Fortunately, one of the people who thought that was David Gaider, Bioware's lead designer on the expansion and apparently a man with some programming chops. On his own time, he continued work on Throne of Bhaal after its release, strengthening some of the story elements in the endgame and building a more dramatically satisfying conclusion. Additionally, he tweaked a lot of the boss battles, making them more challenging for players who had highly powered characters. These components were released in a mod called Ascension.

Ascension has had an interesting evolution in the last decade or so since it was released. I think it originally came out prior to WeiDU, so the mod worked by making a binary patch that would directly edit the game's resources. This was fine as it was, but it also meant that it was impossible to combine Ascension with other game mods. Also, some people reported bugs or difficulties with the mod, and the structure of it made it hard for people to alter the mod on their own.

So, Westley Weimer, the author of WeiDU, with Gaider's blessing, ported Ascension to WeiDU, where it could coexist with other user-created mods. Since then, Ascension has been one of the most popular mods, and also one of the most frustrating. Unlike other mods, which for the most part add new elements to the game but don't alter the main storyline, Ascension effectively rewrote the game's climax. This meant that there were lots of opportunities for bugs, especially when other mods attempted to insert their own content into the climax. As a result, Ascension is simultaneously the mod that experienced players most want to install, and the mod that experienced players most frequently warn against installing.

Because of all the caution I'd seen during my research, I had left Ascension off my initial install list. After beating SoA, I decided that I really wanted to play with Ascension. In particular, the NPC mods that I'd installed (Chloe and Jason Compton's Nalia romance mod) don't have any Throne of Bhaal content, and I really wanted to bump up the variety from what I'd experienced in my last game. I'd avoided reading any Ascension spoilers, but the nuggets I'd heard made it sound like a more satisfying ending, and I decided it would be worth some risk to install and experience it.

Seeking to minimize the risk, I poked around the various BG2 message boards. The most recent posts I could find suggested that, instead of the stand-alone Ascension mod hosted at weidu.org, I would be better off installing BP-Ascension. As far as I can tell, BP-Ascension bundles Ascension into the Big Picture project, a sort of mega-mod that combines a variety of other mods for Baldur's Gate 2 into one big package. I hadn't been interested in BP when getting started, but apparently I could just install the BP-Ascension part by itself, and this is supposedly the most up-to-date version of Ascension (the last "official" WeiDU release was back in 2009).

I downloaded and installed BP-Ascension; there was a single warning, but everything seemed to be fine. I opted for the core Ascension component, but turned down all of the "tougher" components, which strengthen the battles you have with the Five and Demogorgon. I mainly play BG for the story, not for the tactics, and while I enjoy a good fight I didn't feel the masochistic need to thwart my progress.

FINALLY, after many hours researching and twiddling with my setup, I jumped back into the main game! As with SoA, I could remember a fair amount of the game, but the years have caused a lot of my memories to fade, so I was still occasionally surprised by developments.

Fair warning: I'm not going to flag any spoilers below, either for Throne of Bhaal or for Ascension, though Ascension doesn't come for a while longer.

The game starts with a fairly weak opener. You wander through a grove, talking to stone heads that give you not-very-cryptic prophecies about what's going to come. It's kind of portentous, and either reiterates stuff we already know (you are bringing violence and destruction in your wake, many people will be killed, etc.), or spoils things that are to come. I think the single biggest misstep ToB makes is by emphasizing, at the very beginning, that you will be betrayed; and then, almost immediately after, introducing a new character who seems to be trying to help you. You can see the plot twist coming from hours and hours away.

You learn that your opponents for this game will be a group called The Five. Next to you, they're the most powerful Bhaalspawn in the Realms, and any two of them combined have more of Bhaal's essence than you. They are systematically hunting down and killing all other Bhaalspawn, seeking to gain power for themselves. Some operate openly, while others are more subtle. Soon after you finish your chat with the stone heads, you meet the first of the five: Illasera, who acts a bit like a magical assassin. Along with a small group of friends, she ambushes you and tries to kill you. You fight back, and destroy her. The Five are now The Four, I guess, though everyone will keep saying "The Five" through the rest of the game.

As your reward for defeating Illasera, you are taken... to hell! Whaaa? You have a chat with a Solar, a celestial servant of Ao the Overfather, who provides even more exposition on what's going on. She explains that you are currently in a "pocket Plane", a small plane-within-a-plane that's located within the Abyss, Bhaal's former dominion. As the most powerful Bhaalspawn, you have collected a sort of right to Bhaal's old realm; but as a mortal, your mind can't comprehend the immensity of the Abyss, and so it has constructed the pocket plane as a sort of refuge. Your mind has a lot of power, and this continues the thread that was first laid out in the Hell Trials at the end of Shadows of Amn (your Pocket Plane bears a strong resemblance to Hell, especially, with the structure of the tunnels to the trials, which is probably why I had mentally moved the Hell Trials to ToB); everything in the Pocket Plane (except Cespenar, I guess) was created by your subconscious, so when you undertake the challenges in there, you're really facing yourself.

Before getting to the challenges, though, you meet Sarevok. Rather unsurprisingly, he was sent to hell after you killed him, and he's been waiting around since then for you to come. He offers you a bargain - if you'll give him a small portion of your soul, he'll swear fealty to you and help you on your quest. One of the aspects that I'd particularly enjoyed in my first game of ToB was Sarevok's storyline; he starts off as Chaotic Evil, and seems to be slightly diminished from his BG1 incarnation, but he's still one of the best natural fighters you can get (he has 18/00 STR, 18 CON and 17 DEX), plus he has a lot to say about the Five, your evolution, the consequences of violent choices, and so on. In that first game, I'd taken Sarevok and let Keldorn finally go home to his family; in this game, I ditched Chloe (and, sadly, gave up my all-girls party - I do wish that this game had the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity and I could have tricked Sarevok into putting it on. Um. On second thought, that's two disturbing for words) to take Sarevok.

Chloe... left, kind of. I had known way back before starting SoA that she didn't have any ToB content, and I wasn't sure what to expect from her once I reached the expansion. She turned out to be slightly buggy... if you talk with her while she's in your party, she complains about you not following up on that quest about the Yr'kai slave boy (even though I totally had done that), and leaves your party, vanishing. If you manually remove her after Sarevok joins, then she walks up to you, initiates dialog, says something like, "Oh, hello Imoen!", and then the conversation stops without a choice to re-join. She just hangs around in the pocket plane. If you cheat, you can re-add her to your party. I didn't, though... she'd been fine in SoA, but I was much happier having Sarevok along.

As a quick digression from Sarevok taking part of your soul: I find the whole thing about souls and Bhaal essence in this series interesting and a bit confusing. In SoA in particular, there's a lot of talk about souls being divisible and fungible. Irenicus, a kind of mad scientist, has devised a process of removing your soul and implanting it into himself. However, your Bhaal nature remains, and in fact grows stronger once your soul is removed. I think (but am not certain) that the "soul" is from the human/elfish/mortal part of you - what you received from your mother. Everyone has a soul. However, in addition to your soul, you also have the legacy from your father - the Bhaal essence. The Bhaal essence acts a bit like a soul as well, which is why you and Imoen can continue to live and function after you've been de-souled.

Every human has their own soul, and each soul is different. Each Bhaalspawn shares the same Bhaal essence, and all Bhaal essence is the same. You have the same evil taint in you that Sarevok had in him. A Bhaalspawn's personality, then, is determined by the combination of their soul and their essence. When the two are aligned, as with Sarevok or Sendai, the result is an evil person who is much more powerful than any normal mortal. When the two are opposed, as with Imoen or Balthazar, the soul seems to win out against the essence, and in a way becomes stronger because of the constant battle it has to wage against the essence.

I think that each Bhaalspawn starts with the same share of the essence. What happens from then depends on the soul and on circumstance. Someone who is meek will live a more or less normal life, until someone comes around and kills them. Someone who is ambitious will tap the power in their Bhaal essence and use it to become a powerful player on the Sword Coast. When one Bhaalspawn kills another, it seems like most of the defeated Bhaalspawn's essence flows back to the Abyss, but some of it adheres to the slayer, making them even more powerful and increasing their taint. So, over time, the field winnows, and it makes sense that the most powerful Bhaalspawn would also be the most evil.

So, going back to Sarevok - you are supposedly giving him a part of your soul, but I'm curious whether it's "your" soul, or if it's the Bhaal essence. Giving him Bhaal essence seems much more in keeping with what we know about the essence and how it works. We already know from SoA that a person can live with just Bhaal essence and no soul. That said, it seems like an incredibly bad idea to give Sarevok, of all people, a portion of the divine god of murder. On the other hand, giving him your own soul seems more compassionate on your part, and definitely safer for the Realms, but I don't know that the game's canon supports this reading; I can't think of another part of the game where someone talks about dividing a soul. Supposedly this is possible here in the Abyss, which does explain why that wouldn't have been an option for Irenicus, but still... it seems a bit weird. If you DO give him your real (in my case, Neutral Good) soul, then that adds a whole other resonant layer to Sarevok's eventual possible redemption.

That said - I was a bit bummed that, in this game, Sarevok never changed to be good. I think, but can't prove, that this was a bug... we did have a couple of early conversations, and I took what I think were the correct choices (I remembered from my last game that I didn't force him to swear an oath, and whenever I had the chance I told him that I didn't enjoy killing people), but he stopped talking around the time I killed Yaga-Shura, and remained Chaotic Evil through the end. But, the good thing about this is that it meant I got to experience an evil Sarevok through the end, including his very different epilogue, so it's not all bad.

Unlike the Hell Trials, which can be done in any order but must all be done in sequence, the pocket plane challenges are parceled out - after killing each of the Five, another challenge is opened - and I believe that you can wait as long as you like before doing each one, though it's probably in your interest to do them early since they give you extra special abilities. Each challenge starts with a conversation with your opponent, but each also ends in battle - as far as I can tell there isn't a way to avoid the fights. They're pretty good, though I didn't think they were quite as compelling as the Hell trials. The first one has you fighting against a long series of random enemies - it felt a little like the Watcher's Keep challenge with all the Orcs, but there was a bit more variety. The next two challenges have you facing different versions of yourself. (I apologize for jumping around the chronology a bit - you don't unlock the other challenges until later on, but I want to talk about them all here.) Okay, um, digression time... it seems like an inordinate proportion of works of fiction, and an even higher proportion of role-playing video games, are extremely interested in the old question of fate versus free will, of destiny versus choice. Baldur's Gate is no exception, but I like the way it treats this theme. It's something it considers interesting, but it isn't really central to the story; most of the time this idea is raised, it's in banters you have with other party NPCs as you both try to come to grips with the immensity of the changes you're facing and causing. The game never completely resolves this question, which I fully respect. It is heightened a bit as time goes on and the Solar reveals more about your history and questions you about your feelings. You learn more details about your origin, including finally discovering what happened before Gorion adopted you. Your mother, Alianna, was a priestess of Bhaal, and she, along with other Bhaal worshippers, were gathering in a Bhaal temple with many Bhaalspawn to raise them and collect the essence to ensure Bhaal's rebirth. Gorion, along with a group of other adventurers, attacked the temple to thwart their plan and scatter the Bhaal worshippers. Alianna was killed. Many of Bhaal's mates and offspring fled. Gorion was able to rescue you, but Sarevok, among others, were not so lucky, and continued along the path Bhaal had planned for them.

This leads to the questions - which fortunately just remain questions - of what this means for you. How much of your actions are truly your own, and how much contingent upon others' choices? I think of myself as being Good, but what would have happened if Gorion had grabbed Sarevok instead of Sebrina? Isn't it possible that Sebrina would have become the scourge of the Sword Coast and Sarevok the virtuous hero? Given this, it seems like humility is really important - you haven't gotten where you are through your choices alone, but from the actions of others.

With all that as background - the next two challenges have you facing versions of yourself. First, you meet a sort of parallel-universe version of you, where Gorion abandoned you and you got, well, evil. Next, you meet your innocence. This is another kind of parallel universe - what would have happened if Sarevok had never threatened you? What if Gorion never fled candlekeep, and you stayed there, apart from all the violence and death outside? It would be interesting if you could choose to embrace your innocence (though it would make for a much shorter game), but that really isn't a choice - you've already embarked on your journey, and while it's interesting to think "What if?", going back really isn't an option. So, you kill your innocence.

The fourth encounter is the most interesting. Well, the fight itself is a bit dull, but the dialog is pretty compelling. You meet Cyric, who hasn't been a major figure at all in the game, but who looms hugely in the story's background; Cyric followed the same path that you are currently on, born a mortal but ascending to godhood. Not only that, but he was the one who actually slew the god Bhaal, and so pretty directly set in motion all of the wheels that have been turning for the last several years. Cyric is now the god of... well, he has many portfolios, but one of them is Murder, and so he has a professional interest in what happens with Bhaal's resurrection and Bhaal's scattered essences. He probes you for a while, trying to determine whether you mean to resurrect Bhaal, or take Bhaal's place in the pantheon (which would implicitly require you assaulting Cyric). I honestly told him that I had no desire to become a new Lord of Murder; he seemed to believe me, but then still left behind a group of assassins to try to kill me. Hey... what else would you expect from a Chaotic Evil god?

Fifth and finally, you encounter the Ravager. You remember the Slayer, right? Bhaal's avatar, who you can turn into upon will? Well, the Ravager is like the mega-super-upgraded version of the Slayer. This was the only one of the challenges that was actually, well, challenging to me, mostly because the Ravager single-mindedly pursues your main character, and I only have so many Stoneskins. I think I died at least once in that fight.

Okay, enough of the challenges. Back to the main game:

You get the special ability "Pocket Plane", an AWESOME power that lets you teleport back to your pocket plane at will. In practice, I only used this when I finished major quests, but I think lower-level players would really appreciate the ability to retreat to a safe spot in order to rest, heal, and memorize spells. You can also take advantage of the plane's containers for storing all your stuff. As before, this really reminded me of an ancient game called Think Quick, which had a great feature that let you teleport to a hideout room, where you were safe from slime worms and could store and retrieve items.

You can also talk to the wall. Um... yeah. I think it's called the "Wall of Fate" or something like that, but it's pretty odd that you would talk to a wall. It gives you the ability to summon other people into Hell so they can join your party. That sounds like a weird thing to do to your friends, but whatever. In practice, this means that you can call forth almost any of your BG2 NPCs. I've never used this, and I'm not sure whether they'll have the same stats and equipment as when you last used them in SoA, or if you'll be getting special new ToB versions. A few oddities: you can't summon Yoshimo, although in this game I had kicked Yoshimo out of my party after we left Irenicus's dungeon and so I'd never witnessed his death. Also, I had three options for Anomen, which I think were something like "My lover Anomen the cleric", "My lover Sir Anomen", or "Anomen the fighter/cleric". That's part of what makes me think that ToB might be creating new versions of the NPCs not in your party - presumably, if it was keeping track from SoA, it would know exactly whether Anomen was your lover and whether he'd been knighted. (On the other hand, ToB does let you start a new game, so this might just be a way to have a new character and have the full flavor of the end-game without forcing you to re-play SoA.) (On the, um, third hand, it's totally possible that the whole multiple-Anomens thing is something that came from a mod.)

Oh, yeah, and there's Cespenar. Cespenar MIGHT be the most annoying character in the entire series. Yeah, Noober was kind of irritating, but you had to go out of your way to keep engaging him, and he eventually went away. And you can completely ignore Anomen with no negative consequences. Cespenar, though, is the ONLY other being in your pocket plane (at least when the Solar isn't visiting), and you NEED to talk with him in order to get the most powerful weapons in the game. The role he plays is the same as Cromwell in Amn, but they voice every one of his lines, and they do it with an incredibly aggravating, distorted, pitch-shifted voice actor. Oh, and he speaks in cute kiddy phrases, like "Oooo! Me looks for the shiny things!" It's as though Bioware had just seen the Phantom Menace, and said, "Hey, this Jar-Jar guy is HUGE! We need to put something like that in our game!"

The only reason I put up with him is, of course, because his stuff is top-quality. The Golem Manual is pretty awesome - I'd used the Clay one a fair amount in the SoA final chapters; Stone is good, but Adamantine is awesome. It's big enough that you can actually block out some areas with it. I got Mazzy a great short sword (Mask, I think), and Sarevok some powerful two-handed swords. At the very end of the game, I had Viconia give up her Crom Fayer for a fully-upgraded Flail of the Ages; with the strength difference, I'm not sure if FoA is really stronger, but in the final battle, it's a crucial weapon.

Hey, wasn't I supposed to be talking about the main story? Sorry about that. Back to Tethyr...

You show up in Saradush, where you meet up with Melissan ("Trust Me!"), who has helpfully gathered all the Bhaalspawn in one place where they can be conveniently destroyed... errrrr, I mean saved. The city is under siege, and you'll see a lot of activity from soldiers defending the walls against Yaga-Shura's invading army of fire giants. This is the first place in the game where you can buy and sell stuff, though if you're like me, there isn't much point in selling at this point in the game (I think I had well over half a million gold pieces, and the only things worth buying are Cespenar's upgrades and Potions of Superior Healing), but people starting new ToB games or running through SoA at breakneck speed may disagree. You have to be careful, though, because Saradush will later on be destroyed (spoiler!), and you won't be able to buy back, say, stuff you had sold to the innkeeper. This was one of many little differences between ToB and SoA. In SoA, there were a TON of merchants, and virtually all of them stuck around for the whole game; off the top of my head, the only ones I can think of who actually will normally leave over the course of a game are the Djinns outside Trademeet. In contrast, ToB has only a handful of merchants (at any given time, you might be able to access one or two), and they have a habit of dying on you.

My favorite part of Saradush is meeting with Volo; people who bought the boxed BG games will remember the great, thick spiral-bound game manuals that were stuffed with useful information and peppered with marginal notes from Volo and Elminster. Volo is chronicling the recent disturbances on the Sword Coast, and is thrilled at the chance of meeting the legends in the making. You can ask him about each person in your party, and hear his descriptions of them for the history he's writing. Really fun touch.

The rest of Saradush is pretty straightforward - there are a couple of mini-quests within the city, and for the main event, you need to sneak through the crypt into the fortress. Inside, General Gromnir, another Bhaalspawn, is nominally supposed to be Saradush's defender against the Five, but in practice is acting like a tyrant. Melissan keeps trying to persuade him to be nicer, which CURIOUSLY ENOUGH only hardens his resolve to ratchet up tensions with the cityfolk. Who could have possibly foreseen such an outcome?! He arrests Melissan, you arrive; you can chat with him, but no matter what, you need to fight him. He warns you not to trust Melissan (as if the game hadn't foreshadowed this enough already), then you battle.

In general, the ToB battles are harder than the SoA ones, and not just because I was badly overpowered by the end of SoA. I think that they might have upgraded the enemy AI, and in any case, the enemy spellcasters certainly know more high-level spells than anyone in SoA; even the anonymous mages who show up in boss battles are usually casting at the same level as lichs from SoA. That said... I was a sorcerer, I knew Improved Alacrity, Summon Planetar and Comet. You do the math. I generally didn't worry too much about buffing; if I knew a fight was coming up, I'd throw on Protection from Evil, Chant, and Bless, but never bothered with Haste or any of the Mage buffs. I had three arcane casters (Sebrina, Nalia, and Imoen) available to cast Ruby Ray and Breach when needed, which was fairly often; enemy mages are much better about keeping their defenses up, unlike in SoA where they usually trigger contingencies at the start of a fight but don't react when you take the defenses down. Other than this, I usually didn't bother casting offensive spells for any but the hardest battles, and so typically Imoen would attack with her Gesen bow, Nalia would fire the Darkfire Bow with +3 arrows, and Sebrina would wade into combat with her Staff of the Magi... and, of course, all the Stoneskins mana can buy. Viconia would usually melee, except for the harder boss fights, where she would hang back so she could dart in and Heal when needed. (I don't think I ever did a mid-battle Heal in SoA, but it was very useful in ToB; fortunately, Planetars each have 3 Heal spells, otherwise some of the battles like Sendai would have been tough with only Viconia as a cleric.) Mazzy and Sarevok were my meat-shields, although by now they were all getting HLAs and could do a ton of damage too. They were slower attackers than Chloe, who had dual-wielded and had a lot of attacks per round, but both could absorb a lot of damage. Mazzy waved her (upgraded) Short Sword of the Mask while crouching behind her +5 Shield of the Order. Sarevok switched between the Silver Sword (it very rarely did the instant-kill, but every once in a while you'll roll a natural 20 during that 25%), Gram, and the Psion's Blade.

I think I had to run the fight against Gromnir twice... the first time, I focused all my energies on his throne, and did well, but wasn't prepared for the reinforcements, who came up the stairs and slaughtered Nalia and Imoen. Argh - I had forgotten to raise their stoneskins. I probably still could have won, but was embarrassed at how that went down, so I restored and properly defended them. This time around, when doing my Improved Alacrity thing, I spawned a few Planetars in my rear line, in addition to the ones I dropped by the throne. It went much more quickly this time. Hooray! I had, um, killed the guy who was defending Saradush. Dang.

Melissan showed up and expressed her regret at how things had turned out. (Me: "Hey, didn't Gromnir just throw you in prison? How did you get out?" Melissan: "Hey, look over there!") She sends you on your next quest, to find and exploit Yaga-Shura's weakness. The lead-in to this has a one-off encounter that I think is one of the most effective of the expansion: outside a ruined Bhaal temple, you encounter the specter of your adopted father Gorion. In some ways, this is just the umpteenth time that we've had a variation on this scene, going all the way back to the dopelgangers in the original Baldur's Gate, but there's something particularly cruel about the way that this iteration of Gorion chastises you for the swath of blood you've left in your wake. What makes it effective is that, of course, he's kind of right; even if you're "good," you've killed an awful lot of people directly, and indirectly been responsible for the slaughter of thousands more. As always, it turns out that this isn't really Gorion, and you have to fight him, but it's still a well-done set piece.

Have you ever read the Chronicles of Prydain? In one of them, I think Taran Wanderer, the protagonist meets an immortal wizard. It turns out that the reason the wizard is immortal is because it has put its life essence into a piece of bone, which he then hid in a tree. It's impossible to kill the wizard since the bone is outside of his body; but, conversely, if anyone can find and destroy the bone, they'll immediately kill the wizard. I think this is a pretty ancient folk-tale theme, which periodically gets integrated into newer works of fiction; in particular, it provides much of the plot for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. ToB has another variation on this: Yaga-Shura is immortal and unkillable. As you learn, this is because his mother, a witch, has removed his heart and placed it in his fortress. Yaga-Shura is off ravaging the lands, safe from harm. She's bitter at his neglect, and tasks you to go and retrieve it, along with her own heart. After she destroys her son's heart, she's overcome with horror at what she's done, and attacks you to save her son's life. After dispatching her, you return to Saradush, where you see that you're too late; Yaga-Shura has breached the walls, burned down the city, and slaughtered all the Bhaalspawn inside.

Yaga-Shura, now mortal, goes down without too much trouble, though he has a lot of people assisting his army. Afterwards, Melissan appears again, expressing her sadness at how this has gone down (yeah, it's really TOO BAD that another Bhaalspawn has died, returning its essence to the Abyss! Hmm, who could possibly benefit from this?) but urging you to continue your hunt for the Five. There's a little interlude where you meet the general of Tethyr, who has brought a whole host to kill you and your companions. There are some nice dialog options here; you can seek to persuade him that you aren't the incarnate evil he thinks you are. I LOVE that one of the options you have is basically to ask him to get one of his mages to cast a Detect Evil spell; he does this, and is intelligent enough to trust it. Walking past the general, I was pretty amazed at just how big his army is; if you DID get into a fight with him, it would probably be the most on-screen characters I've ever encountered in a battle.

