Anomalies Accumulate, Storm Clouds Congregate

Them Bones, 47-49, 60-63

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Back in the 1929 storyline, some new crew members arrive at the mounds. Their leader, Dr. Jameson, is “the color of dust” (48) – light brown eyes, hat, and clothes. He examines the horse bones and cartridge that Bessie and Kincaid discovered, suggests the former might have appeared in a very late Mississippian site, but then concludes the whole anomaly is “a hoax” (48). Despite his limited imagination and dusty appearance, Jameson appears in this chapter to add some color and tension. He says he'll need a drink, which reminds readers that Prohibition is underway and strong drink hard to come by; he reminds Bessie of his “role model,” Roy Andrews, which lets Waldrop mention Andrews's famous fossil dinosaur eggs and evoke the theme of extinction; and he establishes a time limit on the excavation, noting it has been raining upriver for two days. The mounds are on the floodplain, and everyone still remembers the great Flood of '27.

The weather becomes more ominous when we rejoin Bessie and company later in the day, a hot and humid day with clouds piling up to the north. Work has resumed at the site, and Washington and the other diggers have started a “test trench” projecting into the base of the large mound. Bessie sketches the excavation, drawing a grid over the landscape while the work crew reifies that grid with trenches “straight as a ruler” (61). She reflects how long it took the Coles-Creek-era Mississippians to build the mounds, digging up dirt with hoes and carrying it in baskets. Even in discussing the twentieth century Waldrop never lets us stray too far from the past.

Kincaid, Jamison, and Bessie pause late in the day for water. The digging crew have begun a new trench while other workers sift dirt through screens. The male archaeologists have found no signs of an intrusion or other anomalies. Bessie, who has been able to take in the larger picture, has spotted a new peculiarity: the large compound mound consists of two different kinds of dirt, which means that the base was built at one time and the conical second level at another. That, and the horse bones and cartridge in the small mound, and the anomalous siting of the two mounds on the plain rather than the nearby bluff, deepen the mystery.

And the tension mounts as well when, at chapter's end, a wind blows through the camp, accompanied by the sound of thunder. Bessie and the workers are relieved, but the readers realize they shouldn't be – a storm is coming. Good for Waldrop for taking what might have been a dusty archaeological procedural and adding a bit of external drama to it. Though there's already enough mystery in the mounds to create dramatic tension: who or what built the later section of the larger mound, and whose horse was that anyway?

Coming next: We meet the Great Old One, and perhaps a river manatee or two.

Image above is of Roy Chapman Andrews, ca. 1925, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Microgames and Microworlds

One of the attractions of microgames, as I noted in my entry on Ogre, was their creation of internally-consistent little worlds for the players. Ogre and its sequel, GEV (Microgame 8), created a future in which tanks (and infantry, and armored hovercraft) still dominated land warfare