Traveling onward, you arrive in Amkethran, a desert city. Balthazar, the head monk of an adjacent order, greets you, and says that Melissan isn't there, but asks you to head on to defeat the next two of the Five. This is the first (and only!) part in the expansion where the gameplay gets non-linear, and you have exactly two choices of how to proceed: you can chase after Sendai, a Drow magician who is raising another Drow army to invade the surface; or Abazigal, the only Bhaalspawn to be descended from a dragon. I decided to first pursue Sendai, for the completely unnecessary reason that it took only 8 hours to reach her map space instead of 12.

There are a couple of small quests you can carry out in Amkethran. One incredibly annoying one is another encounter with Saemon, who uses your arrival to turn the town's mercenaries against you to get himself off the hook. I think I was vaguely amused with Saemon in my initial game, but felt far less charitable towards him in this game, perhaps because my sorceress was less inclined to look kindly upon roguish characters than Cirion my bard. I was bummed that I wasn't able to do another "quest", which is sort of an easter egg - you find a dwarf who can craft something from the special pants that you can collect through all three BG games. Unfortunately, even though I'd gotten the Golden Pantaloons in the first game, I hadn't held on to them. (I assume that it's possible to do so, but I'm not completely sure how, since the game strips you of all your equipment between BG1 and BG2. I THINK that I was still carrying them at the end of BG1, but probably on another party member, who didn't make it through.) One of these days, though, I'll remember that it's an option, and will be extra-careful with my leg garments.

Before entering Sendai's lair, you need to discover it, searching various locations in a drow-infested forest. This map features the second-least-surprising betrayal of the game: a woodcutter who greets you when you arrive, and claims to not know anything about drow ("Are they dark, elvish-looking folks?"), and points you to various locations where you are ambushed; at the first site, you see numerous dead woodcutters. FINALLY, he reveals himself to you, and after killing him you can go inside. Sendai's lair has a couple of choices for you (you can go through a spider-infested tunnel, or one with a crazy number of slaved enemies, or do both like me), and a lich fight, which is always fun. Sendai does a total James Bond villain thing, sending her henchmen against you one by one; as each is defeated, you see a cut scene where she berates the remaining supporters and sends out another wave. All of her henchmen are cakewalks, but Sendai herself was probably the toughest battle of the expansion for me, not counting the new Ascension finale sequence. She has six statues of herself, which come to life one by one, each of which makes life very difficult for you (turning invisible, teleporting, etc.); meanwhile, an endless stream of Drow warriors are pouring in through the door. I think these were the only fighters I came across in the whole game who had the fighter HLAs: they would do Critical Strikes, or whatever, and swiftly chop Mazzy and Sarevok down to dangerously low health. The fight was tough enough that I went back to micromanaging my spellcasters: I scattered Sebrina, Nalia and Imoen through the chamber, so they couldn't all get hit by the same environmental effects, and carefully kept an eye on each of them so they could constantly cast spells while staying out of danger. Sebrina brought in a host of Planetars, which always helps, but in this case wasn't sufficient by itself; Sendai moves around so quickly that she's impossible to pin down, and at least a few Planetars needed to help control the Drow incursion, and another would help out with healing or True Sight. Imoen and Nalia mostly had their hands full just trying to keep Sendai's spell protections down, though they also brought in their own summons and occasionally helped with direct damage - Comet is awesome, and Horrid Wilting is still quite effective, especially against groups of enemies. Oddly enough, Viconia ended up being my main melee fighter against the Sendai statues. Finally, once all the statues are activated, the real Sendai arrives, and stuff gets even MORE crazy. She can teleport at will, bouncing around the room like mad, turning invisible and dealing out damage before my True Sight catches up to her. I had a few characters die, but fortunately Viconia stayed on her feet long enough to bring them back into the fight. (Typically, Viconia would cast the standard Raise Dead; then, FOUR planetars would instantly swarm over to the newly raised person and frantically Heal them. I greatly appreciate the loyalty and enthusiasm, but honestly, their AI led something to be desired.) Perhaps worst of all, Sendai is apparently also a Cleric, and she is able to Heal herself several times during the fight. Counting the statues, I think I killed her about a dozen times before she finally went down.

There is some compensation for the trouble, though. Besides all the loot you get from this area - I forget the details, but there are at least some good items for Cespenar, and I think this was when I finished fully upgrading Mazzy's sword - you also get some personal loot from Sendai herself: some of her own potions, which act like a Heal spell, FULLY restoring your health. This is hugely helpful - Sarevok and Mazzy both had above 150 hitpoints, and in the Ascension battle, there just isn't time to restore normally, even with Superior healing - you NEED a Heal. I think there are only two of these potions, but they're some of the best items in the whole game.

Abazigal's lair is a bit different. Instead of a steadily increasing difficulty, your very first battle is one of the hardest: you meet Draconic (ha!), Abazigal's son. Guess what: Draconis is also a dragon! What a twist! It's a good fight, though... I'd gotten somewhat jaded by the SoA dragon fights, which are really challenging at the beginning but end up being much easier than the lich fights. Draconis is a worthy match, though. It's always impressive when a single enemy can fully occupy a full six heroes.

Within the lair, there's... I guess a bit of puzzle stuff, but not really. You use a set of pools to move between different rooms. You need to collect certain items before you can use certain pools. There are monsters to fight. Kind of standard stuff.

EXCEPT... this lair also has hands-down my favorite scene in the entire Baldur's Gate saga. It may be my single best memory from my first game, and it didn't disappoint this time around. It starts off ordinarily enough: you swim into a cavern filled with murderous flying skulls, destroy dozens of them, then locate the evil, insane wizard, who has the wardstone that you need in order to break the geas on a dragon who is guarding Abazigal's throne room. You chat with him; while he's certainly insane, he doesn't feel any particular loyalty toward Abazigal nor any particular hostility towards you. He's willing to give up the stone, if you will rescue an eyestalk that is being held captive by some kobolds in a nearby cavern. Kobolds? "Or beholders. Something like that. I forget." This is just about the most standard sort of FedEx fetch-and-carry quest that you can get... but then, the wizard points out, you do have the option of subcontracting the quest. It seems that some Level One adventurers got here just before you, and were "excited" about questing and whatnot, before getting turned to stone by the mad wizard. Well... use a Stone to Flesh scroll to wake them up, then give them a dramatic pep speech. The FATE of the ENTIRE WORLD rests upon their shoulders!!! They must VENTURE FORTH and retrieve for you... a BEHOLDER'S stolen EYESTALK!!! They are bright-eyed and eager. It's a party of three: Nanoc (heh) the Barbarian, who (he never hesitates to tell you) is not bound by the shackles of civilization; a level-one mage (who, he proudly points out, can cast Magic Missile); and a thief (who is good at backstabbing, once, and then needs to hide). You urge them to do it for honor, for glory, and for a princely reward: one HUNDRED pieces of gold! Heads held high, they strut out on their quest. Then, "Several days later..." (haha!), they return, all excited: it's hands-down the most epic fight that any of them have been involved in. They're so cocky that they start whispering to themselves that they can take Sebrina. ("I'll backstab, and you cast Magic Missile!") They attack. You turn into the Slayer and tear them apart. "Nanoc the Barbarian reloads..." Bwahaha! This time, sufficiently chastened, they hand over the eyestalk, and collect their princely reward. "It was a pretty good quest. I found a scroll of Identify!"

The whole thing is hilarious, and also weirdly, strongly touching. You are now playing the same sort of role that characters like Elminster and Drizzt played way back in the original Baldur's Gate. And, the best part is, you can see an entire gradual path that connects these points from then until now. These aren't discrete points in a novel or a movie, where the foreward shows the hero as a young man and the climax shows the powerful hero at the height of his field. No; you've done this yourself. You've experienced every trek through Beregost; every sword that swung and missed at an xvart, until you started hitting xvarts, until you started hitting kobolds, until you started fighting skeletons, until you stopped being afraid of skeletons. There's no blackout, there's no shift in narrative. This is your story. Every single action taken is YOUR action, not the action of an author. The game... the game is giving you permission to feel proud about yourself, pride in your achievements. You're looking into a lens, and seeing a form of who you used to be; that emphasizes all that you became, and all that you are. I think that's why, to this day, I think that Baldur's Gate is the single most epic RPG that I've ever played. Other games, like the Ultima series, have plots that stretch longer or that cover more territory, but always scattered across discrete and restarting game experiences. One close analogy might be Sierra's Quest for Glory, which did have contiguous advancement, but severely thrashed in tone from game to game. Baldur's Gate has been a single, long, unbroken story; you couldn't even see it while you were inside, since you were climbing so gradually, but now, as you are just below the mountain's crest, you are turning, looking back, and seeing the path which you've climbed. Savor the view. You've earned it.

Ahem.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Abazigal. He's another nice fight, but nowhere near as difficult as Sendai (at least not in my version; from what I understand, the "tougher" version includes multiple dragons, which would be AMAZING), and not even much more difficult than Draconis. My army of Planetars helped beat him into submission.

During the course of chasing down Sendai and Abazigal, you chat with them a bit about the "betrayal". Your dialog options are basically "Oh, you mean Balthazar?" or "Oh, you mean Melissan?" I initially flagged Melissan as the traitor, because, come on now, honestly! It turns out, though, that they were actually referring to Balthazar: he's another of the Five, and presumably had directed you towards them so he could be the last one standing, and the most powerful.

Back in Amkethran, Balthazar's followers are now hostile towards you (though I'm not totally sure whether this is plot-related or because I had earlier ticked off a practicing mercenary captain and killed his company). You meet with Saemon again; Balthazar has shut down the black market with a vengeance, eliminating all of the smugglers and thieves except for Saemon. He offers to disguise you and sneak you into the monastery. Um, thanks, but for some bizarre reason I don't trust you, dude. I took the alternate way, past a lich I'd already killed and through a secret passageway direct into Balthazar's throne room. (Who knew that monks got to sit on thrones?)

Okay: I'm pretty sure that this is where the changes in Ascension start to kick in. The dialog with Balthazar is much longer than I'd remembered, and it allows you to dramatically change the shape of the climax. It turns out that Balthazar is actually what he initially seemed: a good guy fighting against the forces of evil. Yes, he's a Bhaalspawn, but like you (assuming you played a good path like me) he has fought against his Bhaal nature. Yes, he joined the Five, but only so he could thwart their plans. He reveals the shape of the plot to you. As each Bhaalspawn dies, its essence is returned to the Abyss. Once a single Bhaalspawn remains, it will channel the collected essence and bring about the rebirth of Bhaal. The Five had planned to carry this out, and would then be Bhaal's immortal commanders. Balthazar, playing a long scam, intends to outlive the other Five, and make sure that every other Bhaalspawn is dead; then, when only he remains, instead of raising Bhaal he will sacrifice himself, consecrating his soul as he does so so it remains beyond the reach of the Abyss. This will deny Bhaal's resurrection.

Pretty heady stuff, huh? Seems way more noble than you, stumbling around the Realms just trying to survive. By now, you and he seem to be the only Bhaalspawn left. He regrets killing you, since you have tried to be a genuinely good person, but the fate of the world is more important. You can eventually persuade him to join your cause, and together confront Melissan. Oh, yeah: he FINALLY revealed that she's the ultimate bad person here. (Gasp! Shock!) Melissan is the High Priestess of Bhaal, and has been orchestrating all the events leading to Bhaal's resurrection; she doesn't have any Bhaal essence herself, but she recruited the Five and has manipulated the chaos that has allowed them to slaughter the Bhaalspawn and hasten the resurrection. You point out that, if the two of you can stop Melissan, and both remain alive, then Bhaal will remain dead. He eventually agrees.

In my first game, he promptly killed himself. Hm, that was... odd. I reloaded, went through the conversation again, and this time he simply teleported out at the end, saying that he'd be ready and by my side when the time came to fight Melissan. I'm not sure if what I initially experienced was a totally random bug, or if I'd accidentally ordered him to commit seppuku through one of my dialog responses.

I teleported back to the Pocket Plane, where I had a final discussion with the Solar. It turns out (and I forget whether you learn this here or in the next scene) that Melissan hadn't only betrayed you, and the other Bhaalspawn, and the Five, but even Bhaal himself. She has orchestrated events such that she is the direct guardian of all the essence of the dead god. She intends to tap this essence, not to raise Bhaal, but to raise herself to divinity. With a god's full power, she can usurp a new role. Ao the Overfather and the other gods are upset about this, and have selected you to block her plans. After facing the fifth challenge, you will have outgrown the use of your pocket plane, and can escape it like a cocoon, finally confronting the immensity of the Abyss and stopping Melissan's plot.

As a side note - the solar was another kind of annoying element in the game. It delivers a lot of exposition, but it's weirdly mediated exposition. Frequently, the solar will say that it needs you to understand something, and then it will summon someone else (your mother, Gorion, a version of yourself) who actually talks to you, and then ask, "Do you understand now?" It seemed to be behaving a bit like a narrator, but occupied a lot of time and attention for what's essentially a pass-through role. It's not BAD, exactly, but seemed a bit needlessly contrived.

I was ready for the final battle. I stepped forward, went to the gates, stepped through... and back into Balthazar's throne room. Hmm, that's... odd... I teleported back to the pocket plane and walked around, wondering if maybe the Solar was waiting somewhere with further instructions. Nobody was there except for useless Cespenar. I went back to the gates. Back in Amkethlan. Argh.

I reluctantly hopped online and checked out FAQs. It seems like, when I left the plane, the gates should have asked me if I was ready for the final battle. Instead, I wasn't getting that dialog and immediately teleporting to where I'd left. I figured that one of my mods must be thwarting it, but which one? The obvious culprit was BP-Ascension. I uninstalled it, restarted the game, and tried again. Argh, still no dice. I was running about a dozen mods, most of which had only been active back in SoA, and wasn't relishing the thought of uninstalling all of them. Now that I was reading up on Ascension again, though, I was finding MORE posts that were talking about problems with BP-Ascension. Phooey. On a whim, I downloaded the 2009 standalone Ascension mod from Weimar's site. I installed it, restarted, and headed to the gates - hooray! This time it let me through!

Your pocket plane dissolves, and you are left with an unfettered view of the Abyss, centered at the Throne of Bhaal. They did a REALLY good job on design for this. I would have assumed that the Throne was something medieval and/or demonic - a grand chair anointed with skulls, dripping ichor into a river of blood, surrounded with flames, something like that. Instead, it's something that looks very Planar, almost sci-fi: a set of rings suspended in the black void of the Abyss. The Throne proper consists of two founts, facing one another, with a constantly-streaming flow of Bhaal essence between them. Presumably, were Bhaal present, he would be occupying this position, suspended in the center of the Abyss. As it stands, though Melissan is there. Since she doesn't intend to raise Bhaal, she doesn't require your remaining essence, and has already started the process of transforming herself into a goddess.

First, though, she's required by law and custom to give you the standard evil villainess speech. I think that this part may also be different from before. Besides filling you in on her plan, she also taunts you for how she's manipulated you and all the trouble she's caused. The creators have ret-conned Melissan into the plot of earlier games, and she now reveals that she had given Irenicus the idea of tormenting you and Imoen for your souls, and so she was fairly directly responsible for all the suffering of the previous game. To top this off, she summons Irenicus and Bodhi, who also take time to mock you. Here in the Abyss, with Bhaal's power, she's been able to rescue Irenicus from the torment that you had sent him to, and he'll willingly serve her, even in the afterlife. Bodhi is... a bit different; I'm still a little fuzzy on exactly how her vampiricism affects her afterlife. Bodhi also taunts you, but given the dialog options here, it seems likely that evil characters may be able to recruit Bodhi to their side by promising her a piece of your soul (or maybe someone else's soul, or some Bhaal essence? again, I'm a little unclear) in exchange for her service. I made the offer (hey, if I'll accept Sarevok's help, why not Bodhi's?), and she seemed to take it seriously before ultimately rejecting, saying that she didn't trust me to give her a soul.

Balthazar arrives (I'm not sure how; can high-level monks teleport between the planes?) to let Melissan know that yet another Bhaalspawn remains alive, and intends to oppose her. Melissan has become extremely powerful, and she forces Imoen to transform into the Slayer. This section is a little heartbreaking; you see Imoen's voice saying "Help me!" while her body becomes the thing of nightmares. Melissan dives back into the Throne; she's busy sucking up Bhaal essence, and trusts Irenicus and Bodhi to take care of you. They attack, along with a Fallen Deva and the berserk transformed Imoen.

Needless to say, this was a lot more difficult than the climactic battle with Irenicus at the end of Shadows of Amn. Irenicus himself seems faster and more deadly. Facing him alongside other opponents, though, just elevates the difficulty. Bodhi is as nasty as ever; she can drain five levels in a single hit, and moves very quickly; when you finally kill her, she transforms into mist that moves away even more quickly, and then comes back at full health. I studiously avoided fighting Imoen, figuring that I'd try to avoid killing her if at all possible, and if needed, she could wait until the end (as always, you should go after the spellcasters first, and level-draining opponents next). Also, I was at a bit of a tactical disadvantage: having just teleported in, and starting the fight right after a long dialog, I hadn't had a chance to do my normal summons or buffing. I fought long and hard, directing most of my force against the Deva first, but I couldn't take him down until after Bodhi had been killed and reborn several times and Nalia and Viconia had been killed.

I reloaded, and this time raised my buffs in the pocket plane prior to activating the Gate for the final battle. This time around, I very cautiously micromanaged Sebrina and Nalia's spells. Now, in the past, my favored move with Sebrina had been Improved Alacrity, followed by Timestop, followed by several Summon Planetars and Comets. Since Sebrina wears the Robes of Vecna and the Amulet of Power, she can get off a lot of spells within Improved Alacrity, but Timestop does take a little while to get going. In this battle, I discovered that for these particular casts, it actually made the most sense to forego the Time Stop; I think Summon Planetar has a normal casting time of 5, but my equipment reduces that to 1, so I can instantly cast it and move on to the next spell; if I had the interest, I could bring in twelve Planetars in a single two-round Improved Alacrity. Of course, I didn't go quite that far, but I did spam in six or so Planetars, then tossed down a Comet, raised True Sight, and dispelled protections from my opponents. Meanwhile, Nalia was retreating to a safe spot away from Imoen, and bringing down some Comets of her own. With a larger army, the fight got easier. Even though I still focused on the fallen deva, I could devote one or two planetars each to Irenicus and Bodhi; they have good immunities and lots of health, so I didn't need to babysit them too much.

It's kind of funny, but since the final battle goes on for so long, I learned a ton about the game's AI that I had never picked up earlier in the game. For example, Planetars had always been awesome in the past, but now I was learning that they could be obstinate and disobedient. For example, I would often notice that a bunch of Planetars were clustered around one enemy, while another wasn't occupied. I would select a few of them, and tell them to attack the new guy. They would start to float over... and then, before they'd gone five feet, they're turn around and float back to the guy I'd just left. It seems like the AI has a script that it REALLY wants to follow; you can direct it, but it doesn't even complete the action that you've directed (e.g., actually trying to hit the guy you wanted to hit), before rechecking and resetting its mission (attack the nearest guy). I could be wrong, but it felt like I had a bit more luck when I issued move commands rather than attack commands; once I got a Planetar into the right place, it would generally happily commence whacking the nearest baddie. Balthazar was also interesting. He's very powerful and you can give him fairly detailed commands, with access to some of his special abilities like Quivering Palm and Lay on Hands. However, for the most part I just let the AI run him around, and it seemed to do a good job; he's hard to hit, and even when my party was having trouble he was rarely in danger of dying. However, I also noticed that, while the AI is controlling him, he seems to have access to a lot of abilities that I can't access: "Lunar stance!" "Murdering Palm!" It may just have to do with my unfamiliarity with the class - I've never played a Monk, and there aren't any Monk NPCs in the game - but whatever, I had enough on my mind that I was glad to not need to micromanage him.

This time, the fight went much better. The Fallen Deva took a surprisingly long time to kill - I suspect that it may be upgraded from the version Viconia can summon - but eventually went down. Bodhi and Irenicus were usually occupied by a cluster of Planetars, and for the most part left us alone. Imoen and Balthazar spent most of their time chasing each other around the map, which was fine by me. After the Deva died, Bodhi followed suit. I hadn't been paying as close of attention to that fight, but it certainly feels like she didn't go through the death/resurrection cycle multiple times. Maybe the Planetars were able to hunt down and kill her in mist form, or maybe Balthazar knocked her unconscious at some point and they finished the job before she woke up.

Finally, Imoen transformed back. Hooray! There's a rare intra-battle banter where she talks about the ordeal, and wonderingly asks how you could have gone through something like that multiple times. She asks if you want her to rejoin your group. Um... yes, of course! It's not like I enjoy having an empty sixth party slot! She game back in, although she was suffering a persistent Miscast Magic that would remain through the remainder of the fight and longer afterwards.

Irenicus was a machine - he kept bringing up Mantles and Stoneskins as quickly as I could bring them down, and occasionally would Stop Time and bring down horrible firestorms upon us all - but with all our energies focused against him, he died. FINALLY.

I should mention that this was a really, really long fight. Not only did I have to restart it at least once, but even when I did beat it, it probably took me well over thirty minutes to do so. It wouldn't look that long in real-time, of course, but in order to succeed, you really need to carefully manage your arcane casters, making sure they're always doing something useful, and monitor the field as a whole to make sure that each enemy is appropriately engaged and nobody is killing Imoen. It was my longest fight so far, but wouldn't be the longest of the game.

At last, I was able to stop and breathe. I hurriedly and triumphantly saved my game - after such a long investment of time, the last thing I wanted was to go through that fight AGAIN. We started exploring the Throne. Balthazar noted that Melissan seemed to be drawing in the Essence from the three pools nearby, and speculated that we could get her attention and force her to come out and confront us if we disrupted her link to them. "I'm not sure if it'll work, but what else can we do? Wait here for her to become a god?"

At each pool, you touch the essence, and then a whole bunch of demons show up to fight you. It's a similar batch at each - a Marilith, and I think some Bators and Glabraazu (sp). After the battle with Irenicus, this is mercifully easier, not least because you can get your buffs and summons ready before the demons arrive. And, as an extra-good bonus, each time you beat a fight, the pool of essence will give a Greater Restoration to all of your party members, AND, even better, provide a Rest! That's right: you can re-memorize your spells after each fight. That's a relief, and also a great piece of game design. It would be totally unrealistic for you to be able to sleep while standing outside the Throne of Bhaal while Melissan transforms into a goddess - kind of destroys the entire sense of urgency. But, it would also be totally impossible to do an epic multi-part fight if you had cast all your spells before the last battles even began. This was a great way to improve the gameplay for this terrific, extended climax.

Each pool also gives your PC a unique batch of special powers. Unlike most Special Abilities, these automatically recharge after a very short time; I think that one of them makes you immune to Time Stop for 30 seconds, and refreshes every minute. Others are, sadly, fairly useless. One is supposed to let you take control of a demon, but it didn't work the one time I tried it on the Marilith, and, well, there weren't any other chances after that, since the game is over. You also get what SOUNDS like a really cool power, called Unleash, which lets you channel your Bhaal essence onto an opponent and directly damage them with that power instead of transforming yourself into Bhaal's avatar; it does a ton of damage, and will give you Miscast Magic and be unable to transform into the Slayer for a few minutes after casting. Unfortunately, there are only two enemies upon which I would want to cast this, and BOTH of them are immune to it. Phooey.

After the final pool has been cleansed, the game warns you that you have only moments before the final battle. I already had my mini-army of Planetars standing ready, so I brought in the Adamantine golem, had my mages refresh their Stoneskins, and cast a final Bless on us all. Melissan arrives; she's more perturbed than angry, like a store manager who's irritated that they need to deal with an unruly customer. She's a little surprised that Irenicus couldn't finish the job, but she knows who can, and so summons in the "Five" (really, four) to stand against you. Balthazar laughs at her - she has had to give up a lot of her Bhaal essence to restore the Five/Four, and so she's taking a risk, reducing herself to mortal levels. She acknowledges this, but says it doesn't matter; she'll continue collecting essence, and once you're dead she can add yours to the pool as well.

Melissan hops back into the Throne, leaving the Four to deal with you. And... wow. Oh my gosh. They are HARD. At least Abazigal isn't in dragon form, but he's still a nastily powerful mage. I think Ilasera is technically a fighter/mage, but she acts like a thief: she turns invisible, and prowls around the battlefield, sneaking behind your lines and striking at your vulnerable points. Sendai only has one form this time, but unfortunately it's her last and most powerful: the kind where she "twists an onyx ring", teleports around the map at will, brings down death, and can heal herself and others. The worst one of all, though, is Yaga-Shura, who seems to be back in the invulnerable-giant mode from before you destroyed his heart. And, yes, you need to fight ALL FOUR of them at the SAME TIME. Joy.

The first time I fought this, the battle stretched on for close to an hour, and I still died near the end. My usual MO is to focus on one particular enemy, so I can kill them as quickly as possible and gain a better numerical advantage; I try to keep the others minimally occupied if possible, or else just accept their blows until I can turn my attention to them. Anyways, this time I used True Sight to keep Ilasera in view, and focused almost everything I had against her. She went down without too much trouble. From then on, things got steadily worse. Abazigal was acting like a pure mage, and so logically was the next threat; while I was attacking him, though, my Planetars' meters expired, and they zipped back to the celestial realms. D'oh. I'd blown a lot of Comets in the early stages of the fight, and so could only summon up a few replacement Planetars. Abazigal was the master of contingencies, and I wasted a lot of precious swings from Mazzy and Sarevok while he was in invulnerable mode. By the time I'd taken him down, Sendai had managed to kill Imoen and Nalia. Yaga-Shura was fortunately trading blows with my Adamantine Golem and then my Planetars, but he was implacably advancing towards the main action.

I resurrected Nalia, only to have her die in a firestorm. Blech. A second resurrection took properly, though she wasn't able to get back into her armor/robes, due to being in the middle of a fight. Heh... how appropriate that I wouldn't realize that particularly germane rule until the climax of the whole game. Abazigal finally went down, around the same time that the last of my available Planetars expired. I went to check on Yaga-Shura, who I had totally ignored but who had spent the entire battle so far under constant assault from my most powerful summons. "Barely Wounded." What the heck?! I scrolled up through the list of messages about the fight, thinking that he must have received a Heal from Sendai. It didn't look like it - we'd been landing plenty of blows on him, but each time for just 1 hit of damage. Argh. Was this another bug?

I had a rare, brilliant flash of inspiration - Nalia had Maze memorized! This doesn't have a saving throw, and I was fairly sure that Yaga-Shura didn't have a high intelligence. If I wanted anything, I wanted a cleaner battlefield - I'd have to face him eventually, but I wanted it to be after I'd taken care of Sendai. I made sure that Yaga-Shura was focused on Sarevok, then had Nalia run in and Maze him. I honestly don't think I've ever cast that spell before, and I was relieved when it worked as advertised. Finally, I could turn my attention to Sendai.

With all of us after her, I could finally make some headway, but not nearly enough. She's impossible to pin down, and leaves a ton of damage in her wake. Plus, like Abazigal, she's anal about keeping up her protections. The good news was, she seemed to be going light on the self-Heal spells, and so I was finally getting her down in health... and then Melissan showed up. At this point, she's huge, dressed in black, and she likes to keep a Globe of Blades spinning around her. The one good piece of news is that she usually acts like a Fighter and not like a Mage, so whenever she locked on one of my characters (generally a hapless Mage), I would hastily bring up Stoneskin, then run like mad away from her. More often then not, she would give chase, and leave the rest of us free to continue desperately trying to kill Sendai.

At last, I managed to kill Sendai. Then Yaga-Shura returned. Oh, CRAP - I had completely forgotten about him. He's still Barely Wounded. I attack him frantically. 1 point of damage. 1 point of damage. This isn't working. I leave Mazzy to play with the giant and have everyone else gang up on Melissan. This is at least a bit more successful: I'm landing 6 or 7 points of damage with each blow. She creeps further down... further down... then, once she's Near Death, she teleports back to the Throne, restores her essence, brings back her Globe of Blades, and leaps back into the fight. I check her. Uninjured. CRAP! Mazzy dies. Sarevok dies. Melissan casts Time Stop, then hits my main character a dozen times and kills her. Game over. Arghaghagha!

So... the next day, when I calmed down, I restored my last save and tried it again. This time, I took a few extra precautions. First, I waited for all my previous Planetars to leave, and then summoned a fresh batch; since this resets their timers, it would mean that I would get to keep them for longer, and since I would get a Rest anyways, there was no downside. I raised plenty of extra buffs for this final fight, including some Improved Invisibility - unlike Bless and Chant, mage buffs like II are especially good because their duration increases with your level, which means that they would last longer into the fight as well. I also carefully positioned my summons. I knew where the Four would arrive - Sendai and Yaga-Shura to the left, Abazigal and Illasera to the right - and that my party would be forced to the bottom, so I divided my Planetar host in two and set each group between me and the Four. I also made sure my Golem was set up to block Yaga-Shura. I re-saved with all my buffs ready, touched the pool, and launched back into the final fight.

As usual, since I already knew what I was doing, it went much easier. This time, I had Nalia Maze Yaga-Shura right at the very beginning of the fight, long before he could occupy much time or damage. I sent most of the Planetars to kill Sendai, and Balthazar tagged along as well; she was still teleporting all over the map, but they chased her so resolutely that she didn't have much time to get up to mischief as she flitted around. Illasera actually lasted a bit longer this time - before I could cast True Sight she had already snuck up and hammered Imoen (thank goodness for Stoneskin!) - but with all my NPCs focused on her, she didn't stick around for too long. Since I'd been neglecting Abazigal, the Planetars hadn't been able to wound his Absolute Immunity, but once I turned my attention to him, he opened up, and VERY quickly died.

This time around, Melissan arrived early, so I had to deal with her, plus Sendai, plus the specter of an imminent Yaga-Shura. I tried to avoid her as best as I could, dispelling her Globe of Blades but otherwise ignoring her. Fortunately, Balthazar latched onto her once she arrived, and they kept each other busy enough that I could eventually kill Sendai.

Another thing that's funny: by this point in the game, all my fighters were into their level 30's. This meant, among other things, that they had taken a bunch of HLAs. Mazzy had a lot more XP than Sarevok, so I think she had access to something like 8 Critical Strikes, while Sarevok only had maybe four and a couple of Hardiness promotions. Anyways, I had never, ever, ever used any of those abilities. It just hadn't been worth my time before. Well, now it suddenly was, and they suddenly became very useful. When I DID manage to (briefly) corner Sendai, having a Critical Strike proved hugely effective, since it meant that the few blows I could land on her did serious damage. Even better: Smite (I think) could actually STUN her, one of the toughest enemies in the whole game, which meant a precious whole round or two where not just my fighters, but also the Planetars, could all get their licks in. After repeating a few times, Sendai died. All hail the wonderful fighter HLAs!

I half-heartedly started whacking Melissan, keeping an eye on her health. Periodically she would case Time Stop, and I never remembered to have my special ability active, but fortunately Balthazar is sometimes able to remain active during a Time Stop, so he could smack her and chase her and keep her from killing us all. Finally, Yaga-Shura returned, and we all switched over to him. Good grief, what a slog. I eventually figured out that he was (relatively) vulnerable to Ice, and immediately smacked myself in the head at my stupidity. That's seriously remedial Baldur's Gate 1 stuff - he's a FIRE GIANT, for crying out loud! Of COURSE he's (relatively) vulnerable to cold! Unfortunately, I had almost no way to take advantage of this - I didn't have any Cones of Cold memorized, nor any icy swords - but, amusingly enough, my weakest fighters were best equipped to exploit this weakness. I had held onto a few Arrows of Ice, which I don't think I'd ever used in SoA or ToB, and divided them among Imoen and Nalia. They stayed a safe distance back, and cautiously fired in. I also had Viconia switch from the Crom Fayer to the upgraded Flail of Ages. This proved to be a huge unintended blessing. Not only did I do a (relatively) decent amount of damage with the cold-damage component of the flail, but each of the heads did their own damage as well. Yeah, granted, the other damage was only a single point each, but still: given that mighty Sarevok and Mazzy were only doing 1 point of damage with each hit, it was pretty impressive for Viconia to lay down six or ten or so points of damage with a single strike.

And Sebrina? She was a little bored, and spent most of her time casting Lower Resistance on Melissan. On further reflection, I'm not sure if this actually did anything, but it felt like making progress.

Killing Yaga Shura was one of the longest experiences of my life. It took way longer than killing Safer Sephiroth. Way longer than getting a driver's license at the DMV. Way longer than attending a four-year university. At long last, he creeped down from Barely Injured to Injured. We kept swinging away at him. Every once in a while, Melissan would grow extra-annoying, and I'd need to resurrect someone or dispel her protections. All my Planetars got bored and left. Sebrina started Improved Alacrity and summoned another six, more out of desire for company than for any tactical advantage. Most of them threw themselves at Melissan, who enjoyed slowly killing them while we blunted our weapons against Yaga-Shura.

Injured... Badly Injured... Near Death... I was growing irrational now, worried that a power spike would trip my power supply or that Melissan would pull one of her patented "Time Stop and then let's kill Sebrina while she's helpless" moves. I belatedly brought up my Focus, then managed to forget about Time Stop again. Shoot... shoot... whack... thwack... finally, at long last, Viconia swung the Flail of Ages one time too many, and the giant went down. He's very tall, so presumably it took a while for him to fall, but he made for a very impressive corpse.

I focus on Melissan, and immediately start feeling some satisfaction. At the next blow, she gets startled, and blurts out, "What's this? I'm mortal again? No!" It seems that Balthazar was right - she had divested herself of so much essence raising the Five (that's FOUR!) that, when they were destroyed, she could no longer draw on their power, and so was a mortal again.

I had to be careful while fighting Melissan - by now I had used up pretty much all of my level 9 spells, and had to carefully conserve the reserve items I had - but she was much, much easier than Yaga-Shura, and maybe even easier than Sendai. Melissan's weakness appeared to be electrical attacks. I didn't want to risk Viconia in there with her Flail of Ages - with all of my Planetars finally gone, I didn't have anyone else available to Heal, and only a Rod of Resurrection to Raise - but my mages each had some Chain Lightning available. I haven't cast this in a while, since it doesn't do a lot of damage, and it seems... weird... to cast on just one opponent, but it was about the only spell I could find that would hurt her. Unlike with Yaga-Shura, regular enchanted weapons would damage her as well, and so Mazzy and Sarevok kept up their Critical Strike regimen. Balthazar was finally free of distractions, and could devote himself full-time to whupping her. I'm not sure if it was Balthazar or one of my fighters, but we were occasionally able to stun Melissan, which always made me a bit relieved. As it was, I always carefully kept Viconia and Sebrina well away from the fray, just in case things went awry.

At long last, Melissan fell! I cheered in my heart. The Solar appeared, announced "Enough!", and began to lay out the terms of resolution. The gods had spoken: Melissan was unworthy to wield the power she had sought. The other Bhaalspawn, though, had a choice to make: if they wished, they could surrender their Bhaal essence, thus giving up the taint (and the immortality that comes with it), and returning to a normal, mortal life. Balthazar is practically weepy with gratitude - this is all he ever wanted, and he's overjoyed at the Solar's gift. Imoen is emotional as well; she has only recently confronted her Bhaal nature, and only VERY recently seen the darkest manifestation of it, so she doesn't have any regrets at giving it up and returning to the person she always thought she was.

You, as the last and most powerful Bhaalspawn, have a choice to make. You can follow the steps of Imoen and Balthazar, surrendering your Bhaal essence and becoming an untainted mortal. The Solar will then attach all the Bhaal essence to Melissan. Melissan, who doesn't intrinsically have a connection to the Essence, has bound some of it to her soul, much like grafting a new limb onto a tree. Even if they wished to be merciful, the gods couldn't just remove it from her. Instead, she will be bound away in the Celestial Palace for all eternity; the Bhaal essence will go with her, removing its evil from all the Planes forever. You would be free to live out your life as you see fit, without being bound by destiny.

Alternatively? The Solar could kill Melissan. You would then be free to take her essence, and all that which has been collecting in the Abyss for years. You would become a god. What kind of god you would become is up to you - the nature of your divinity flows from evil, but you have shown yourself to be a force for good, and so over time you can find your right place within the pantheon. This gives you immense power, of course, and also incredible enemies: you would certainly come to the attention of Cyric, and other gods as well, and would likely struggle for millennia across multiple Planes.

The final battle finally over, the game now turns to what I love most about BG2: the interaction with NPCs. It starts out with my newest friend, Balthazar, who gives advice on the situation. He doesn't exactly say to surrender the godhood, but he does ask you to think about how much trouble your portion of the Bhaal essence has given you in your life, and whether you really believe you'll be able to stick to the good path when confronted with all of it. He then says that we have to be careful, because Melissan is in the Throne, and that you need to disrupt the three pools with the Bhaal essence. "I'm not sure if it'll work, but what else can we do? Wait here for her to become a god?" Um... what? Then Melissan teleported in - while also lying dead on the floor, and taunted me. Then started attacking. As the party fought back, I frantically tried talking to everyone. Balthazar didn't have anything to say, nor did Imoen or Viconia. I chatted with the Solar, who started the whole conversation over again, telling Melissan that she was being stripped of her power. (Whether she was talking to the one lying on the floor or chasing me around, I couldn't say.) She gave Balthazar and Imoen their chances again, they surrendered their essences for a second time, the Solar laid out my choice, Balthazar weighed in with his advice... and, once again, warned about the essence pools, and a THIRD Melissan teleported in and started attacking.

I was getting royally ticked off. After ALL of that - and, worse, without even the chance of an interim save point - my game

was

being

ruined

by

a

bug!

It seemed clear that Ascension was glitching. I knew enough to guess that it was due to some other, weird mod interaction that it was causing problems, but at this point, I was so not in the mood to mess around with stuff, mere moments from the end of the game. I half-heartedly opened the Ascension dialog files in gvim and quickly found the conversation that was getting messed up. Everything SEEMED fine - I could see the parts where it inserted Balthazar's speech, and where it was supposed to return to Imoen afterwards - and I could also see the earlier, totally unrelated speech that he was segueing into, but I couldn't make out how the latter would cause the former. Something lower-level seemed to be messed up, and this wasn't something I'd be able to fix by tweaking a line and recompiling the mod.

I thought long and hard, and decided that the only way to fix it would probably be to make a clean, fresh install of SoA and ToB, then install Ascension, and only the other mods that seemed necessary. While googling for other people who'd had my problem, I hadn't seen anyone else with the exact same symptoms, but plenty of others who had various other quirks with Ascension (usually well before this point), and the rule of thumb seemed to be that Ascension should be one of the earliest mods that you install - after the Fixpack, but before any other mods and before the Tweak Pack. That made some sense then - after all, I had installed Ascension absolutely last, and with the two versions I had tried, something might have gotten mis-adjusted.

I called it a night, and then spent a few hours the next day re-installing all four discs of the game, the fifth disc of Throne of Bhaal, then copying to a backup directory, then copying over my mods (not all of them, but I did try to bring over all the ones that had content I was indirectly profiting from - for example, the Colours of Infinity mods that had given my main character new special abilities - on the off chance that not having them installed would break my saved games), then re-installing all the mods. Mod installation is generally pretty fast, but the Tweak Pack feels like it takes an age... you need to answer many questions, which are usually very pithily phrased.

At long last, the game was re-installed and stable. I'd copied over my saved games, and held my breath as I re-loaded my last save, from before the final fight. It seemed to go well - I was missing a couple of crucial pieces of equipment (notably a Belt of Fire Giant Strength for Viconia and Nalia's robes), but nothing was obviously buggy. Keeping my fingers crossed, I cleansed the last pool and began the fight.

I immediately noticed some very slight differences. In my previous fights, Illasera hadn't been immediately visible during the pre-fight dialog. Now, I could see her standing near Abazigal, though she still turned invisible once the fight started. Now, there was NO WAY that I was going to suffer through that whole fight again, on top of re-installing the game, so this time I took full advantage of cheating without any guilt: with debug mode enabled, you can move your mouse cursor over an enemy, and then press Ctrl+Y to deal them massive damage. This immediately kills almost everyone; it doesn't instant-kill Yaga-Shura, but it does hurt him enough where you can realistically finish him off. I used my newly-claimed powers of divinity to slay my enemies, then waited for the Solar to arrive.

Heart pounding, I raced through the dialog. Melissan defeated... Balthazar and Imoen mortal... I have a choice... okay, Balthazar's giving his warning... and now... Imoen speaks! Hooray! I exhaled, filled with relief that the hours of fighting with my crazy mod-loving self hadn't been entirely in vain. The rest of the party each gave their own, touching advice on my situation. Imoen trusted me to take whatever path I wanted. The unredeemed Sarevok urged me to claim the mantle of blood that he had wanted so badly for himself. Mazzy urged caution, although she said that if anyone could handle this divinity, it would be me. (Reputation == 20.) Nalia spoke with confidence in my ability to improve the world. And Viconia... as my romantic interest, Viconia had been on a journey of her own through the expansion. Our relationship had rekindled early on, although it wasn't physical this time, and she was increasingly curious about the surfacers' views of morality. A while back, we'd had a long discussion about the carnage I had left behind; she had assumed that I would rejoice in it, was a bit baffled when I professed to dislike slaughter, and was left to ponder the gaps between our worldviews. As time went on, she got a little sadder and more pensive, but also more open and humble. Somewhere along the line, her alignment changed to True Neutral. Now, as her lover is on the cusp of divinity, she states that, were it her, she wouldn't hesitate to seize this ultimate power; she trusts you to make the right choice, and says that her only regret would be if you left before she shared her feelings with you... which she does, briefly but VERY touchingly. All three of the female Bioware NPC romances I've played through have the characters go on their own interior journeys - Jaheira grows estranged from the Harpers, has her world turned upside down, and resettles as an equal companion to you; Aerie finds her self-confidence and self-identity as a woman - but Viconia's journey seems by far the most wide-ranging and the most challenging for her personally. You have stripped away all her defenses, and left her utterly vulnerable in a land that uniformly hates her; she has no center, no rock, but for you and for Shar; and now she has even turned her back on Shar, and urging you to leave as well. Still, she remains utterly proud, never clingy, never demanding; she's confused at what the world has become, but determined to find a way through it.

Well. I actually wasn't totally sure whether I would accept godhood or not. In my previous game as Cirion the Bard, once I had realized that divinity was a possibility I had decided to accept it; Cirion was Good, but also a good-naturedly self-interested form of Good, and I saw him as becoming a kind of cheerfully larcenous deity. Sebrina, though... what WAS her angle? I ultimately decided that, powerful as she was, she wasn't really interested in power for its own sake, only for what it could obtain. And what would she want to obtain most of all? Viconia... especially with Nalia off the table, it didn't seem that anything else in any of the Planes would be more rewarding than continuing with Viconia.

There's a bit more chatter after you make your choice. Balthazar enthusiastically endorses your decision, Imoen expresses relief, and Sarevok is nonplussed. Viconia calls you a fool, and embraces you.

The game is at an end. A final video shows Melissan's final death as the Throne of Bhaal implodes while she tries to grab some final essence from it. Oh, and another video narrates what happened to you next: while a mortal, you are among the most powerful of all beings in the Realms, and your future journeys cement your legacy. Bards will tell tales of your epic achievements for generations to come. As a final touch, you can read the "epilogues" for each of the characters. I had been looking forward to this for a while, as they would almost all be new.

Well, ALMOST all - Imoen was a repeat. Imoen's epilogue seems like it's probably the same regardless of which choice you make, since it just vaguely references Sebrina being "gone". Imoen accomplishes remarkable things: after returning to Candlekeep briefly, she heads out again, adventuring for a while and becoming enormously famous, including fighting and killing a dragon. She later formed a thieves guild (hooray!) that stretched the entire length of the Sword Coast. Good job, little sister!

Mazzy forms a new adventuring group - the Knights of Fentan - and tales of their valor and good deeds spread throughout the realm. (This feels like a particularly apt coda for Mazzy. She was already leading a group before you met her back in SoA, and has much more confidence and leadership ability than most other NPCs. It feels good to have her on your team, but she's very believable going off on her own. I mean, I can picture Imoen eventually running a thieves guild, but not right away; with Mazzy, though I can picture her saying goodbye, then immediately riding off to slay a lich.) At the culmination of her career, she finally achieves what she always wanted: she is given an honorary knighting by the Order of the Radiant Heart, and becomes the first halfling - indeed, the first non-human - to become a paladin. A remarkable achievement for a remarkable adventurer.

(I presume that there are different versions of the epilogues, or at least some of them, based on whether you played as a good or an evil character. In particular, Mazzy's epilogue describes how she would speak admiringly of you; presumably she wouldn't do so if you had acted like a tool during the game.)

Sarevok - who, I should reiterate, is still evil, through no apparent fault of my own - returns to Baldur's Gate and seizes power in a bloody coup. Eventually, some other adventurers drive him from the duchal palace - I like to imagine that this was Mazzy - and he is forced to flee. He leaves chaos in his footsteps, but as time goes he is driven farther and farther away, until he eventually fades from sight.

Nalia returns home to find that her keep has been usurped by Isaea Roenall. (Cough. We totally killed him in the SoA romance mod.) She throws him out, and claims her father's title for herself. Way to go! Apparently, she's a wise and fair ruler, but has also dialed back on the Marxist redistribution of wealth angle. She gains a seat on the Council of Six and is widely respected throughout Amn. (I think I'm going to hold onto this saved game forever, just so I can see what happens if and when the Throne of Bhaal expansion for the romance mod is released.)

Balthazar returns to Amkethran, where he repairs the damage he did during the run-up to the war of the Five, and becomes a wise and beloved ruler. Amkethran grows from a dusty outpost into a major trading destination, eventually growing into one of the great cities of Tethyr under his benevolent guidance.

And Viconia. Well... sigh. Viconia and Sebrina get married. They have a son. (With a surrogate, I'll pretend. The epilogue isn't written to be gender-general.) Lolth is a jealous goddess, and after waiting for years for an opportunity to strike, she sends an assassin against Viconia. Sebrina slays the killer, but Viconia is fatally poisoned; all the magic of the Realms aren't able to save her. Viconia had finally proven her worth to the surfacers, and the entire city of Baldur's Gate weeps as Sebrina rages helplessly. Viconia dies. Sebrina is mad with grief, and pursues Lolth throughout the Planes. Their son grows up, and apparently has some amazing adventures of his own.

Man... isn't that a huge bummer of an ending? Jaheira's and Aerie's romances turned out WAY happier than that. This one feels very dark, very goth, very brooding. It's powerful and well-done, I'll grant, but still, it's a bit of a slap in the face after such a long trial.

So, there was just a slightly bitter aftertaste, but still, on the whole I would qualify my second journey through the Baldur's Gate saga as a grand success. These games would have wonderful replay value anyways, thanks to the huge roster of NPCs and the incredibly rich and broad class system, but the steadily improving wealth of user-created mod content just makes it all the more rewarding to return to. I'm going to set my CDs back on the shelves, and return to playing other games for now, but I look forward to the time - four, six, or ten years from now - when I pull them down again, blow off the dust, and write another version of the tale of the bhaalspawn. Perhaps I will name the next one... Nanoc.

Nom Nom Nom

2011-10-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! This year's Blog Action Day, also known as #BAD11, focuses on the topic of Food, which I am actually interested in! I've enjoyed writing for previous years, but those have tended to be issues that I recognize as very important but don't think about that often. In contrast, I, and I'd presume to say almost everyone, thinks about food on a daily basis.

Over the years, I've come to treat BAD as an excuse for some rambling reflections on my personal connection with the topic, and then kind of try to tie in with some larger political themes. Shall we give that a shot again?

Food was an important part of my life growing up. My parents were great about making sure that we always ate meals together as a family - and, with six of us all at different stages of life and with a wide variety of interests, that can't have been easy! My mom was and remains a great cook, and I can still remember a lot of the dishes that she would make. We grew up in Minnesota, so there were a lot of classic casseroles like Tuna Noodle Casserole, and a chili with spaghetti in the broth, and seaburgers, and meat loaf... all kinds of stuff. She also tried to serve nutritious food, though I resisted mightily. I think that I would refuse to eat just about anything that was green - I didn't like broccoli, didn't like lettuce, didn't like celery, didn't like green beans, didn't like lima beans, etc. ad infinitum. I think that I liked canned corn, and tolerated canned carrots, and that was about it.

My strongest emotional connection was and remains with my mom's baking. She was a famously talented pie-maker, and could make an incredible variety of pies. Her most famous one was probably a rhubarb pie, made from our backyard patch of rhubarb. She also made a wonderful apple pie, a special-occasion strawberry pie, occasional blueberry pies, a sticky-sweet-but-delicious pecan pie, and more. The only pie I didn't care for was a sour cream apple pie, which I had decided at some point that I disliked. But, since she was known to make multiple pies, I almost always had an alternative anyways. Even today, when I'm feeling brave enough to attempt making a pie, I almost always steer away from the types my mom made, since I know they'll never meet those standards, and instead I usually end up making new kinds like sweet potato pie.

Beyond pies, she would also make birthday cakes for us. Early in life, I settled on a favorite birthday cake, which I continue to have every July: yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Some years we would put M&M candies along the edges.

And, of course, there were the cookies. Mom made cookies throughout the year, but a sort of Cookie Armageddon would strike just before Christmas, where our home would fill up with literally hundreds of cookies: chocolate bon-bons and Mexican wedding cakes and a variety of sugar cookies (in our family, we follow a strict hierarchy: Trees > Bells > Stars). It made an already special season even more special.

And, really, it's that "special"-ness of food that's so important and rewarding. Food isn't just fuel, it isn't just a source of calories, it isn't just a bundle of nutrients. Food is a very primal way of connecting with one another, of building shared experiences and common sense memory. When I sit down with my family for Thanksgiving, we're not just enjoying one another's company, but also tapping into a tradition that stretches back thirty years, and is all the more powerful because it's operating on the taste and scent planes, in addition to touch and sight.

I can't claim that I ate especially well as a high-schooler; like most of my peers, I enjoyed eating, but I kind of shudder now when I think about WHAT I ate. Lots of frozen pizzas, and frozen chicken pot pies, and Doritos, and cans of soda. It went even further downhill when I went off to college. My freshman year, I took advantage of the all-you-can-eat pricing at Center Court and loaded up on the (surprisingly tasty) choices, often dominated by pizza and pasta from the Italian kiosk (to this day, I get queasy when I see fetuccine alfredo on a menu, after one too many scoops from the congealing tray they always had on display there), or burgers from the grill, or ginormous sandwiches. In later years, I increasingly took advantage of the speed and convenience of Bear's Den, which led to a steady diet of fried chicken tenders and fried mozarella sticks.

As with family meals, food in college served an important social purpose beyond just feeding our bodies. I remember huddling under the stairs in Lopata II, enjoying Cheap Lunch with a circle of friends; or a weekend brunch in Center Court with the other floormates from Beaumont Hall; or a late-night session in front of the TV, laughing at The Daily Show while picking our way through trays of fried food.

I was probably at my least healthy when I graduated from school. I lived for a few years in Kansas City, and struggled a little with putting together a bachelor lifestyle that wouldn't kill me. I avoided eating out, and started "cooking," but my cookery wasn't anything at all notable. I would occasionally fry up burgers, but most of my meals tended to be Hamburger Helper-type affairs: the recipe would typically start with melting together a stick of butter and a cup of milk in a skillet, then adding raw meat and finishing with some dried pasta and flavoring packets. I doubt that this food was any healthier than what I was eating at college, but I do think that it was a healthier habit to get into: I was, very crudely, practicing making my own food at home, and developing a set of habits around preparing, serving, and saving food that would serve me well in future years.

My epicurean epiphany started when I moved to California. Off the bat, I started shopping at Food Maxx, still buying mostly the same stuff as I had in Kansas City, but starting to experiment with some Hispanic flavors. The big turning point came about a year later, when two unrelated events propelled me into becoming a more serious home cook. First of all, out of nowhere I received a sample issue of Cook's Illustrated magazine. I thought a couple of recipes looked good; made them; decided they tasted REALLY good; and ended up subscribing. For the next several years, every two months would give me a new magazine with enough recipes (with leftovers for one person) to keep me going with fresh, new, interesting dishes. Around the same time, Albertson's went bankrupt and closed a bunch of their stores, including one at Leigh and Southwest Expressway where I used to always shop. When coming up with a new routine, I started patronizing the Campbell farmer's market, and quickly fell in love with it. Every Sunday, I would wander into the market with a few empty bags and an open mind. I would walk up and down, check the prices on everything, try a few samples, look for anything that looked especially tasty or interesting. If I saw a fruit or vegetable that I didn't recognize, I would buy it, take it home, and then look it up in The Joy of Cooking, a massive cookbook that my aunt Fran had given me as a graduation gift years ago but was finally getting put to constant use. Between Cook's Illustrated for main dishes, and the farmer's market for produce and side dishes, I had a steady influx of new and stimulating challenges. I loved Christopher Kimball's methodical, precise approach to cooking, which gave me the confidence to try making complex dishes. Over time, I gradually got better at using my tools (it used to take me ten minutes to mince an onion, it now takes me about thirty seconds), gradually upgraded my tools (I can no longer imagine having a kitchen without a garlic press), and learned some fundamental but important principles for cookery, like the importance of a heavy skillet or the role acids play in baking. Even more gradually, I've slowly become comfortable with more of the ephemera of cooking: being able to "tell" when something is done cooking by the look and texture, or having a sixth sense kick in moments before something becomes overdone.

All this cooking stuff was pretty new for me. I think that I would make Macaroni & Cheese while growing up, and I've been making chocolate chip cookie bars since I was in junior high school, but otherwise I couldn't make anything that didn't come from the freezer. I think my parents were probably amused when I would gush at how much fun I was having with cooking - I'm sure I never gave a hint of interest back when I could have actually helped out in their kitchen!

Cooking has become a very important part of my life lately. It's an activity that both physically and mentally rejuvenates me; it requires a certain amount of focus, yet doesn't occupy all my attention, and so it can feel very relaxing and productive at the same time. I'll typically cook a fair amount over the weekend, and depending on what it is, I'll often save some in the fridge for the next few days, and some more in the freezer for a longer-term leftover. Even having a ton of leftovers, I'm able to get a lot of variety in my diet, and because I rarely repeat dishes, I don't have enough time to get bored of what I just made.

In recent years, I've grown increasingly fascinated by the economic and political aspects of our food system. The first example of this for me was Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation". Now, I'm actually less tied to fast food than a lot of people I know. When I was growing up, I ate fast food maybe a total of a dozen times, mostly on family vacations; since then, I'll occasionally stop by a restaurant, but have never regularly patronized the major fast food chains. Still, FFN greatly disturbed me. It goes beyond the problems with fast food itself, and taps into what has been wrong with our country's food supply in general: the deplorable conditions in the meat-packing factories, the totally backwards approach to food safety (where the USDA doesn't even have the authority to order a recall, and has to rely on manufacturers to do so), the way we cannibalize animals and have them eat one another's flesh, which in turn has led to the rise of scary new diseases like BSE.

For a few years, I pretty strictly confined myself to only eating organic meat, and almost always eating organic produce. I've since softened that stance a bit; I still prefer organic when I buy stuff for myself, but since the food I buy and prepare myself forms by far the largest part of my diet, I don't worry about the few times when I'm eating out or at a friend's house. More importantly than that, though, is probably the way that Fast Food Nation helped un-jar my meat-centric approach towards meals. For a long time, I just took it for granted that any meal I ate would have to include meat, in some form: either chicken tacos, or beef chili, or Swiss steak, whatever. Increasingly, I have many more vegetarian meals, and when I do have meat, it tends to be a smaller component in a larger meal, like a stir-fry or pasta with chicken and vegetables. It also helps that I now live on the West Coast and have much better access to a huge variety of fresh and delicious fish. For me, fish used to mean either fish sticks or canned tuna. Now, it means a yellow grouper curry, or a salmon burger, or toro sushi, or simply broiled snapper. Ever since I found the Monterey Bay Aquarium's phenomenal Seafood Watch guide, I've been able to happily and confidently buy and eat all the delicious seafood I want.

My reading continues, and over time I've become more passionate and less militant about food, if that makes sense... I'm learning more about the problems with the way we produce and eat food, but also recognize that there are multiple ways to make things better. The single best food-related book I've read may still be Marion Nestle's "What to Eat" - it came at a great time in my life, and helped stave off the confusion that I would have otherwise come up against if I tried to keep track of what's good and bad for you. Nestle has a wonderful approach which allows you to throw out all of the news-cycle-driven "health" stories that are constantly produced, with a bewildering set of recommendations and reversals, and replaces it with just a few simple, basic principles: "Eat less. Move more. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Don't eat too much junk food." Cool! There's lots more that you can learn, but if you just follow that sound (and simple!) advice, it's really hard to mess up your diet.

Michael Pollan takes a similar kind of tack, although he is perhaps a bit more interested in the production of food, where Marion Nestle focuses more on the distribution and consumption. Pollan's alternate mantra is "Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Just eight words - a winner!

The food-related book I've most recently read, though it's actually a bit older, is Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." This is much less overtly political than Nestle or Pollan, but is quite emotional and heartwarming, while still tapping into some of the same national themes that those other authors work with. Kingsolver has the most up-close view at actual farming of the bunch, and unlike the others, who point to the problems with the current system, Kingsolver shows (and lives) an alternative approach to how we can feed ourselves.

These days, the food information I'm most interested in comes from Nutrition Action Healthletter, a small monthly from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Along with the EFF, I think that the CSPI are some of the good guys in American civic life. They lobby strongly, based on the most solid, proven science, for effective legislation to improve Americans' physical quality of life. They were responsible for putting nutrition labels on food products in the supermarket; they helped push for the US standard for organic food; they led the successful drive to remove trans fats from our food supply; and they continue to be at the forefront of every important food-related issue. Beyond their lobbying, though, I just generally dig them for their common-sense approach to everything. Whenever someone publishes a new nutrition study, every newspaper and magazine in the country will simply reprint whatever the researchers say. Nutrition Action, though, will actually break down the study, help explain whether it was well-done or not; whether it confirms or conflicts with previous studies on the topic; explains how reliable the results are and who they apply to; and gives bottom-line recommendations for how to integrate this new information. More often than not, that ends up meaning ignoring it, and I'm glad that they can cut through the noise and help people stay focused on what's really important. Like Nestle and Pollan, they help drive a consistent message. There's a nearly infinite variety of healthy diets out there, and you shouldn't stress out about whether you're eating the right "miracle foods" or have the hot supplement of the month; instead, just make sure that your plate is mostly full of fruits and vegetables. That's it! You can pick the fruits and vegetables that taste best to you, and you can prepare them in a variety of ways, and you can enjoy sweets and meats as long as you don't go overboard.

I'm so very fortunate to live in California, where it's probably a lot easier to find fresh and tasty fruits and vegetables year-round. I've gradually come to realize that this is one of the big intersections of cooking and food. Cooking is kind of a great equalizer: if you cook well, you can elevate humble ingredients to a strong finish. However, if you're starting out with great ingredients, little or no cooking is required to bring it out. I still do cook a lot of my vegetables - one of the things I've realized as an adult is that, unlike my parents, I dislike the texture of hard vegetables, and a lot of the same foods that I despised as a child, I now enjoy if I cook them until they're soft. (I don't like eating raw celery, even with dips, but will gladly eat celery once it's braised. I don't care for raw carrots, but think that roasted carrots are some of the most delicious sides imaginable, and steamed carrots tossed with a little pepper and thyme aren't far behind.)

I think that there are improvements we can make in our approach to food, both on a micro, personal level and at a macro, societal level. The two levels are linked but distinct, sharing the same ultimate goal of improving quality of life, but the personal level focuses on actions that we can take today, while the political level seeks to improve the playing field. On a personal level, the most important thing we can do is to cook more and to eat socially. Cooking brings us into a relationship with our food, and is a powerful foundation for all the other improvements we can make in our culinary lives. It's impossible to eat healthily if we eat out all the time, and it's nearly impossible to even tell just how unhealthily we're eating, thanks to the gargantuan portions and the difficulty of obtaining good information about the food. When we cook, though, we have control over every aspect of the meal. We can shape it to our own tastes, and we know exactly what we're putting into our bodies.

Cooking at all is great. Even better is to cook primarily with produce. Nothing against a juicy steak, but bringing more plants into the diet makes you feel better, and gives you a better variety of food. For extra credit, cook with food that's in season (it's cheaper and tastes better), grown close to where you live (tastes better and is better for the environment), and organic (healthier for you and better for the environment).

And, just as importantly, enjoy food. It should be shared, it should be savored. Pay attention to what you eat. Pay attention to what you like. Try to develop a vocabulary for the flavors you encounter. Whenever you share a meal with someone else, ask them what they think of it, and see if they can raise anything that you might have missed.

On the social level, we have already made huge strides in the past decade. Books like Fast Food Nation and groups like the CSPI have helped significantly decrease the cannibalism in our cattle; they have led to greater transparency in nutrition information at chain restaurants; they led an absolutely crucial and revolutionary charge in Congress that resulted in the successful passage of the most significant overhaul in our food safety system in the past 80 years, finally giving the FDA the authority and resources to proactively prevent poison in our food supply. Sadly, the Republican party is trying to gut the law, so we'll be playing on the defensive for a while yet, but even if they manage to strip funding from the FDA, the country as a whole will have a far safer food system than we did at the turn of the millennium.

That doesn't mean that the job is over, though. The highest priority should be maintaining the Food Safety Modernization Act. Next to that, in my opinion, is the importance of increasing the availability of healthy, real food. People like me who are lucky to make good incomes and live in fairly upscale neighborhoods have an embarrassment of fresh food supplies available (within roughly a three-block radius of my condo is a Trader Joe's, a Safeway, a butcher shop, a greengrocer, and a small upscale independent grocery). However, many Americans live in "food deserts", which have plenty of McDonalds restaurants but no grocery stores with fresh produce. Kids grow up in these places with horrible nutrition, and as a result we're seeing children growing up into both first-world obesity and third-world malnutrition. Solving this problem will require the cooperation of government, business, and grass-roots social groups. The federal government can help by subsidizing the production of produce (currently most subsidies are directed towards grain crops like corn); state and local government can help by using zoning to encourage development within food deserts, streamlining approval for businesses moving into such areas, and providing tax incentives to the first companies moving in; and local community groups can help clean up the blight that tends to scare away new investment.

Besides this, we can help align our country's actual government policy with our stated aims. For decades now, Congress has acted very schizophrenically, on the one hand deploring the decreasing health of our country, and on the other hand massively supporting the system that has led to that poor health. The prime culprit here is the Farm Bill, which overwhelmingly subsidizes the production of grain crops using unsustainable levels of pesticides and other gunk. That has led to a highly inefficient series of outcomes: we sweeten our drinks with corn, and we turn corn into fuel for our cars (arguably better than burning gasoline, but corn is one of the least efficient alternative fuel sources, and is only chosen because the government has made it cheap). This has also led to the monoculture of our agriculture; Iowa used to grow a huge variety of fruits, vegetables, starches, and animals, but now produces almost nothing but corn, soybeans, and pork. We should put our money where our mouth is: support small-scale mom-and-pop farmers instead of subsidizing ADM and other corporate behemoths; cut down on subsidies for commodity crops and increase subsidies for fruits and vegetables, which will help drive down their price, make them easier to buy and more available, and increase consumption; and reward farmers for farming sustainably and preserving their topsoil, instead of relying on ever-increasing chemical support.

The Farm Bill will probably be coming up for reauthorization in 2012, and in the middle of a huge election, I can see it being very political. We should take that opportunity to align our tax dollars with our goals, instead of putting them at odds with one another.

Until then, though, there's plenty that we can do in our own lives to improve our diet, and vote with our dollars for better food. The market for organic foods and farmer's markets have exploded in the past decade, as a direct result of the increasing demand from regular consumers. Food quality has been one area where the government has followed public opinion, not driven it, and the choices we make today will not only benefit us, but the rest of the country as well.

Hey, Lookit Them Moving Pictures!

2011-10-10T19:12:00.000-07:00

It's the start of something vaguely resembling a TV season! I watch some shows! Consider each paragraph below to be minor spoilers for the current season, and mega spoilers for previous seasons!

Parks & Rec: This is off to a great start. I was a bit surprised that they have so completely dropped the Scott romance from last season, but I think it's a great move on their part - they need to be focusing on the city council race, and it's very in keeping with those characters to put aside their personal feelings for Leslie's political ambitions. I'm loving seeing Andy back in Agent Burt Macklin Mode. Everything with Entertainment 720 is just hilarious - I'm particularly getting a ton of chuckles out of it because a lot of what's absurd about that place is very similar to too many start-ups out here in Silicon Valley. The Tammy One story has been creepy and funny. I'm enjoying the way that this show can let characters continue to evolve, while still remaining true to what we know about them.

Community: I've been enjoying this so far, though it hasn't been as crazy-good as the heights of last season. It feels a bit like they're trying to identify an overarching plot for the season, similar to the Pierce saga of last season, but haven't found it yet... the pilot was leaning on John Goodman and the financial straits of the college, but they haven't done much else with that. Still... the journey Chang has been on has been amazing, and has carried some of the weaker material within the study group. The nested interior monologues with him and the Dean were just wonderful. Oh, and we have Omar! Omar! I stumbled from my couch in shock and delight when I recognized him in the pilot. Anyways... there are a lot of good ingredients in here, and I'm optimistic that Harmon is building to something excellent.

Dexter: The start of this season has me really excited at the season's potential. That said, I'm ALWAYS excited by the first few episodes of a new Dexter season. The first two seasons were completely amazing. The last three have been interesting but flawed. So far, I'm liking what's going on with the main cast. Angel and LaGuerta were a huge drag on the show, and their split will hopefully free us from the pointless bickering. Quinn has always annoyed me, and I'm glad that he's out of Deb's life. Deb getting appointed to Lieutenant feels a bit like jumping the shark, but I'm reserving judgment - as Dexter noted in a voice-over, it could make things very interesting if the department has to hunt him again. And Masuka's sideshow is funny as ever. As for the main plot: it's pretty clear that the primary theme this year will be religion. I was a bit bummed about that in the pilot - it felt like it was continuing the thread from last season (one of MANY things that the season introduced and then COMPLETELY dropped), and the show doesn't have much interesting to say about it. But, I felt like we got a more nuanced perspective in the second episode, plus the apocalyptic work of Edward James Olmos and Colin Hanks could be pretty cool. (Incidentally, did you catch that the detectives briefly listed Santa Muerte as one of the possible culprits in the murder? I presume that means that we might see the group return, which could be very cool - I thought that the Santa Muerte plot last season was more interesting than the main plot, and think there could be a lot of potential there. Still, this show has thrashed through showrunners so frequently that I've given up on the hope of a strong through-plot connecting multiple seasons.)

Archer: That was a bit of a tease, wasn't it? Season 3 starts, shows 3 episodes, then goes off the air until 2012. These were great, though. It continues Season 2's trend towards more serial storytelling, and caps off Season 2's game-changing finale with an extended coda that kind of acts as a reset button while also honoring that finale. Oh, and David Cross showed up, which means that Archer continues to move closer to becoming the true reunion of the Arrested Development cast. What else... these episodes were obviously more action-y than others have been, and in general there tends to be a bit of a trade off between action-heavy episodes and the funniest episodes, but the through-line was strong and the jokes have been great. I feel like I'm still trying to get a handle on Archer's character... he's incredibly dumb, but he isn't stupid. The best example of that yet might be the scene where he's discussing blood types with Lana. He's had a solid education, and KNOWS things, but still manages to be incredibly dense. (Oh, and I got a huge kick out of the repeated joke in the last episode about the "Columbia" incident, where Mallory did NOT bail him out, and which led to a great and typically understated punchline in the episode's last moments.) It's going to be really hard to top last season, which is some of the best and most consistently good comedy I've seen in years, but so far they're off to a fine start.

Louie: Okay, now we're moving away from what's showing now and over to what I've been watching. With all the praise that the show has been getting, I've finally gone back to watch Season One, and am close to done with Season Two. It's amazing. It's a really funny show, but interestingly enough, one of the things I like about it most is how un-funny it feels comfortable being. Some episodes will go through long, sometimes agonizing, sections with no jokes, just unpleasant things happening or Louie suffering through indignities. This will often lead up to a strong humorous payoff (like the fart joke in this season's pilot), but just as often it ends up doing something powerful and non-comic, like the bullying episode from last season, or the religion episode. The standup alone is worth the price of admission, but the core show is a really remarkable blend of humor and raw, heartfelt humanism.

Arrested Development: I started re-watching the show back during the summer hiatus, and am up to season two. I was getting all depressed again about how they had canceled the show, and so am doubly delighted that it seems to be coming back. As usual, I feel required to be the negative voice of reason - no studio has yet agreed to do this, and nobody has agreed to distribute it, which means that there's no money and nobody is actually in a position to do anything yet. Still, the pre-requisites seem to all be in place, and it sounds like some competition between Hulu and Netflix might help drive production. Whatever it takes! I can't wait to see this.

Luther: This had briefly caught my interest when I'd first heard about it, then I forgot that it existed. (Easy to do with a BBC drama.) It's gotten some more publicity now that Season 2 has started airing on BBC America, so I'm currently watching the first season. Well, I've only seen the pilot so far, but it was really good. First of all, Idris Elba is just an incredible actor. (I'm tempted to say something like, "Idris Elba was the best actor on The Wire", but that's kind of like saying "Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's best book" or "Revolver is the best album from The Beatles" - arguably true, but misses the point.) As for the show itself - it's a very dark cop show. I don't think that an American network show could get away with showing the kind of carnage that's on display here - heck, I don't think any of the killings in Dexter have been as bloody as what happened to that dog. The acting is really sharp, and it looks like there will be a good mix of procedural-type stuff for individual episodes and more long-running character arcs. Oh! And I was SO HAPPY when the theme song kicked in - it's "Paradise Circus", off of Massive Attack's latest album "Heligoland." I think I've mentioned before that I kept watching "House" through the first season largely on the strength of the "Teardrop" opening theme and Hugh Laurie's performance. Well... this show also has a phenomenal lead actor and a great theme song, so let's hope it stays strong!

Speaking of House - I'm currently one or two full seasons behind. I do plan to catch up, but at this point, I'd rather just wait and do the seasons in big chunks. I tend to enjoy TV more when I'm watching it that way, and I no longer feel as compelled to track weekly developments on the show.

Also speaking of House - I got to hear Hugh Laurie play at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this year and, well, he was incredible! It always blows my mind when I think of how little America knows of his talents - they see his dramatic side on House, but I think he's one of the best comic actors of our generation, plus he's a really talented musician. If you ever get the chance, check out "A Bit of Fry and Laurie," which has wonderful sketch comedy (vaguely Python-esque without feeling derivative), and also some terrific Hugh Laurie musical numbers. Anyways... he's currently promoting "Let Them Talk," a celebration of New Orleans blues. PBS recently aired a Great Performances special that combines footage of some concerts he performed in the Big Easy with a documentary travelogue as he retraces the blues route, not unlike a shorter and more specialized version of Stephen Fry's American documentary.

Also on a music note: You absolutely must check out Radiohead's hour-long special on The Colbert Report. My mind is still spinning, both from the awesome songs, and the fact that it happened at all - who would have thought that the best venue for the best band of our times is a satirical news show? Well, it is. The performances were the highlight, but they had a lot of fun sparring with Stephen in the sessions as well. Oh, and be sure to check out the web site for a few other songs that didn't make the cut of the show, including a great version of "Good Morning Mister Magpie," which I think is my favorite track off of King Of Limbs.

Futurama: Wow, that was a really long season! There were, what, like 26 episodes? I actually didn't watch the show before it was canceled (I know, heresy, shame on me), but I've gotten into it since, and was pretty happy with it. The last episode with lots of different animation styles was particularly fun - it went from 1920's Betty Boop-ish cartooning through an AWESOME retro 1980's video game sprite-based animation to a hilarious shonen anime spoof.

I don't think I've yet plugged Norm MacDonald's latest special, Me Doing Stand Up. It's excellent. Norm is a bit of an acquired taste (heh... I initially wrote "a required taste," which may also be true), and people either love him or hate him, but if you can tap into his style of humor, the special is very rewarding. It includes one extended bit, on missing persons, that may be the funniest and most audacious bit of standup I've seen this side of Louis C.K. all year.

Oh, yeah - Patton Oswalt had a special, too! That one is also great. It felt a bit safer than Norm's, and didn't amaze me quite as much as his earlier specials, but he's still incredibly funny.

I'm still waiting on a few other shows to start back up. Hm... I think Bored to Death just re-started, or is due soon? That's been pretty good - not one of my favorites, but I've always enjoyed watching it. I feel like I've been waiting forever for The Venture Brothers. There was recently a one-off special, "From the Ladle to the Grave," that whetted my appetite and then laughed at me as I ineffectually raged at needing to wait still longer for the next season. And, a second season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret has been approved, though I don't know when we'll get to see that. Based on what David Cross has said elsewhere, it seems like this next season may be the last one, continuing its really faithful adherence to British television norms.

I think that's it! The TV lineup seems pretty strong, and I'm not even watching what I repeatedly hear is the best show on television, Breaking Bad. The golden age of long-form televised storytelling continues!

Baldur's Gatina

2011-10-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

As previously noted, I've been continuing my retro Bioware kick with a play through the Baldur's Gate tetralogy. (Or I guess maybe "trilogy" is more appropriate - Tales of the Sword Coast wasn't so much another chapter in the saga as a literal expansion of the original Baldur's Gate world.) I greatly enjoyed my playthrough of Baldur's Gate, and found that the mods (particularly Unfinished Business and the BG1 NPC Project) made it noticeably better and more fun than my initial play-through. Still, the whole time I was playing that game, I was looking forward to BG2, arguably one of the finest RPGs ever created.

(I'm not going to bother marking spoilers on a decade-old game, sorry. The rest of this post gives away the main plot points of BG2, as well as way more information than anyone in their right mind would be able to remember.)

I had actually installed a bunch of mods way back in the spring when I was setting up my BG1 Tutu game. Even though Tutu runs on the BG2 engine, they're installed in totally different directories, so the mods you install for one don't affect the other. That said, a lot of the gameplay-related mods (as opposed to quest or NPC mods) work for both Tutu and BG2, so those changes can work for both. I was torn between a desire to install as many mods as possible, in order to provide the greatest difference from my first play-through, and a desire to keep the mod list to a minimum, to reduce the risk of conflicts. While my memory of my first playthrough of the game is a bit fuzzy, I'm pretty sure that I was running at least a couple of mods; I think I had the multiple-romance mod installed, as well as the Baldurdash collection of non-Bioware bugfixes.

I ended up with a pretty decent number of mods, selected from a few lists and forum discussions that I'd found, and winnowed down by what I was looking for in the game. My list included:

BG2 Fixpack - this is apparently the modern successor of Baldurdash.
BG2 Tweak pack - provides a bunch of options to customize how the game works, including allowing multiple romances, getting rid of "You must gather your party before venturing forth", allowing more items in stacks, etc.
Banter Pack - adds many more interjections and dialogs between the Bioware NPCs
Unfinished Business - the original game scripts included quite a few quests and characters that were apparently dropped from the final game. This mod re-enables them, fixes any bugs with them, and when necessary finishes them.
Flirtpack - this lets you initiate flirting sessions with a romantic partner
Gibberlings Three Anniversary Mod - a fun (and funny) quest that includes a pubcrawl through Athkala and a chance to meet the Gibbering Twelve
Quest Pack - a collection of original quests
Assassinations - another collection of quests, this one oriented more towards evil players
Chloe - an NPC mod, Chloe is a semi-divine Kensai romanceable by female PCs
Nalia romance - There are two, I've heard that the jcompton one is better so I got that. This lets you pursue a romance with Nalia de'Arnise, and provides more content related to the de'Arnise lands and the Roenalls
Romantic encounters - adds a bunch of casual hookups to the game, both with minor existing characters and some new ones.
Oversight - Fixes a bunch of strange alignments for monsters and characters
Alternatives - Offers some other options for traveling to Spellhold.

Another mod I was particularly interested in was Ascension. Ascension seems to predate WeiDU, the scripting framework that almost all BG2 modern (heh) mods are written in, though it's since been ported to WeiDU. Unlike all other mods, Ascension was written by a Bioware employee; in his own capacity, he spent time fleshing out the ending of Throne of Bhaal and trying to improve on the original ending of the game. That sounds intriguing, but unfortunately, I've read enough posts about the conflicts that Ascension can cause that I've been scared off for now. I might check it back out when starting ToB to see if there's a clear guide on the right way to include it.

I'll cover most of the mods' effects in-line below, but a few of them ended up not having a big impact on my game. Assassinations sounds interesting, but I just couldn't make myself let my Neutral Good character go through with them. I did do the first quest, which is a standard carry task, but never got into any of the actual assassinations. If I ever do play this came as a CN or any of the evil alignments, I'll be very interested to see where that mod goes. Also, I got a bunch of prompts for the romantic encounters, but only ended up going through three of them - Ribald of the Adventurer's Mart, Teos from the Cowled Wizards, and a particularly disgusting interlude with the Pirate King (which, to be fair, they certainly give you plenty of warning about). I'd meant to play Sebrina as a lesbian character, but I guess she kinda turned out bi instead. Oh well.

One of the things I decided early on was that I wanted to make this game as different as I could from the previous play-through. As noted in my BG1 write-up, I stayed with the Neutral Good lineup, but otherwise transformed my PC from my half-elf male bard Cirion to my new full elf female sorceress Sebrina. The biggest choice to make, though, was which NPCs to run with. In my original game, I had pretty early on settled on my core group: Cirion was the Bard, who was the public face of the party and provided support and inspiration to the group in combat; Minsc and Keldorn were my front-line melee fighters, soaking up damage and pounding down enemies; Jaheira was my versatile member, who could heal or bless the party, join the melee, or provide missile support; Yoshimo was my thief, who shot bows and occasionally backstabbed when I felt like micromanaging him; and Aerie was my main mage, who by the end of the game could cast some very powerful offensive spells, as well as handle a lot of healing. The party only changed a little bit throughout the game; I think I temporarily admitted Nalia for her quest, I replaced Yoshimo with Imoen after spellhold, and in Throne of Bhaal I would finally let Keldorn go home to his family and let my brother take his place in the front lines. Still, once I had a setup that worked, I would turn down anyone who offered to join, so I never really got to know any of the other NPCs.

In this game, I experimented a LOT with my party. I think a majority of the NPCs were in my group at one time or another, even if only for a quest or two. Yeah, that did have the effect of diluting the experience I earned - but heck, over the course of the entire game (especially including Throne of Bhaal), I knew I'd get more than enough XP, so in the long run it really doesn't matter at all. So, let's see if I can reconstruct how my party ebbed and flowed:

By the time I left Irenicus's dungeon, I had a full party: myself, Minsc, Jaheira, Imoen, Yoshimo, and Chloe (who you meet in the Plane of Air).
Imoen left.
I finished the circus questline and had Aerie join. At this point 4 of my 5 NPCs were the same as in my first game, and the only one who wasn't was my non-Bioware NPC, so it was time to start culling.
I went to the Government District and rescued Viconia, dropping Jaheira.
I also ran into Jan and saved him from the guards. I kept him, replacing Aerie.
At the Copper Coronet, I was approached by Nalia. I took her into my party and removed Yoshimo.

That lineup kept me going for a while. Oh: while I'm thinking of it, I was pretty surprised at how over the map my characters' XP was at the start of the game. I had imported Sebrina from BG1, and she had around 220,000 XP. Minsc, on the other hand, showed up with a HUGE amount of extra XP, around 400k; I think he might have started at the same level as at the end of the last game, but immediately got several levels up, and stayed way ahead of me. I'd assumed that this was some quirk that had to do with the fact that Minsc had been in my party at the end of my last game; Jaheira had not been there, and started this game with about 160k (80k per class). However, even later NPCs showed similar discrepancies. Viconia had never been in my party in BG1, but she had a ton of XP; Jan, though, had way less than my PC. I'm a bit curious about what algorithm the game uses for determining what level characters should be when they join, and why mine seemed to be so varied.

After finishing the de'Arnise keep, I was hoping to kick off the Nalia romance, but it didn't trigger. It's only intended for male PCs, and I'd forgotten that the any-romance mod which lets you romance same-sex Bioware NPCs doesn't affect third-party mods. Fortunately, all WeiDU mods ship in source code form. I hadn't done anything with mods before besides install them, but I had a lot of fun looking through the Nalia one and figuring out what I'd need to tweak to make it work. I felt like I had to work while peeking between my fingers, because I didn't want to encounter any spoilers for the mod; fortunately, the way the Bioware dialog is constructed automatically separates out translate-able strings from scripts, so for the most part it was pure logic. All scripting languages are pretty easy to pick up once you get enough examples, so I just had to switch a few checks from MALE to FEMALE and I was set. (I later had to go back and make a few more changes - it turns out that one set of relevant checks are in the character's dialog, while other checks are in the script; updating the dialog had allowed Nalia to offer me the keep even though my class didn't allow it, but the romance still didn't trigger until I updated the script. Also, for some reason, the checks for Player1 [that's me] CD_STATE_INVALID were incorrect, so I had to remove those from the script as well.) It took me a while to work out my kinks from the Nalia mod, and I was continuing to play the game in the meanwhile, so that romance didn't really get going until Chapter 6. Which actually proved to be fine, since that meant that in the meantime I was able to run through virtually the entire Viconia romance.

The Viconia romance is... really good, and unintentionally hilarious. The original Bioware game has 4 romance options. Intentionally or not, all of the romantic partners are some form of cleric, which in itself is kind of an interesting statement on the role that one might expect of a partner. Female players tend to get shafted, since there is only one male option, and he is Anomen, and he is insufferable. Male players have a choice of three, and all of those women have problems. In my first game, I'd pursued concurrent romances with Jaheira, a half-elf fighter/druid, and Aerie, a winged elf mage/cleric. Aerie is sweet, and EXTREMELY sheltered and fragile; you need to be extraordinarily gentle when interacting with her. Jaheira is much fiercer and more assertive; at the start of the game, she is mourning the loss of her husband (and your former traveling companion) Khalid, and over time, you can get into a relationship with her. Her romance is much more complex and involved; unlike Aerie's, which is pretty much all about talking, Jaheira actually has several quests associated with her romance. It's also notoriously buggy. Viconia's romance is interesting; you learn a lot about her background, the life she led in the Underdark and the incredibly difficult time she's had surviving on the surface. However, much more so than just about any other mod, it does NOT make much sense if you're playing a female character. Much of Viconia's romance content has a lot to do with the sexual politics of the Underdark, where females are dominant and males are slaves who exist to provide pleasure. It's just kind of funny to have Viconia sneer "Sniveling male!" at you when, you know, you're not. Viconia's romance is a bit like Aerie's in that it's primarily conversation-oriented, but it's much more dramatic, with lots of ups and downs. In Shadows of Amn it ends on a downish, bittersweet note; I've heard a few things about where it goes in Throne of Bhaal, and will be interested to see that play out.

The Chloe romance was... all right, I guess. I think I might have messed it up, since there were a whole bunch of getting-to-know-you friendship talks at first, but no actual romance developed. Based on what I read online, it sounded like this might have been due to my PC's INT getting drained by mindflayers at some point. I fiddled around with CLUAConsole to get it back on track, but there just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of actual romance involved once you get to that point. (And, since Imoen had rejoined while our romance was still broken, Chloe was pursuing that love interest at the same time, which was a bit disconcerting.) It sounds like Chloe was originally intended to be extended into ToB as well, and maybe things would have gotten more involved there. There is a Chloe-specific romance quest in SoA that ends in a cliffhanger, which I presume was intended to be consummated in the finale. At this point, it doesn't sound like the ToB component will be finished, which is a shame.

As a character, Chloe is interesting. Her most controversial aspect by far is her DEX of 25. This is intended to both reflect her divine heritage and lower her AC, which is important since as a Kensai she can't wear armor. She dual-wields special weapons which are usually as good or better than the equipment you'll have at the same point in the game, at least unless and until you start exploring Watcher's Keep. All that adds up to a really devastating damage dealer on the front lines; she gets an insane number of attacks per turn, and is doing extra elemental damage with her weaponry as well. That said, she attracts a lot of damage, even with her low AC, so I definitely needed other meat shields with her.

Chloe has a lot of content - again, almost all of her dialog seems to be "Getting to Know You" sorts of things, but it's pretty involved. I can't say I care a lot for her personality, but I think that's intentional; she's designed to be strong-willed, a bit arrogant, and opinionated. (She doesn't boss you around quite as much as Jaheira, but she'll let you know her opinion on just about every topic.) She banters a lot with the other Bioware NPCs, and interjects in a whole bunch of game dialog. The writing is pretty good, though her Imoen banters had a bit too many "Haha"s and "(Grins)" for my taste. I didn't care much for the voice acting at first, though I've gotten used to it over the course of the game; I think the main thing that bugs me is actually some slight technical problems with the audio tracks (nothing horrid, just the difference between a very clear professional Bioware recording and a decent home recording), and the fact that she's a bit shouty (though, in all honesty, probably not much more shouty than Jaheira).

All that said, I am a bit astonished that there aren't more lesbian NPCs out there, given the significant number of new NPC mods made for the game and the number of Bioware characters reconfigured into NPCs. I can totally understand why Bioware wouldn't have made any of its own when the game was released back in 2000, but I would have thought that in the post-Dragon Age era we'd have picked up a couple. Heck, if there's a mod that makes Imoen a romanceable NPC (!), I don't see why there aren't more same-sex female romances.

Where was I... ah, yes. After finishing the de'Arnise quest, I kept on bopping around the map for a while. Having played the game before, I knew that once I headed off for Spellhold, all the Amn-related stuff would be out of the picture for quite a while. Unsurprisingly, virtually all mod content is located in Amn; pretty much all the other locations will only be visited once, and you can't go back to any of them after you return in Chapter 6, so most of the cool new stuff I wanted to see was in Athkala or the countryside.

I'd intended to kick off the Planar Sphere quest next, to get my hands on my own stronghold, but Minsc started complaining about going to the Umar Hills, which a sweet little boy had asked him to do. I like Minsc, and I like Boo even more, so we ventured forth. This brought me into the first of MANY main quests that I'm pretty sure I completely missed in my first game. And these aren't third-party mods; they're main parts of the game. I'm a bit baffled as to why I wouldn't have done them initially; I probably had headed out to Spellhold as soon as I could so I could rescue Imoen, and either forgot those optional quests by the time I got back, or hadn't realized that I wouldn't be able to go back and finish them in ToB.

Anyways... the Umar Hills quest is pretty neat, and I'm fairly sure I would have remembered it if I'd done it. It starts off as a bit of a mystery: villagers have been dying for a while; their bodies don't seem to show many signs of a struggle; furthermore, their bodies will actually vanish in the next night or two. From that description, I'd initially assumed that it was the work of vampires or some similar creatures: the the villagers were being "killed", then raised again as undead. The villagers were split between three dominant theories as to the culprit behind the troubles. Some believe it to be the work of a group of hobgoblins who have recently migrated into the area. Others think that the wolves from the woods have been killing people, then stealing into town at night to devour their bodies. Still others think that it's the Umar Witch, a creature of legend who supposedly died generations ago but whose spirit may still haunt the Umar hills. (You can pick up a book in the town titled "The Umar Witch Project." I think this might be from a mod.)

I checked out the hobgoblins; they actually seemed peaceable, and pointed out that they would have nothing to gain from killing in this way, since the humans could easily wipe them out. They asked me to represent them to the town mayor and see if they'd be interested in opening up trade. He was, and they did. So that was cool, but still left the question of the disappearances open. Next up I went to a cabin in the woods, where the town's ranger had lived before disappearing herself. The cabin was abandoned, but I found a journal from the ranger, who had noticed the strange and frightening behavior of the wolves recently. I was now leaning more towards "werewolves" than "vampires". There was also a note from Mazzy Fereldan, a halfling adventurer who had previously been hired by the village to investigate matters. Mazzy had traced the source of the problems back to an abandoned temple to the west, and included a map. I followed it and went into the woods.

The abandoned temple is in a very dark place, which is filled with many Shadows, creepy undead creatures. In a cave, I encountered a werewolf. It turned out, though, that the werewolves were themselves victims in this matter; the Shadows had been killing both humans and wolves, then raising the dead as more Shadows. The problems all stemmed from the nearby temple. It had once been the domain of a powerful Shade Lord, a spiritual creature who reminds me of the Witch-King of Angmar. The Shade Lord was defeated, and the followers of Amaunator, the Sun God, rededicated the temple in his name. While Amaunator's worship continued, the shades were kept in check; however, over time the order faded, the temple decayed, and now it has been corrupted back into its original form.

The wolf wants vengeance, and I let her go. After fighting our own way to the temple, we encountered a HUGE wave of undead Shades. It was a very long and tiring, but very fun, battle. The wolf dies pretty early on, but tells you how you can defeat the shades: trigger a lens that reflects some daylight, which helps wipe out most of the shades and lets you enter the temple. (I was too dense to realize this at the time, but I later learned that Shades are, duh, considered Undead; I think this whole quest could have been much easier if I'd had Viconia using her Turn Undead power.)

Inside the temple, I met the famous Mazzy Fereldan, a Halfling who apparently hasn't read the D&D manual and so doesn't know that halflings can't become Paladins. I let her into my party, dropping Jan. (This started the nadir of my party's thieving skills; Nalia is nominally part-thief, but she dualed over too soon. I got to use a lot of Knock spells before getting back Imoen.) Mazzy proved to be a great character, both in this quest and just in general. A lot of Bioware NPCs are needy (Aerie), conceited (Jaheira), mentally deficient (Minsc), or... hm, I'm not even sure how to characterize Nalia's blend of privilege and heavy-handed socialism. Mazzy, though, is just a bright, talented, optimistic, and good-hearted person. Sure, that means she's less interesting than Minsc or Edwin, but it's also really pleasant to have a solid person around. (That may seem like an odd thing to say, but these people talk to you EVERY TIME you click on them. I avoided doing anything specific with Chloe whenever I could just because I was tired of having her yelling at me; I was more than happy to send Mazzy off on errands, though, since she would cheerfully say something like "I shall do what you ask!" I always let Mazzy wear the Boots of Speed while she was in my party.) Mazzy is also a very nice yet believable variation on the halfling stereotype. She isn't overly cute, or fawning ("Oh, it's a fine day for meeting new friends!"). She's as far from the typical halfling thief as you can get. Yet, they resisted the temptation to play completely against type and make her a hard-bitten warrior. Instead, she's got a lot of the cheerfulness that one associates with halflings, but completely directed towards her notions of honor, duty, and virtue. It's a nice mix.

Mazzy filled me in on the other details. The missing village ranger hadn't been turned into a mere Shade, but was being possessed by the Shade Lord him/herself, as its main vessel and connection to the world. Worse, all the members of Mazzy's party had been captured or killed. Her lover, Patrick, had been turned into a powerful Shade. The Shade Lord had let her know that he intended to use her as the next vessel after discarding the ranger's form. We'd come just in time, and (without Jan) continued our exploration of the temple.

This may be as good a time as any to reflect on my experiences with Jan. Jan is probably the funniest NPC I've played with. He's got a huge stock of loooooong anecdotes, most of which somehow involve turnips, and none of which seem to ever exactly end. He exasperates most of the other NPCs, but doesn't seem to mind. I guess that, like Mazzy, he's another fairly independent and self-secure NPC; yeah, he's pretty eccentric, but he also owns his own business, has a family, and adventures just for the fun of it, not out of some deep dark primal urges.

So, as a personality, Jan was great. As a character, he was... fine. In BG2, all that you really need is one fighter, one mage, one healer, and one thief; since some characters can be more than one class, that means that most of your party slots can be filled by the people you like, not necessarily the people you need. Jan was a bit redundant, especially since both he and Nalia were Thief/Mages; he was a better thief than Nalia, but I was invested in Nalia for the romance; he was a fair mage, but not nearly as good as Sebrina, and since he was multi-class instead of dual-class, Nalia would be eclipsing him soon. At this point in the game, I was getting concerned about protecting my back line - Minsc and Chloe were both dual-wielding (Minsc with dual maces, Chloe with her custom scimitar and short sword), so they were doing a lot of damage, but when I was facing large mobs like that group of shadows, those two would quickly get overrun and my rear spellcasters would need to muck around with evading enemies or switching to (ick) melee. Mazzy is ALL front line, so into the group she came.

There are some fights in the temple, but also some good puzzles. There's an Indiana Jones-style walk-across-the-letters maze. You also find a few pieces of paper describing a ritual you need to perform; unfortunately, the papers have been damaged, so you need to infer the missing steps of the ritual, which is an interesting variation on this type of quest. Ultimately, you unlock the wards on the lower level of the temple. By rescuing the desecrated remains of a child prophetess of Amaunator, you had gained a wardstone that lets you tiptoe past the dragon without it noticing you. I saved, tried talking to the dragon, and then fought it. I eventually gave up, and resolved to come back after finishing the Underdark.

After emerging from the other side of the temple, you are confronted by the Shade Lord in the ranger's form, along with Patrick in another shade form. Oh, and there's the Shadow Altar, too. I "killed" the altar first, then the Shade Lord, and finally Patrick. We gave Mazzy some time with her grief, and made an appropriate grave marker for Patrick. With the Shade Lord banished and the Sun Lord's rituals refreshed, the dark shadow was removed from the forest. We returned to the Umar Hills and accepted the thanks of a grateful populace.

That whole sojourn had taken much longer than I had planned, so I was eager to get back to the Planar Sphere quest. This kicks off when a Cowled Wizard asks you to track down Valygar, a man who had murdered two wizards and fled Athkala. After resuming my investigations, I was surprised to note that he had gone exactly where I had just been, in the Umar Hills. We headed out, and I met him in his cabin hideout. Valygar gives his own explanation of what had happened. He is the last living descendent of the mage who had created the Planar Sphere many centuries ago. His family has encountered all sorts of misfortune as a result, and he has a particularly strong personal revulsion towards all forms of magic. His ancestor was basically a lich, a powerful undead mage, who had left Athkala to travel the other planes of existence; now that he has returned, only his own blood (including the blood of his descendents) can open the sphere. The Cowled Wizards had sought to use Valygar to enter the sphere.

It seems like there are multiple ways you can approach this problem - I had asked him to join my party so we could enter the Sphere ourselves and do an end-run around the Wizards, but I think you can also kill him and get into the sphere that way. With some reluctance, I moved Mazzy out of the party to make room for him. I wanted to keep Chloe, Viconia and Nalia in the party for their ongoing storylines, and I just feel bad about leaving a big guy like Minsc on his own. However, I was already playing around with the germ of an idea for making an all-ladies party, and I decided that after I rescued Imoen I'd like to bring Mazzy back in as well.

The sphere was nicely challenging. Since it has spent so much time moving between the various planes, it has taken on a wide variety of creatures, including mermen, insanely homicidal halflings, and a ton of elementals. The ship itself has several golem defenders. There weren't many puzzles in this quest, but the fights were appropriately difficult, and there were a few item-related tasks to complete.

Eventually, you descend into the interior of the ship, by the engines, where you and Valygar confront his ancestor. After a tough fight, he reveals that he has been possessed by one of the demons from the outer planes. That demon had hoped to use the sphere to invade the Prime Material plane, but his desires have been temporarily thwarted. The sphere's defense systems have been activated, moving you back out to one of the infernal planes. In order to get back to Prime, you'll need to retrieve some demon hearts, powerful relics that will provide the ship with the necessary power.

The infernal plane was SUPER creepy - Black Isles has a couple of astonishingly good maps, and this was one of them. This was one of the few parts of the game where I had to resort to relatively cheesy tactics, like casting Skull Trap into the Fog of War so I could soften up a demon without starting the fight. Still, I was intrigued enough that I eventually worked my way through the entire map, harvesting all the available black souls.

Back in the sphere, you return to Prime, where Valygar has a very touching denouement with his ancestor. Valygar is another fine NPC; he's more quiet and soft-spoken than most of your companions, but he's also very thoughtful, and has an introspective streak, so as his ancestor dies he starts to wonder whether redemption is possible after all, and whether some of his hatred towards magic might be misplaced.

The Planar Sphere was a pretty good stronghold, but nowhere near as entertaining as the Playhouse had been for my bard. Unlike the Playhouse and the Keep, the Sphere doesn't generate any income. Instead, you get a group of interns, who you can assign to create various magical artifacts for you. Unfortunately, each time I told them to do something, one of them managed to blow themselves up doing it, so after three weeks, I had no interns (though I did have a Staff of Power). My Cowled Wizard overseer made fun of me for being such a bad teacher, but there weren't any other consequences. I imagine that if you figure out how to keep them alive, you can probably keep getting more items or gold or something; as it was, there really wasn't any point to visiting after a while.

In Athkala, I got to do a GREAT quest which I'm pretty sure came from one of my mods, but felt like it belonged in the original game. After visiting the Docks one night (as part of my pub-crawl quest), we were walking in the Government District, when Minsc suddenly panics upon realizing that Boo is missing! He's been KIDNAPPED! It turns out that Boo is not just a giant miniature space hamster, a loyal companion, and a wise counselor; he is also the source of Minsc's great strength. Minsc is usually the strongest NPC you can get, with something like 18/92. However, with Boo gone, Minsc becomes a wreck, and his STR drops to, like, 9. Minsc urges you to retrace your steps so you can find Boo. You gradually find the urchin who rescued/stole Boo, and after threatening him, you find out that he sold him to a pet store. You teleport to the pet store (I LOVE that this exists) and talk to the very reasonable proprietor, who lets you know that he sold Boo to a young lady magician. From here you go to the Government district, where that woman is trying to teach Boo how to swim in the fountain. There's a great, long dialog that unfolds, where you learn about how this young woman (who is not just a magician but also a debutante) is trying to improve Boo and make him... I dunno, stronger, faster, better. Minsc is practically weeping with ineffectual rage. You agree to a bargain whereby you will solve some riddles to prove your worth, and after completing them, Minsc and Boo are finally reunited. The young woman even gives you an "improved" Boo, with the power to create "Boolets", tiny little miniature giant space hamsters that you can, I dunno, use as scouts or something. They're useless but really cute. She also buffs Minsc, who comes out of the quest with a permanent boost in his STR to 19 - not as dramatic for him as for anyone else, but still, a good reward for a very traumatic experience.

Okay... note to self, I cannot give capsule summaries of all the quests I went on, or this post will take as long to write as the game took to play. I just wanted to mention this specific one, though, since it's one of the great examples of the high level of quality I found in the user-created mod community.

I continued for a while longer with this party, tackling old and new quests as I wandered back and forth across the map. Eventually, I decided it was time to start getting ready to go to Spellhold. I'd read online that, while Imoen does gain some XP while you're gone, there's a limit to how high her level will be, and since I wanted to keep her in my party, I didn't want to wait too long before rescuing her. (Plus, of course, she's your sister! You shouldn't leave her at Irenicus's mercy!)

As noted before, I'd picked up a mod called "Alternatives," which gives you alternate ways to get to Spellhold. I've noticed that most people who continually re-play the BG games tend to do two things. First, most people will at some point try to make a solo run through the game (only using the PC in a party by themselves). Secondly, people really get into the role-playing aspect. The game itself is really pretty indifferent to how you role-play; sure, you can call yourself Chaotic Neutral, but the game will let you make Lawful Good choices without any negative repercussions, and your choices won't affect your alignment (unlike in Planescape: Torment). But, players self-enforce the actions that are logical for their roles: if they're playing an evil character, then they'll make the effort to BE evil when they can, while not breaking the game's main plot.

The problem is, there are a handful of situations where it's impossible to progress in the game without making decisions that might violate your character's persona. Most famously, if you are a Lawful Good paladin, it's inconceivable that you would choose to ally yourself with the Shadow Thieves or Bodhi's guild; no matter how much you wanted to rescue Imoen, doing this would necessarily violate your calling (and, really, make you a Fallen Paladin). So, gamers are forced to break character in order to keep playing the game.

Alternatives gives you some new choices. The main one, which I ended up pursuing, lets you ally with an undercover group of Paladins of Tyr who are willing to transport you to Spellhold in exchange for your assistance in cleansing Athkala's underworld. (As Neutral Good, I would actually be comfortable with aligning with the Shadow Thieves - they aren't good, but I'd see my assistance in fighting a larger evil as serving the greater good. Since I'd done that before, though, I was looking forward to trying something new.) I think that the other alternative, which I never followed up on, is surprisingly straightforward: a man offers to let you sail away "from all your troubles" for the simple price of 100,000 gold pieces. I'm guessing that this puts you on the same boat as all the others, just without all the quests in front.

The Tyr quests seem to combine the tasks that you would get from the Shadow Thieves and Bodhi: you are charged with wiping out the two guildhalls and killing their leaders. I remembered the Shadow Thief guildhall from the last game, though it was a bit more nerve-wracking this time since I was fighting everyone on my way through it. The final battle with Aram actually proved to be really difficult, and I had to reload a few times in order to finish it. (He and all the other thieves are hasted, and use a lot of invisibility and illusion magic to hide from sight while back-stabbing you for huge damage.) Bodhi's graveyard lair was just as incredibly creepy as I had remembered. I think I've picked up a revulsion to blood over the last couple of years, and the images of the giant feeding pits made me feel a bit sick. That's, um, a good thing - it's very effective.

Sidebar: Fighting vampires is ANNOYING! I'd forgotten just how bad it was. They have attacks that can drain your levels; lower-level vampires can drain 1 or 2 levels on a hit, and I think bosses can drain 4. In BG1, the risk was that your level would drop down to 0 and you would die. Here, I usually didn't need to worry about that happening, BUT what's really annoying is that when they level-drain your clerics or mages, they lose their spell slots; and, even after you restore their previously lost levels, those slots remain blank. That means that I need to fuss around with a bunch of aggravating micromanaging whenever I finish a vampire fight, as I try to recall just what mix of spells I'd had across multiple spell circles for multiple characters. Gr. Magic doesn't help much, either; Viconia knew Lesser Restoration, which will restore members after they've been drained, BUT casting it will make her tired, so that usually means that I need to rest after each major level-drained fight. Negative Plane Protection SHOULD be the right solution, but it only affects a single party member, on touch, and only lasts a couple of rounds; it's practically useless in a fight. I think the game badly needed something like Mass Negative Plane Protection as a higher-level cleric spell.

Rant over. After wiping out the vampires, your sponsor from Tyr brings you to Saemon, and you're on your way. The mod creators did a nice job with this one; the Tyr character has a good voice, and they update the Chapter 4 opening crawl to match the decision you've made. She also sends along an observer who warns you about Saemon (though they're not able to do anything about it).

Once you reach Brynnlaw, the game continues normally. Chapters 4 and 5 don't seem to have a whole lot of mod content, as noted previously, but a few of the wider-ranging mods do plug things in here.

I'd forgotten that there are also multiple ways of entering Spellhold. I think that in the first game, I'd taken an amulet from a Cowled Wizard in town that let me just walk over there. This time, I, um, had my character sleep with the Pirate King in order to prove that she was crazy enough to be admitted to the Asylum. That was pretty gross. But effective. In Spellhold, I reunited with Imoen, who didn't recognize me. I, however, was delighted to see how many other inmates I did recognize. Having just finished playing Tales of the Sword Coast for the first time, I was happy to run into Dradeel, whose already-tenuous grip on reality has now completely unclasped. Tiax was fun, too; I regret having never kept him in my party in BG1.

Anyways, you know the drill... Irenicus steals your soul, everyone's really sad. I talked the guard into letting all the crazy prisoners loose, together we took down the place, but not before Irenicus managed to slay them all (sniff... goodbye, Tiax!). Saemon flips back towards you again, and you set sail for home.

On both my games, I've opted to sail with Saemon, and so have gone through the Githyanki ambush and the sojourn among the Sahuagin. I presume that turning away from Saemon will let you just skip those parts and head straight for the caves near Ust Natha. It's good to know that that option is there, and if I'm in a hurry the next time I play the game I might just do that; as far as I can tell, skipping those parts will keep you from being able to create the Silver Sword (which, in my game, nobody was really capable of wielding anyways), possibly some other Cromwell pieces (I know that I returned to Athkala with a TON of them, but have trouble remembering which came from which places), and a ton of experience and plot.

I very vividly remembered the Sahuagin city, though I had gotten confused about how that storyline ended. I remembered that you were involved in a prophecy, and that there was a civil war going on; however, for some reason I recalled that it ended with you actually destroying the city, such that the barrier surrounding it broke and it was flooded with water. Obviously, that's not what actually happens. I'm curious if I conflated that ending with something else, or if I just made it up somehow.

The whole segment in Ust Natha is very dark. It's also quite interesting; I like the sense of constant threat you feel, the in-game role-playing required (you need to act like a Drow even if you actually aren't one), and the different feel that these quests have. Most noticeably, this is practically the only place in the whole game where time limits actually matter. Oh, sure, virtually any quest that you get in the rest of the game is delivered by someone breathlessly exclaiming, "This task is of the utmost urgency! You must do it at once!" But, you can take months and months and still finish those quests. In Ust Natha, though, you have very specific timelines for everything: "Meet me within a day," "You have three days to accomplish this," etc. That keeps things moving along briskly, and adds a nice layer of verisimilitude to your journey; in real life, if you were undercover in a hostile city, you wouldn't be kicking back and ambling around for weeks on end, right? Fortunately for me, I'd done all of the major Underdark lairs (Illithid, Beholders, and Kuo-Toa) before entering Ust Natha, so I didn't have to panic too much about the timelines.

I feel like the Underdark segment is the one other part of the game, along with the end of Chapter 2, that could benefit from an "Alternatives"-style mod. As usual, it's those pesky Lawful Good types who can spoil the fun; I just can't imagine a paladin going undercover. Still, I suppose that the game probably does give a way that you can technically advance to Chapter 6 without going undercover; I haven't researched it, and I assume it would be very dangerous, but there might be a way you can fight through the Drow and kill the Matron Mother, or otherwise do something to unlock the exit. That said, it would be interesting to have a relatively peaceful but less deceptive way through that part of the game. (I was going to say that it would also be nice to have a straight-up evil path, but from looking at some online walkthroughs, it looks like the game does offer some pretty evil solutions - you can betray Solaufein, you can betray the Matron Mother but choose to deal with the demon, etc.)

I finally emerged from the long hiatus and back into Amn. Like I said before, I'm still fuzzy on parts of my first run through the game, but I feel like in the first game I had picked up on the Suldanessellar plot fairly quickly, and didn't spend time doing the many, many optional quests in the Amnish countryside. That may have just been because I didn't know that the game would end then... after all, you don't know in advance how many chapters there are, and I probably wanted to get my soul back before picking up the side-quests. This time around, though, I was ready to experience more of the game, and so took my time polishing everything off.

Before that, though, I wanted to settle on my "final" party. I do love Minsc and Valygar's personalities, but since I already had five females, I wanted to go all-out and finish making this an all-girls party. I had asked Mazzy to go back to her home in Trademeet when I had earlier exchanged her for Valygar, so I headed there and swapped those two back again.

I found one other major set of quests that I had missed on my first game: I don't recall having ever made it to Trademeet, Mazzy's hometown and a place with its own set of crises. This touches off the Druid Grove quest, when you try to track down the source of the animal attacks that have caused chaos in the city; you also meet Cernd, an outsider druid captured by Trademeet, who wants to help you investigate the Shadow Druids. The game really, really wanted me to put him in my party, but I really, really didn't want to muck with my composition just yet, so I sent him ahead and fought my way through the very long and boring druid grove map. I eventually confronted the druid grove leader, and accepted her challenge of a one-on-one fight. I'd assumed that I'd be able to pick a champion from within my party, but no, it had to be my leader. Whoops. Well, at least I had some good gear that would help me in the fight - oh, no, I had to do it in the buff. Well, nuts. Oh, wait a minute: I'm a sorceress! I quickly brought up Stoneskin, then... hmm, I think I might have used Melf's Minute Meteors, though if it was late enough in the game I was probably using Mordenkainen's Sword. Honestly, I probably would have been OK with just my fists; thanks to the Manuals and Tomes I'd found in BG2, I had an STR of 19 and a DEX of 20, so I probably would have come out of it all right. Still - I'm a magician, and magic can make some things VERY easy.

I turned down the offer of joining the druid grove - I think I'd inadvertently enabled one of the tweak pack options for multiple strongholds, or else maybe I had intentionally installed it months ago and since changed my mind - since I got offered all of the strongholds (ranger's cabin in Umar Hills, playhouse in Five Flagons, etc.), but turned them all down except for the Keep and the Sphere. I might have originally thought that it would make sense to take all the strongholds just so I could experience all those quests, but by this point in the game I was fairly confident that I'll be playing BG2 at least one more time in my life, so it makes sense to leave a few things to experience fresh in the future. Back in Trademeet, they were grateful to have escaped the immediate hazards of the animal invasion, but still had to deal with the more pernicious economic maladies afflicting their town. Trademeet, like Athkala, is devoted to Waukeen, the goddess of wealth. Waukeen had died during the Time of Troubles, though Trademeet's clergy refuses to accept that, and insist that she is merely "missing." However, Trademeet is no longer able to engage in any meaningful commerce, thanks to a group of djinns who have set up camp outside the city; they are sort of genially blockading the town, buying up all of the goods traveling into the city, leaving merchants with nothing to sell. The town's mayor and the equivalent of their chamber of commerce (who seems to be wearing chain mail armor and wielding a mace) ask you to deal with that problem.

You can probably "fix" this by killing the djinns - for as much as people are worried of them, they've never seemed particularly difficult to fight - but it's more satisfying to hear their demands. They're hunting a rogue rakshasa, a catlike genie who has escaped their justice. The genies are setting up this embargo in order to get the humans to turn over the rakshasa - even though they admit that she isn't actually in the town, and they don't know where she is. Ooookaaaay then... fortunately, you eventually meet a local thief who gives you a tip in the right direction. You head back to the druid grove, and spend another five minutes to walk thirty feet across the map. The disguised rakshasa reveals herself, you kill her and her companions and take her catlike head back to the djinns. They leave, and everyone's happy. They even erect statues of your entire party in the middle of town!

Here we are, posing by our respective likenesses. All hail the glorious heroes of Amn!

Clockwise from the top, the characters are:

Chloe, the Yr'kai kensai, dual-wielding her custom weapons (a short sword and a scimitar).
Viconia, my Drow Cleric.
Nalia de'Arnise.
Sebrina, my PC, an elven sorceress.
Imoen, my sister.
Mazzy, the cheerful and effecting Halfling paladin and our resident tank. She's the cutest, smallest little tank you'll ever see.

I think it was around this time that I finally figured out what was going wrong with Nalia's romance, and so that started gradually ticking along. Her romance is LONG, which would ordinarily be a very good thing. My only complaint about a lot of the Bioware romances and banters is that they sometimes "finish" relatively early. I don't think that there's much they can do about this; since they've given you, the player, the freedom to take as much or as little time as you like to finish the game, it's impossible for them to know how long they have to unfold these side-stories. I think that in most cases, someone who picks up Nalia early (and it's kind of hard NOT to do that - she and Viconia are, I believe, the only two NPCs in the whole game who will actually approach you and demand a response, rather than standing around and waiting for you to come to them) and pays attention to her romance's requirements (being a good steward of the de'Arnise keep, not letting her languish in Isaea's clutches, etc.) will still be able to play at a leisurely pace throughout the entire game, including all the side-quests you want, and still have new romantic developments unfold as you're approaching the very end of the game.

Since I was getting such a very, very late start, though - having only begun the post-funeral lovetalks in Chapter 6 - I had a lot of time to spend. Fortunately, Watcher's Keep awaited. This is one of the major additions from the Throne of Bhaal expansion, and it's the only quest/area that's available in the main Shadows of Amn portion. However, it does seem to otherwise draw from the ToB segment of the game, as it's filled with a lot of powerful items that I never found anywhere else in SoA - like Potions of Superior Healing (absolutely critical for my front-line fighters by this stage of the game), +4 Bullets, +3 Arrows, etc. It also has some more artifact pieces that you can combine into powerful weapons and items; I think that there's a similar smith in the ToB portion, but it turns out that Cromwell can also forge these things (at least the ones you find in Watcher's Keep), so I was able to get some pretty nicely upgraded weapons that were a bit unbalanced when I went back into the normal SoA world.

As for the Watcher's Keep itself - it's good, not amazing. On the surface, it seems to resemble Durlag's Tower from TotSC: both are large, multileveled dungeons that are completely optional but offer significant rewards for completion. As I'd noted before, Durlag's Tower made a pretty strong impression on me: I thought it was the darkest, spookiest, creepiest part of that whole game. DT was insular, but very focused on your steady uncovering of the history behind Durlag's tragedy and meltdown, and the evil forces that had been arrayed against him. Watcher's Keep has plot as well, but less mystery. Before you enter the Keep, you're given a precis of the situation by an order of Helmic knights; your view of the situation is further refined as you complete more parts of the Keep, but the plot seems a lot less complex than in DT.

One of the things I'd loved most about DT was how radically different each of the floors in the dungeon was. One was filled to the brim with deadly traps. Another had an elaborate system of self-opening and self-locking doors that shunted your party through the map, splitting you up if you weren't careful. You got to experience the actual rooms where Durlag and his family had lived, and watch their ghostly apparitions replay the ghastly violations of the doppelgangers. WK still has more variety between levels than you would get in, say, a Final Fantasy super-dungeon, but it didn't feel as exciting as DT. There were some cool puzzles that required you to pay close attention to your environment, which was a nice change from the game's standard of revealing everything through dialog or items. For the most part, though, each level really only was about itself. The Keep as a whole is there to guard The Imprisoned One, but nothing in the keep really has anything to say ABOUT The Imprisoned One, or about each other. It's as if Durlag's Tower only had the Demon Knight, and none of Durlag's family.

That said, the individual levels are pretty interesting. The first level has some nice-if-standard item-based puzzles, and a very challenging fight with some animated statues. Later on you meet a Chromatic Demon, with some environmental puzzles that require you to read and compare notes from various dead mages, then arrange the environment to allow you to defeat some ordinarily unkillable guardians. I think the battle with the Chromatic Demon is supposed to be tough as well - according to the notes, he can take four forms, and in each form he's only vulnerable to a specific type of attack - but fortunately to me, he emerged in his Ice form, and, well, if there's one thing I do VERY well, it's offensive fire-based magic, and I was able to kill him before he shifted.

Later you go through a very difficult maze game. This felt like a throwback to the 80s and 90s adventure games - typically, all screens in those games would be connected in North-South-East-West-type links, and you could navigate them sensibly, but every once in a while an area would abandon spatial logic, such that you could keep going in the same direction and end up in circles. Well, this was like that. In addition to the challenge of navigating the maze, the way it's divided into rooms also makes it nicely tough; for example, you can choose to raise a powerful summon, but you won't be able to take it with you when you move on to the next room; and you need to be very protective of your weaker party members, since enemies might be on top of them from the moment you enter the room. And, as a final grace touch, two powerful groups of demons (I think balor and tanar'ri) are also lost in the maze and are battling it out for supremacy. I killed pretty much everyone in the maze before I found the journal that clearly describes how to get to the exit. In order to leave, you need to gamble with a tiefling (or kill him, I suppose - I never fight when I don't have to).

You finally encounter the Machine of Lum the Mad on the next level. I think this is probably the real highlight of Watcher's Keep - yeah, all of the artifacts you get are nice, but solving the mysteries of the Machine gives you the only chance in the whole game to directly improve your natural stats. Unlike BG1, where items like the Manual of Bodily Health were scattered throughout the game, and you could gradually improve yourself over time, here there's one point in the game where you can pull a bunch of knobs and levers and quickly raise all your stats. I took the DEX, STR, and CHA for Sebrina. Finally having a natural 18 CHA let me ditch the Ring of Human Influence that I'd been carrying since the start of the game; DEX helps my eternal quest for a low AC (though this is still mostly driven by my Bracers); and, while I'm not all about combat, I do occasionally whack people with my quarterstaff. And giving myself a better natural STR makes it easier to dispense the STR-boosting items to my real frontline fighters. As a sorcerer, I really don't have any use for INT, WIS, or a higher CON. I gave the INT to Nalia, finally raising her to 18 and letting her learn a bunch more spells. The CON went to... hm, I think Mazzy; Viconia needs higher CON more badly, but I think that a single point wasn't going to help her enough, and fighters always benefit from more CON.

The fifth floor has less-interesting puzzles, but more-challenging fights (probably the most difficult since the statue fights on the first floor). There's an interesting "endless horde" type thing early on, where you fight a seemingly endless wave of orc fighers, archers, and mages. After a few minutes, I became convinced that I was doing something wrong, that I had to do something on the map in order to keep them from arriving. Nope - turns out it's just a test of your perseverance. As you collect, um, gems or keys or something, you can start unlocking the seals on the Imprisoned One's prison, which unleashes some VERY challenging fights. I'm talking, like, multiple lich-powerful opponents at once. I struggled for a while, then started bringing in the summons. WK lets you earn a TON of XP, and I'd rocketed up through Level 20 by now and started gaining HLAs. I found that the battles got far easier when I had, say, a Fallen Deva and a Planetar fighting by my side. Honestly, the numbers were the big thing; once I got parity with the number of enemies, I could finally start protecting my spellcasters, and then the fights, while still challenging, were much more doable.

Oh, yeah: this level also had a GREAT retro text-based adventure game. No, really, I'm hardly even joking: one of those things where you go "North", "South", "Look", "Fight". Instead of clicking on the screen to move through rooms, you do both your movement and actions through dialog. You can find some equipment, some items (like a key to open a chest), fight enemies, use a Wand of Missiles, etc. You eventually fight and defeat a Skeleton Warrior. It made me really nostalgic for the formative games of my childhood, which were the start of a fairly direct line towards me playing and loving the BG games.

There's a bit of a plot twist that you encounter once you finally reach The Imprisoned One. It had been pretty obvious from the beginning that some twist was coming - the Helmic knights are a bit too cryptic - but I had assumed that they were, like, actually in service of the Imprisoned One and using you to free him. It turns out that they're who they say they are, they just aren't very good at it; they've neglected to tell you that the job requires sacrifice and eternal imprisonment alongside the bad guy, who turns out to be the Demogorgon, one of the more powerful princes of the Abyss. They're using you so they can remain free. You have a couple of choices in how to resolve this; the "best" solution, in the sense of serving the greatest good, is probably to use Helm's ritual to seal Demogorgon and the faithless knights inside; doing this will keep the world save for several centuries more. That seemed a little boring, so I opted for the second-best approach, killing Demogorgon and rescuing the knights. Once again, my Planetars helped a ton with this fight, and I fell in love with Improved Alacrity and Stop Time. Killing Demogorgon sends him back to the Abyss, which is actually a bit less good since it means he's free to move around and do stuff, but Helm seemed cool with it.

As all this was going on, the Nalia romance was steadily advancing; periodically I would break away from one of the levels to head back to the Keep or to the city in order to advance things. However, even after WK was done, I still was barely dating her. I spent some more time hunting down and finishing every last little side-quest I could think of, until my Journal was totally empty. I then started downloading and installing still more quest mods, to draw out the time. That's a huge testament to how much I was enjoying this mod - I was so wrapped up in it, and I knew that it would come to a hard stop once I moved on to ToB, that I wanted to keep on playing just for the mod. I also started looking around for ways to speed up the romance without breaking the mood. There's a pretty trivial cheating way to do it via CLUAConsole, which I'd done a few times before when I was checking to make sure that the script was still on track, but that's a pretty lame way to experience something like this; the whole thing that's fun about this sort of NPC interaction is how fairly spontaneous it is, how it pops up while your mind is on something else, and quickly becomes the center of your world. It turns out that the timers the game uses for events (including love talks) isn't based on real-world clock time, or on in-game clock time, but on the game's frame rate - basically, the rendering loop. So, by boosting the FPS, you can also speed up a romance. It turns out that this also has other side-effects, which might have been annoying or difficult early in the game, but for now were pretty much perfect: your characters all walk faster, so you can get across maps more quickly, and fights are over sooner. Since everyone was so incredibly overpowered by now (all my characters ended the game with levels in the mid-20s), Mazzy (who, remember, always gets the Boots of Speed) would often race across a map, run into, say, a group of five Greater Wolfwares, start swinging her adorable little short sword at them, and kill them all before the rest of us would catch up. I'm planning on setting the FPS back down when I start ToB, because it's hard to manage tactics when fights move that fast, plus I want all the NPC content to last me as long as I can, but for this, it was a great way to make sure I could experience the whole de'Arnise plot while still doing SOMETHING in the game.

So, I grabbed a couple, played through them, grabbed some more, and played through those. As always, it's really interesting and exciting to see the variety of cool things that independent modders can do. There's a lot of variety in tone and style between the mods, but for the most part that's okay and in keeping with the main game - after all, BG2 has some really amusing stuff in it like the Five Flagons playhouse and the Cyrano-esque wooing outside the Temple of the Radiant Heart, along with some incredibly dark stuff like Irenicus's torture chambers and Bodhi's pools of blood. Some of the mods are very self-contained. One, Tower of Deception, is apparently based on an old D&D module. It's a wholly separate area, with its own plot that fits within the world of the Sword Coast but doesn't connect to any of the BG2 plots. The overall story of that mod actually reminded me a bit of the Ice Island quest from TotSC, in that it's a far-away place that attracts and traps people moving nearby. There are some good puzzles in the mod, and I liked the way that a lot of them depended on you actually using items within the game, instead of just picking from dialogs or clicking on things. My main complaint is probably that the rooms in the tower are too small - it's really hard to fight, or even move, with a six-person party when everything is scrunched up together. Still, it was a great mod, and the creator gave it a lot of polish; in addition to the custom maps, it even has a custom video showing the tower as you approach it, very similar to the Bioware videos introducing new areas. I was tempted to keep the book for myself at the end - after all, as a high-level sorcerer it's the sort of thing that I SHOULD be able to use - but I decided to keep my word and hand it over.

After this, I played a couple of mods created by Lava Del'Vortel, a Polish BG enthusiast. First up was Eilistraee's Clearing, which adds a bit of a coda to Solaufein's story, and introduces you to a group of peaceful Drow who are trying to build a virtuous community on the surface. This was a perfect mod for me: lots of nice little quests, some set in a new area and others that tied back in to existing places (one particularly adorable one has you finding a teddy bear for a little girl). There's a good and challenging optional fight with a demi-lich; in contrast with my earlier fights with Kagnaxx, this time I did very little advance buffing and preparation, but was able to kill him quickly enough that only a single party member got Imprisoned. There's a larger overall plot that has to do with enlisting these good Drow in the fight against Irenicus and his army from the Underdark. Unfortunately, by this point in the game I'd already reached Suldanessar and cleared all the enemies all the way to the Palace; I still wanted to see how it played out, though, so I peeked at the mod dialog for Elhan so I could manually carry out an exchange that was supposed to happen in the Elven war camp. A significant portion of this mod has to do with reading comprehension and analytical thinking; you review a couple of scrolls that describe Eilistraee and her relationship with the Drow pantheon, then carry on a fairly intelligent conversation with one of the group's elders: not just reciting memorized facts from the scroll, but inferring conclusions from the evidence they present. At the end of all this, you gain a new special ability, in addition to a few useful items (including a unique amulet for Viconia).

At right around the time I finished this set of quests, Nalia and I had finally set RomanceActive from 1 to 2.... if you know what I mean! Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more!

There are still more developments in the romance, so I kept on with my quest mods. I did an earlier mod from the same author, Tales of the Deep Gardens, which was a much more stand-alone one; after an initial set of riddles and mini-quests in Athkala, you are transported to a new area. This is a very involved and intricately constructed alternate world, where colors are dominant essences, and humans are only faint followers of those colors. Once again, a big part of the mod consists of immersing yourself in this mythology, and coming to understand what it all means. This mod also added a lot of new, unique, interesting items and spells, and manages to offer a bunch of new things that feel very useful without being overpowered. I bought a bunch of cool and unique things, but ended up only permanently keeping a few pieces of equipment - a new Black mage robe for Imoen, and a nifty Mage healing spell for Nalia. (I know that this kind of violates the divide between mage and cleric, but a single spell isn't going to ruin anything, and it isn't like it'll make me ditch Viconia.) There's another segment like the one in Eilistraee where you need to answer a bunch of questions, this time about Colors, although here you don't just study some documents; instead, your understanding comes through sheer exposure to all the aspects of this society. Oh, and there are several fights that are also riddles; the hardest for me by far was the Silver Guardian, who basically tells you what you have to do to defeat him, but it still took me a long time to do it correctly. You do get a ton of XP from completing this mod - I think they could cut the amount in half or more and it would still feel like an adequate reward - but the best part is probably an opportunity you get to spend 16k gold in order to have a character named "Silvertongue" bind you with a color. This KIND of reminded me of the tattoos from Planescape: Torment, but you can only choose a single color. Now, by the end of the mod, you'll have some idea of what impact the various colors might mean. For example Red is the color of hostility, so it makes sense that this would boost your fighting ability. I saved my game and tried a few colors, but didn't immediately see any impact; I'd assumed they would boost your stats, but that wasn't the case. I eventually broke down and hit Google, and finally found a (German?) page that Google helped me translate. I opted to go with the Gray color, which actually takes away max HP and gives you a fairly significant penalty to your death saving throws, but grants you an extra attack and improves your THAC0. As a sorceress, this was probably my only chance in the entire game to boost my number of attacks.

Finally, I played through an older quest mod, Dungeon Crawl. This is apparently based on a webcomic that evidently no longer exists; I'm sure I would have gotten more amusement out of it if I was already familiar with the characters, but it was fun anyways. There's an initial segment in the Copper Coronet and the Slums, then the bulk of the mod takes place in a new area in a dungeon-type place on an island. Actually, now that I think about it, there was actually some really funny stuff in there... on the second level, the smugglers responsible for your kidnapping offer to assist you if you'll help kill a lich and his pet beholder. Sounds like a nice epic fight, right? Well, you can kill them if you want, but they're really just two very enthusiastic entrepreneurs: the lich makes some delicious tea (and you'll even hear some fun rumors if you patronize him), while the gazer is deliriously excited about his cheese shop; the gazer actually has some really good other items, including another pair of Boots of Speed, a Belt of Ogre Strength (which I grabbed for Mazzy - making the Crom Fayer for Viconia had deprived Mazzy of her strength-boosting belt), and another really good mage robe. I eventually decided that I liked this lich and beholder more than the smugglers, and killed them all. The final boss is Lupus, a demonic rabbit - yeah, basically like the one from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except he actually talks. My fight with him was a bit buggy - I got him down to "Near Death", but he just wouldn't die, even after whaling on him for another minute or so. By now, I was feeling really comfortable with editing mod scripts, so I started poking around the source tree for something that looked promising. Ah, O#Lupus.baf - that's gotta be it! I saw a couple of potential problems - it had the same "!CD_STATE_INVALID(Player1)" check that had been breaking my Nalia script, and also a check for "HPLT(10)", which I figured had to mean "fewer than 10 hit points". Now, Chloe et al were whacking Lupus for 20-40 HP on each strike, so I wondered if the script might be getting thrown by that - either wrapping him around to negative values, or else not dropping below 10 since he wouldn't die at 0. I took out the CD_STATE_INVALID check, boosted the HPLT value to 50, re-installed the mod, and fought again. This time, it ended as expected: I got him to Near Death, the adventurers teleported in, Lupus fled, we took the treasure and left. All in all, a fully satisfactory mod.

By now, I had finally completed all the unique content from the Nalia romance mod. I thought it was extraordinarily well-done, arguably better than any of the three Bioware romances I've played through. It managed to really stay true to what we know of Nalia from everything that's in the official game, and then it extrapolates from that; it manages to surprise you occasionally, while making it feel like a revelation and not a repudiation. The overall pace of the romance is quite different from the others, and I think that's very appropriate given Nalia's personality and social role. For example, with Viconia you, um, get to ViconiaRomanceActive == 2 relatively early on, and then experience a sort of roller coaster of ups and downs as you explore that aspect of your relationship. With Nalia, though, there is an extremely long period of gradual friendship, which deepens to interest, which leads to a state where Nalia digs you but seemingly won't admit it to herself, to a period of reflection and creative thinking. I'm making it sound more directional than it really is; most of the conversations are about topics other than the two of you, but you can sense your two orbits gradually synchronizing with one another as you exert more of a pull on each other. After the consummation, there is still a little more fleshing-out of your relationship, and you have access to all of the flirt options (which, again, she reacts to in believable ways - don't think that she and Viconia will go for the same things!), but that initial journey was by far the biggest element of the romance, and there isn't a whole lot that follows is. Again, I do wish that jcompton or someone equally talented would make a Throne of Bhaal version of the mod - I would love to see how that story ends.

Speaking of ends... once I determined that the romance had run its course (I think that's at PGNaliaLoveTalk of 65), I headed back to Suldanessellar and the Palace. I think I managed to goof up the Tree of Life - I had repaired the statues and gone down into the Tree before harvesting the nuts, and when I came back up it didn't seem like it was possible to get them anymore. Once again, I used the cheat console to grab a necessary item. (I'm usually fairly careful with my saves, but I had overwritten my quicksave and auto-save, and the last unique save would have taken me back about two days of in-game time.) I destroyed the parasite, fought Irenicus, and won!

It was yet another case of my memory playing tricks on me... I had vividly remembered the battle at the Tree of Life, but had thought that it was the last battle in the game. After all, I remembered it taking a long time - I seem to recall racing the party around the branches, chasing after Irenicus and fleeing from him when we needed to recover - as opposed to this time where my seriously overpowered characters whaled on him for a while. (The secret to a boring boss battle: Improved Alacrity + Timestop + Ruby Ray + Breach + Summon Planetar + Comet + Comet + Comet.) After you kill him, though... you get dragged down to Hell! Zoinks!

I did remember Hell, but for some reason I had mentally placed that near the beginning of Throne of Bhaal, not the end of Shadows of Amn. I'd wondered for a second whether the game had automatically moved me on to the final episode - but no, I was still getting unique dialog from Chloe, so this had to be SoA. Well, that's fine. Down we go!

Hell is kind of interesting. You need to face five demons who each present you with a trial. I think that you can fight someone for each of the trials, but it may only be required for one. Each presents a "good" and an "evil" solution. First I faced the wraith of Sarevok, who wanted me to transform into the Slayer and claim my Bhaal birthright. I turned him down (saying that I felt only pity), but still had to fight him. The second demon gives you a powerful longsword, the Blackrazor, which is a +3 blade with some really good abilities - fast HP regeneration, some immunities, and I think a level-drain as well. You can give up the sword to free an imprisoned djinn, or kill him and keep the sword. That would have been a much more difficult choice if I'd had a single party member with a longsword proficiency - next! A particularly nasty dilemma forces you to choose between sacrificing yourself or losing a party member. The demon chose Imoen, which I thought was particularly unfair - after all, she's already HAD her soul stolen once! I gritted my teeth and went through the self-sacrifice doors. I HATE giving up personal stats; I had spent an inordinate amount of time in denial an an earlier dream sequence where you need to sacrifice a point of CON in order to survive. Here, I lost some max HP (eh), some XP (big whoop), and 1 point of DEX (NOOOOOOOOO!) Mutter, mutter.... I hope you appreciated it, Imoen. The next trial featured a demon offering another choice: you can accept a cloak sewn from the flayed skins of beautiful nymphs (ewww!) in order to avoid the fear that awaits you. I get the feeling this might have been one of the mod-affected trials; in addition to the clearly good and clearly evil dialog choices ("Screw the nymphs, give me the cloak!" or "I would never accept a gift from you!"), there's another line of inquiry where you seek to establish whether the nymphs had already been harmed or not; the thinking here is, if the cloak has ALREADY been made, then you're really not making the world any better or worse by taking it. I dunno, maybe that was in the original game, but it feels like something added by a thoughtful/obstinate modder. Taking the cloak makes this a cakewalk. Like an idiot, I stuck my head in the other room, only to see a whole bunch of beholders. Blech. They chased me back to the main Hell room, where I had to whack them a lot. The last trial has a demon egg you on to fight an enemy. Um... are you really going to do what a demon tells you to? I just kept questioning it; turns out the enemy was a golden dragon, which I guess is one of the good kind. No more fighting!

Phew... after all that, you get to insert "tears" (c'mon, they're keys, all right?) into the big scary eyeballs by the door. And, ta-da, you get bonuses for doing this! I was ecstatic to see that I got +2 DEX from one of them - okay, so now I didn't feel so bad about that choice. You pick up some nice resistances as well, and I think I got some mostly-useless boosts to WIS and CHA as well. (I'd be curious to see if these rewards change based on your choices - it seems like it'd make sense.)

This is probably as good a point as any to show of my lead character, Sebrina, at the end of the game.

Not too bad, I guess. I hadn't bothered re-rolling her when starting off in BG1, so she started off with good but not great stats there. I'd maxed out my DEX and STR, and ensured that I'd have a decent amount of CON (again, non-fighters don't need too much, but I'd remembered that I'd be losing some along the way). Sorcerer is a kind of weird class, in that none of your stats are really that important; unlike every other mage type, you don't rely on INT for any of your spellcasting; like all other mages, you don't need WIS, either. (I think there might be minimums for these stats, but they're pretty low, and there doesn't seem to be a benefit to boosting them.) I'd filled out my remaining points into CHA, as usual making my protagonist the public face of the party. I think I'd had enough points left for a natural CHA of 16 at the start of BG1. I'd gradually enhanced it to a natural 19 by this point in the game, and a few buffing items raised it still further, as seen here. My other boosts had come from the Manuals and Tomes of BG1, the Machine of Lum the Mad, and my Trials. It's fun to look at these stats and think about what Sebrina would be like in real life... not too bright, kind of rash and impulsive, but extremely capable and VERY persuasive.

Anyways... after the last Tear was inserted, Irenicus arrived for the final battle. This was more challenging than before, if only because he summoned some fiends to help him. Still... this battle was NOT designed to be challenging for someone who had gone through Watcher's Keep. He threw me off a bit early on - a fireball interrupted my attempt at Improved Alacrity, and some Demon Fear temporarily put Nalia and Viconia out of the picture. Still, Mazzy and Chloe were able to keep his demons occupied, and in the meantime Imoen was able to summon her own Planetar. By then Sebrina had recovered and was back on the Improved Alacrity kick (oh, and in case you still aren't seeing why this is such a big deal, I should mention that she was wearing the Robes of Vecna and the Amulet of Power. So, basically, she can unload something like 10 spells in the 2 rounds that IA lasts. If the first spell is a Time Stop, then... well, you're waking up to a very different world than the one you left), raining fiery death down and distributing Improved Invisibility to everyone. Irenicus ran away like the little coward he is, and the two Planetars (!) chased him down and continued rapidly whacking him all through his cut scene.

Finally - dah dah dah dah! - Irenicus is dead, you can reclaim your undivided soul, and you and your companions ascend from Hell back to Suldanessellar. There's a nice, if brief, segment where Queen Ellesime assembles all the Elves together in the palace to praise your actions, and (shockingly) admit some culpability for their setting Irenicus's wheels of revenge into motion. I got a kick out of this bit - it just reminds me so much of the end of Sierra's old Hero Quest / Quest for Glory I, or the end of the original Star Wars. It just feels RIGHT when I end a long computer game with a bunch of animated sprites clustering up a screen, telling me that I've done a good job.

And, with that, Shadows of Amn draws to a close. There's a creepy final video where you see Irenicus face his final (and probably eternal) punishment. This rapidly segues in to a teaser about the upcoming conflict in Throne of Bhaal. I no longer remember exactly who those mysterious hooded men seated around the table are, and am looking forward to finding out.

Throne of Bhaal automatically kicks off after you've finished SoA, so I won't be able to resist playing through that, but enough stuff went down in this game that I wanted to write it up first while it was still relatively fresh. As with my re-play of BG1, I was blown away by the quality of the user-created mods for this game, and found that they significantly improved what was already one of my all-time favorite games. And, like my original play-through of BG2, I was thoroughly impressed by the depth of the story, the high level of NPC interactions, the wonderful variety of optional quests and other amusements. It felt very rewarding to experience so much that I hadn't encountered in my first game, and to often not be entirely sure whether I was playing a mod or a side-quest that I had simply overlooked.

I'm sure I'll play BG2 again, though realistically it'll probably be another wait of many years. That's kind of comforting in its own way: by then my memory will have another chance to slightly fade, and get fuzzy around the edges, letting me feel surprise again at parts of the game. And it's exhilarating to see that the mod community for this game is STILL thriving - Eilistraee's Song was released just last December, for example, and last updated a few months ago. By the time I return, I imagine that there will be a whole other set of mods created. It seems like Tutu might be obsolete by then, replaced by BGT or The Big Picture or whatever comes after them, similar to how Baldurdash of old was replaced with the Fixpack.

I find that part of my mind is already thinking forward to that speculative next game, thinking of what I'll do differently. It does seem like I should give a shot at playing some sort of evil character, or at the least something like Chaotic Neutral. I'd like to play a pure thief - I've always resisted this in the past, since Imoen is a thief and so becoming one seems redundant, but if I want to build an evil party Imoen won't be in it anyways. And being an evil thief would be important if I wanted to make a full-on evil party in BG2 - I think most players will take Yoshimo or Jan since they're neutral, but there are only three evil NPCs in the whole game, and none of them are thieves. Anyways... just something for me to think about while I get ready to bring Sebrina to her deification at the Throne of Bhaal.

In the meantime - kudos a decade later to Black Isle and Bioware for making such an amazing game that's withstand the test of time, and mega-kudos to the dozens of modders who have transformed their passion for the game into an amazing creative endeavor. Let me selfishly encourage them all to keep up the good work!

Goodbye, Steve

2011-10-06T17:14:00.000-07:00

Like practically everybody here in the Bay Area, I was sad to hear that Steve Jobs had passed away. We've known for a while that his health was poor and his days were numbered, but still, it comes as a shock to realize that this titan no longer walks among us.

Steve was inextricable from Apple; even during his years in the wilderness, his stamp remained on the company, and his return cemented his place in the tiny pantheon of true technology leaders.

Most famously, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak invented the non-hobbyist version of the personal computer. Without the Apple, there might not have been an IBM PC; we would probably still have PCs, but I imagine that they would have taken much longer to come into our homes. As a programmer who first found his life's calling by typing BASIC programs into a home PC, I owe Steve my thanks.

When I was growing up, I bought into and helped perpetuate the whole "Macs-Versus-PCs" debate. In elementary school, I enjoyed our Apple IIe computers, where I experienced the joys of Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and other light educational games. In junior high, I was put off by the Apple Macintosh computers in the lab: where were the games? Where was BASIC? I sneered and returned to my command line at home.

I still remember when Jobs came back to Apple, and particularly when he "sold out" and announced a deal with Microsoft. I remember crowing to my friends, announcing that Apple's days were numbered, that in another year or two we would be living in a glorious, PC/Microsoft-only world.

I'm willing to admit that I was very, very wrong.

Steve proved me, and everyone else, wrong. I can't think of another person over the past fifteen years with his track record. Creating a successful business is hard. Reinvigorating a dying business? I would have said that was impossible, if I hadn't seen it for myself. He rescued Macs, and made them presentable to a wide group of people, including (probably not as crucially as I would like to think) coders like me. OS X proved to be the natural evolution of my college-age love affair with Linux, as I could finally achieve high productivity in a beautiful environment.

Steve had a knack for changing the world. For all the truthful accusations of Microsoft copying Apple's innovations, Apple itself had a tendency to take something that had previously been tried, and failed, and turn it into something indispensable. Our planet has had portable digital music players since the Rio and the Zen; few people cared, and now everyone has an iPod. Palm had been making PDAs for a decade, and Microsoft had spent untold millions of dollars creating Windows Mobile phones. Now, the iPhone dictates every move of the mobile market where I make my living. When the iPad was announced, I wondered whether a market could possibly exist between the small-size phone and the large-size laptop. Yes, it can, and it's where most of the growth in our industry is occurring.

I never met the man, and in all honesty, I'm not sure if I would have wanted to. From what I hear he could be curt and abrasive. He demanded perfection, and could get upset when he didn't receive it. That made life difficult for a few hundred people. It made life better for millions of others.

Nobody can fill his shoes. I'm confident that Apple and Tim Cook will stay true to the vision that Steve Jobs so ardently embodied. When you look throughout the boardrooms of Silicon Valley companies, though, you can see many other smart people, many other talented people, but nobody else who can shake up so many industries, and personally touch so many lives, the way that Steve did. He helped change the way we communicate; he personally brought the publishing industries into the 21st century; he created beautiful objects that can enrich our lives. He left a legacy. He will be missed.

15 Reasons Why I'm Glad R.E.M. Stuck Around

2011-10-02T15:15:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the (to me) shocking news that R.E.M. has decided to break up, it's been interesting to see the range of reactions. I and a few close friends (with impeccable musical taste) were caught somewhere between disappointment and denial. Their last two albums in particular have been so good, and the band has sounded so engaged, that it seems kind of weird that they would pick this point to call it quits. Most of the critics that I've read have lauded the band for their longevity, their influence on the "alternative" music scene, and their string of solid albums from 1980 through the mid-90's, and have somewhat gently said words to the effect that R.E.M. made a good choice in deciding to exit while they're still on top of the game, instead of facing a slide into irrelevance. Many individual commentators, either on twitter, Internet message boards, or the blogosphere, have been quite a bit harsher, either expressing surprise that the band is still around, or stating that they haven't done anything good for the past decade or two.
I find it a bit interesting that there's so much disagreement over when the "right" time for the band to break up would have been. Automatic for the People came out in 1992, almost twenty years ago, and marked a sort of high-water mark in the band's popularity and critical acclaim. Quitting then would have meant that they went out "on top" by having a trajectory that only went upward along all axes (fame, fortune, and respect). Monster, from 1994, was the last huge commercial success that they had; it went quadruple-platinum, and every record since then has seen declining sales. Quitting then would have cemented their commercial legacy. Many people think that the logical time for R.E.M. to break up would have been after New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 1996, when Bill Berry left the band. (Famously, he told the other three that he wanted to leave, but would stay if that's what it took to keep the band together.) For anyone who thinks that R.E.M. did the right thing in continuing to make music after 1996, most people seem to be happy that they went all the way until now.

In retrospect, 1997 was probably the most important year in the band's history. The obvious reason was Bill Berry's departure. However, this was also the year that Radiohead released OK Computer, which shook up the rock world that R.E.M. helped create. R.E.M. generally and Michael Stipe in particular had acted as mentors to Radiohead since they first arrived in the early 90's, bringing them along on their tours and acting like elder brothers as they navigated the business of music. Thom Yorke, who had worried early on that his band was sounding too much like R.E.M., later on embraced their similar styles, only to keep on pushing and eventually eclipse them with his radical innovation. OK Computer (and later Kid A) opened up huge new territories for rock bands to explore, and I think that everything R.E.M. has done since then has been driven by their excitement and curiosity at moving into that space.

There's an old and trite choice between being a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond. I feel like pre-1997, R.E.M. was one of the biggest fishes in the pond of alternative rock. After 1997, they moved into a different pond that was much bigger, with a much wider array of potential to explore. They never dominated this new pond like they did the old, but they became an even better fish.

Obviously, I'm glad that we got to hold on to R.E.M. for as long as we did. Here are fifteen reasons why I'm happy that they didn't call it quits after 1996, and blessed us with five more albums over fifteen years.

Lotus
Hope
Walk Unafraid
Saturn Return
Imitation of Life
Chorus and the Ring
Leaving New York
Living Well is the Best Revenge
Houston
Accelerate
Sing for the Submarine
Discoverer
It Happened Today
Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter
Blue

I think that whenever a person or group makes something that's good, the world gets a tinier bit better as a result. R.E.M. hasn't been making as big a splash over the past decade, but they've been more quietly making a bunch of really, really good music. Listening to it has made my life more pleasurable, and I know that these songs and more will continue to make me happier throughout the rest of my days. I'm grateful to them for giving me those gifts, and wish them all the best in whatever comes next.

Read Me First

2011-09-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

Yowza! Reading Neal Stephenson's latest opus, REAMDE, feels a little like getting sucked into the engine of a jet airplane. It's impossible to resist.

As is usually the case after I've finished reading one of his books, my head is still kind of spinning. I was debating whether to throw up my thoughts now, while the experience of reading is still fresh, or to wait a while, to give things a while to settle. I've decided to press ahead for now, but I reserve the right to post again in the future if it seems warranted.

Let's start off with that spinning head. In the last books that Stephenson has written, that head-spinning sensation is the result of volume; here, even though REAMDE is over a thousand pages in hardcover, the spinning is a result of velocity. I've tricked myself into thinking of a "typical" Neal Stephenson novel as one with a sprawling plot, a multitude of characters, incredibly broadly branching ideas and theories, and clever writing. REAMDE's plot is tremendously exciting, but it feels more linear and comprehensible than the plots of, say, The Diamond Age or The Baroque Cycle. For the most part, the plot is about A leading to B leading to C leading to D, unlike some other books where A, B, C, and D are all occurring more or less independently of one another, smashing into each other from time to time. If I were to graph it, the REAMDE plot would consist of only two arrows, but with lots of twists within them; other recent Stephenson books would require a dozen arrows.

The characters are just as varied as in his other books, and I think they may be his best set to date. I'll get into more details in spoilerville down below, but he covers a lot of ground among them (ages, genders, interests, capabilities, personalities), and everyone feels both cool AND essential to the action, which is no mean feat. He does a great job of introducing them as well. We get a core of key characters, mainly orbiting around the Forthrast family, in the first few chapters of the book. This group mostly remains throughout the book, but we're treated to additional major characters until quite far into the story. That tends to be a bit risky, just because the author doesn't have as much time to establish the characters' personalities, but Stephenson is a pro at this - when necessary, he'll break from the main action to fill us in on the new character's background, but focusing on their actions and interesting contributions in the past, so that it feels like a flashback and not like exposition.

Stephenson seems to have tamped down on the wildly meandering digressions that have long been the hallmark of his books. I'm a bit sad to see them go, but that doesn't mean that we don't get discursive passages with interesting and fully developed ideas in them; it's just that those passages tend to be more obviously germane to the story than they used to be. We learn a lot about how firearms work, and the technical and political processes that go into developing a flight plan between two cities, and the care that must be observed when attempting to offer assistance to Midwesterners (I can vouch for the complete accuracy of that last part).

One thing that especially struck me about Stephenson's storycrafting in this book is how masterfully he portrays characters' thinking. I think a lot of authors try to make their characters smart by having them KNOW things - one person will be confronted with an obstacle, and then go, "Ah, I know how to solve this problem," and we're impressed by their solution. Throughout this book, though, Stephenson's characters impress us as they're confronted with situations where they don't know the answer; over a page or two, we'll see how they study the problem, perhaps try out one or more hypotheses, draw conclusions from their failures, and eventually LEARN a better solution. We see one woman trying to figure out a Chinese numbering system; a group of urbanites attempting to steer a boat through a storm; some criminals cleaning up the evidence left behind. It's highly engaging and rewarding to read this; we aren't just asked to admire someone's excellence, but can track them through their progress and struggle.

Stephenson's writing is as clever and sharp as ever. I'm reluctant to pull quotes here, maybe I will later, but he just has an absolutely amazing knack for pithy phrases and memorable phrasemaking.

A few minor technical notes before I plunge into the plot proper:

The paper stock and binding for this book is very similar to that used for the Baroque Cycle, and unlike that used for Anathem: the paper feels rough, and the edge lengths are varied, which lends it a slightly antique character. I haven't decided if I should read anything into that or not... it totally made sense for the Baroque cycle, given its historical milieu; this book doesn't share that setting, but if there is a reason for those pages, it may have to do with the occasionally rural and anti-modern themes of the book.

This book is written in a standard past tense ("Zula looked him in the eye"), unlike Stephenson's occasional present tense ("Hiro races down the street").

I think this is the first book I've read that uses a new system of punctuation popularized on the Internet: the combination of an exclamation mark and a question mark to indicate extreme surprise. He only uses it within dialog ("You think!?"). It totally works, and if the technique enters into the literary mainstream, I'm pretty confident that this book will be cited in whatever equivalent of the OED gets used for punctuation.

MEGA SPOILERS

I got the book on Wednesday night. On Thursday night, I laid down in bed around page 250, having gotten to the part in Xiamen when they're closing in on the Troll. "This is pretty exciting," I thought. I decided that I'd keep reading until they finished that scene. Little did I suspect that this is where the afterburners would kick in. I FLEW through Yuxia's kidnapping, the casing of the Troll's apartment complex, Zula's electrical gambit, the INSANE introduction of Abdullah Jones, the holocaust on the fifth floor, the AMAZING introduction of Olivia, the way everyone fractures into a half-dozen groups of survivors, the flight from the explosion, the premeditated hijacking, Sokolov's incredible reorientation from sole survivor to capable operator, the various nautical piratings, MI-6's potential double-cross, and, of course, Zula's totally bad-ass approach to self-defense. That brought me up to... um, about page 540. I was pretty tired the next day. But, I'm convinced that I wouldn't have been able to sleep if I'd tried to stop at any point in between those two spots. It's seriously the longest, most intense and most exciting sequence that I recall having ever read in a book.

This seems like a very plot-oriented book, but for some reason I actually don't feel like writing about the plot - it would take forever to recap, and I can't do justice to how awesomely it all spins out. So, instead, here are a few brief thoughts on each of the characters.

Richard Forthrast: I kind of get the feeling that he might be Neal's alter-ego in this book. Oh, to be sure, they're very different: Richard is older, and heavier, and used to be a marijuana smuggler and presently owns a Fortune-500 company. Still, I get the impression that many of Richard's concerns are Neal's concerns as well. Richard spends a lot more time observing and thinking than many other characters in the book get to, and that leads to come great insights. I wanted to picture him as being kind of a Richard Garriott figure - more on the inspiration below - but the text makes it pretty clear that he isn't. He primarily wanted to solve a technical problem and make money; the other people in his company, who we don't spend as much time with, are more of the world-centric fanatics of Garriott's stripe.

The Forthrast Clan: I really, really liked this family. Not to put down the Shaftoes or the Waterhouses, but the Forthrasts seemed more varied and more believable: there's a lot of different types of personalities, different histories there. I particularly loved the intricacies of the internal politics, and the simplicity of the external politics: the family can talk darkly about one another, but they present a unified front as soon as any one of them comes under threat. I really related to this large, sprawling, Midwestern-originating family. The King clan on my dad's side is similarly large, and I know all to well the feeling that Richard gets when he encounters "cousins" (Stephenson nails the way that this word gets used in this context) who he doesn't remember at the re-u. This is pretty fertile ground, and I can easily imagine Stephenson doing another Forthrast book, perhaps with Richard as a minor character who pops up in a scene or two.

(Another fun thought experiment: would there ever be a book with the Forthrast and the Shaftoes/Waterhouses? Or, to ask the question slightly differently, do you suppose that this book is in the same universe as Cryptonomicon/The Baroque Cycle; and as a corollary, if they are, is it the same as our own universe? Cryptonomicon and REAMDE are particularly interesting because they're all set more or less in the present day, but that present day is going to be obsolete in the near future, so it's kind of tempting to view them as occurring in an alternate universe one or two steps away. Farther up the wick, perhaps?)

Zula: Oh. My. Gosh. She's gotta be the most bad-ass heroine this side of The Bride. I love that what makes her so deadly is her mind. She's dealing from the most limited deck that anyone gets, and somehow manages to find the cards to make her survive. I cringed and cheered when she did for Khalid on the plane. When you take a step back, it's a bit harder to cheer for her as hard - her decisions to help save herself also result in touching off Jones' bloody flight from China, and later she puts her family directly at risk to save her life again. Still, who can fault her for making those decisions? She extends life into a future that she wouldn't otherwise have. She breaks up Jones' planned assault on the Taiwan conference - it seems clear that Olivia and MI-6 weren't going to be able to stop him, and if that had gone down, who knows, it might have touched off a series of events leading to World War III. And turning Jones towards the Schloss ultimately leads to the eradication of not only the survivors of his China network, but also flushes many Canadian and American jihadist sleepers out. It's impossible to do moral calculus on human lives (125 innocent civilians killed in border crossing, but saving an unknown number in Las Vegas or the Mall of America), but we can cheer for Zula in each decision she makes. I also think that Zula may be the best female protagonist from any of Stephenson's books, with the possible exception of Eliza from The Baroque Cycle. Zula is a believable, awesome, independent and intelligent woman, and one of my favorites in a book with lots of good candidates.

Peter: I hesitate to say "He got what he deserved," but... yeah. I do, however, like the way that Stephenson introduced the character. We don't get inside his head for a while; instead, we see Richard trying to figure him out. He's elevated by Zula's aura, so it takes a little bit to recognize what a jerk he is. Even then, he isn't evil - we all know lots of people like him - and he's kind of cut adrift of our sympathy and interest.

Ivanov: I was getting an Uncle Enzo vibe from him at first. You eventually realize, though, that he's consciously projecting that vibe. He isn't really Uncle Enzo, just a wacked-out crime boss who can turn on the charm when it benefits him to do so. The biggest plot twist in the book is probably when Ivanov exits the action and Jones enters it. For the last 700 or so pages of the book, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: after we learn that Jones is just a player within this larger organization, it seems inevitable that they'll get around to investigating the incredible mess he made, and bring in their own guns against al-Qaeda. That never happens, but it seems like yet another good opening if Neal ever decides to write a sequel.

Solokov: Another guy who made my favorite-character short-list. Ivanov stays a bad guy all the way through his end, but Solokov gets to play both sides, an intimidating villain in the early pages and probably the most capable of the heroes after the jihadists appear. I loved his Jason Bourne-esque movements through Xiamen; it's a testament to Stephenson's great writing that his infiltration of a luxury hotel and acquisition of a stolen suit made a bigger impression on me than him counter-ambushing and machine-gunning three Public Security Bureau agents. He's skilled, but more than that, he's incredibly adaptable and a quick learner. I was initially going to complain about his timeline - he cut his teeth in Afghanistan, and I thought he seemed too young to have fought there - but it never says that he was involved in the invasion, and I presume that the USSR kept their own anti-insurgent forces in there well through the 80's.

Csongor: Less exciting than the other characters, but really decent; he's certainly the nicest criminal of the group. His affection for Zula was really touching; heck, even Ivanov thought he'd make a better boyfriend than Peter. I liked his humility, his loyalty, and his intellectual tenacity. For a hacker, though, he really doesn't get to do a whole lot of hacking; he basically runs traceroute in Xiamen and installs Linux in the Philippines, not exactly the most technically taxing tasks. But, I think that Stephenson was able to get at his hacker mindset, and show how Csongor could apply that to different situations he found himself in. I probably related most strongly to Csongor out of all the characters in the book.

Yuxia: She's... interesting. She sometimes comes off as a potential Manic Pixie Dream Girl. When she first showed up, I had wondered if she might represent some other, hidden layer in the rapidly thickening plot - perhaps she was a secret agent for the Chinese government, or had ties to the Russians or the Troll. Nope - she was what she seemed, which in itself is surprising. She's incredibly resourceful and determined, but often seems out of her element, even in Xiamen and definitely after leaving China. Still, when confronted with the unknown, like everyone else in this book she buckles down and figures out how to make it work. She's a striver, much like Marlon in her own way, and I think she'll have an exciting story of her own in the States. I can easily imagine Richard fronting her seed money to open a distribution channel for her mountain tea in America.

Marlon: Much like Csongor, he's out of his element for most of the book; a city-dwelling professional video-game player is thrust into the stormy world of international terrorism. Unlike Csongor, though, we get to see him at his peak: marshaling a vast army of real and virtual followers, capping off a long-running criminal extortion scheme (that we nonetheless can't help cheer him for - hey, it was their fault for not updating their antivirus programs!), bridging the gap between the virtual and the real worlds. It's interesting to finally meet the Troll after such a long chase, and he proves quite likeable; I particularly liked how he prepared his roommates for the zombie apocalypse. I got a kick out of his approach to thinking of things - I think that at one point Csongor asks, "Should we grab their weapons?", to which Marlon replies, "That's what we'd do in a video game" - which, of course, means "Yes". A life of playing video games proves to be a surprisingly good preparation for the crazy situation he finds himself inside.

Olivia: I think she was the last major character introduced who I really got. Stephenson kind of takes a break from all the totally crazy stuff going down across the street, but it's totally the right time to introduce her: the first we hear about her is after we realize that there's this entirely different threat that's completely orthogonal to everything we've seen up until now. Olivia's passages are really fun to read - Stephenson isn't as obviously POV-centric as George R R Martin, but like GRRM he lets each passage's character's personality somewhat color the prose, and I loved reading the various dry and sly Britishisms that pop up when Olivia is thinking about her situation. The various references to James Bond are quite fun as well. Unlike most of the other characters, Olivia is probably more important for who she is than for what she does, but she crucially serves the plot and does it with style.

Abdullah Jones: Holy cow, he's scary. Stephenson spends a lot of time with him, and like Ivanov he shows us how charming he can be. That charm just makes him all the more horrible; he isn't a faceless villain, but someone who believes deeply enough in the rightness of his cause that he's comfortable joking with his victims or parlaying with them. He's a far more capable villain than Ivanov: he's more intelligent, and crazy more in a sociopathic sense than a psychopathic sense. He's less impulsive, which drives MI-6 nuts; where Ivanov flies off the handle and takes huge risks to uphold his respect, Jones gets cold, thinks through the problem from all angles (just like our heroes), and because of his care he's able to survive many situations that would otherwise leave him dead (again, just like our heroes). We're well rid of him.

Seamus: He arrives a bit late to the party, but is still fun to have around. It seems pretty clear to me that, despite what he might say, he probably is looking for a T-Bird after all; he fell for Olivia while she still had her pageboy, and Yuxia's similar haircut was sending signals to the Russians and others (incorrect signals, but still). Like Olivia, he's important for what he is: he's the only significant US military character in the book, and is in the right place with the right status to bring Csongor, Yuxia and Marlon into the final level.

T-Rain sure sounds like fun, doesn't it? I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about MMOs in contrast to how little I play them, and I think that Stephenson is fascinated by the same theoretical aspects that attract me: the formation of virtual communities, and how they do or do not relate to communities in the real world.

REAMDE is the second book in the past two years I've read that deals intensely with a fictional MMORPG. The first, of course, was Charles Stross's "Halting State." HS is like REAMDE in that it's set in the very near future, using technology that's pretty familiar to us, with just a few comprehensible changes (most importantly, someone proving P == NP). HS's Avalon Four (run on ZONE) bears some similarities to REAMDE's T-Rain; besides an obvious fantasy-inflected flavor taken from World of Warcraft, both also assign real monetary value to in-game assets, and both plots are initially driven by money-related shenanigans taken place within their in-game worlds. The details are a bit different, though. The crime there was a bank robbery, and the underlying problem was the dissemination of encryption keys that were meant to protect such transactions. Ultimately, it's the encryption that's the biggest threat, and the ways the platform is being put to use. My favorite line from that book is "They're tunneling TCP/IP over AD&D!"

In contrast, the crime in T-Rain is... I guess blackmail, or kidnapping, if you can kidnap data. What's interesting is that, from the perspective of both the criminals (Marlon) and the game owners (Richard), there really isn't a problem. Sure, the governments are mad, but T-Rain was explicitly designed from the ground-up to support the transformation between real-world and virtual wealth. Someone paying a ransom in-game isn't Corporation 9592's fault any more than someone paying a ransom in New York City is Mayor Bloomberg's fault, or someone sending a ransom note through the mail is the US Post Office's fault. Stephenson doesn't exactly defect the virus-writing, but he assigns some of the blame to the victims as well, and in the grand scheme of things, the hackers here are far from the worst criminals.

I should also point out that I preferred the writing in REAMDE. Partly because Stephenson's awesome at everything, also because I was never able to get into HS's second-person narration.

So: on a more lateral note: I'd briefly mentioned Richard Garriott before. Garriott is the creator of the Ultima series, which may be my favorite fantasy RPG of all time (though the Baldur's Gate games certainly give it a run for the money). One of the cool things about Garriott's approach to making games was that he had a very world-centric approach. Before starting on a new Ultima, one of the first things he would do was draw out the map. He'd sketch in the main continent of Britannia, draw in the islands, draw castles and mountain peaks and dungeons and villages. Working with other artists and creators, he would come up with a really complete map. Only then would he start work on the actual story of the game.

I think that's quite similar to Pluto's approach to creating T-Rain. Making the game world first creates all sorts of wonderful benefits that may not be immediately obvious, but that turn it into an incredibly rich and deep experience. I remember so many hours of pleasure from my time exploring the world of Ultima VI, just wandering through the wilderness, stumbling across interesting places and encounters. The game world included some pretty massive and complex structures to explore that were completely optional in terms of the plot; if memory serves, you only had to enter something like three of the eight dungeons in order to beat the game, but if you decided to go into any or all of the other five, you'd find thoughtfully designed and challenging environments to explore. There was an entire castle that filled most of the Isle of the Avatar; just from looking at the map, you'd assume that that was where you'd go to fight the ultimate villain, but no; it's just a place in the world. Of course, these things all contribute to a sense of "realism," of existing in a fully-realized world. You might be on an epic quest to save the world, but not every single thing you encounter has to be related to that quest; you'll also see farmers harvesting cotton from their fields, and weavers in town spinning that cotton into cloth, and merchants carrying cloth between towns, and tailors creating and selling fine garments from that cloth. You don't need to ever think about cotton in your quest, but the fact that numerous characters are devoting their lives to carrying out such activities makes it feel more like a real world, and all the more important to save.

Similarly, Pluto's simulation of five billion years of physical processes, plate tectonics, magma flow, erosion, and other arcana have allowed him to create the most realistic game world ever. I can totally buy that this would be one of the things that allows T-Rain to challenge WoW: people can FEEL it when the creators have paid attention to the environments, and that's the sort of thing that would make someone want to actually spend time in the world, and not just run quests. Heck, it's even more important for T-Rain, given that they're asking many of their players to spend their lives harvesting ore.

It's also fun to look at the literary/creative input into the game. Donald is, of course, a proxy for Tolkien: the Englishness, the fact that he's a professor, his love of language, all cry out "Tolkien." I can't immediately think of a counterpart for Skeletor, but I think that's part of the point; I certainly have the impression that there are some fantasy writers out there who can churn out an incredible number of books with very little effort. The clashes between those two was fun to read, since it wasn't just the mixing-up of two fictional writers, but a not-too-thinly-veiled manifestation of the endless conflicts between High Fantasy and Swords & Sorcery, between Low Magic and High Magic worlds, between thoughtful literary epics and action-packed pablum. My sympathy's with Donald, of course.

Now that I think about it, I guess that this is one of the plots that ends up not really going anywhere, at least not that I remember. Richard eventually figures out that Skeletor had been actively (if furtively) agitating the War of Realignment, then gets him and Donald to take more active roles in leading their respective factions. But it doesn't really have much to do with what's clearly the main plot, to stop the terrorists. Well... I guess that the havok they create does keep any one faction from taking over the Torgai Hills and preventing Marlon from reclaiming the gold that he'll eventually use to fly them home, so I guess it does tie in after all. Still, I did love everything related to the game, and am sure that Stephenson could have written an entertaining (if shorter) book that was only about 9592, the WoR, and Reamde.

END SPOILERS

Maybe I'd been primed by the Q&A session at the Swedish-American Hall, but as I read I kept on thinking, "Wow, this would make an AMAZING movie!" It's very kinetic writing, and there are long stretches with pretty much non-stop action, occasionally interrupted by extremely witty dialog. That, in turn, got me thinking about why Neal Stephenson would want to be a novelist instead of a Hollywood scriptwriter: what's the point of putting something in a novel instead of in a movie? For starters, we're privileged to actually move around inside the heads of the characters; even the best actors in the best movies can only give us limited access to their thoughts. You can get around that problem with a voiceover monologue, but that seems to kill the dramatic impact of a movie. I think the pacing can help too. In a movie, exactly one person (the director) can decide when things should happen, and then sets the beats. It's like pressing "Play" on a CD. When you read, it's more like you're the conductor of your own personal orchestra. You can progress fitfully, or race ahead, or slowly ponder the themes and variations as you encounter them.

I'll be very interested to see how people respond to REAMDE once the reviews trickle in. I suspect that people who've first come to Stephenson in the past decade will be caught off-guard by the book; it's about the same length as each of the Baroque volumes and Anathem, but reads much more easily, and is less dense and more action-oriented. Most people who met Stephenson through Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon will feel a bit more comfortable here; the pace of this book feels like the most active portions of Snow Crash (like that killer opening chapter), married to the setting and some of the interests of Cryptonomicon (present day, business drama, international travel). But I think the people most at home will be those who've gone into Stephenson's deep cuts. The overall trajectory of this book feels very similar to something like Zodiac or Interface, and the midwestern/Iowa milieu matches that found in The Cobweb. Crucially, REAMDE is longer than any of those books (heck, it's probably longer than all of them), but... well, to use what might be a slightly dirty word, they're all thrillers. They're highly literate thrillers, which are much more interested in a broader range of topics than you would get from John Grisham or Tom Clancy, but they're anchored around engaging and highly kinetic storylines. I think that that's how I'll remember REAMDE, as another entry along the Zodiac/Interface chain that displays the author's incredibly heightened powers.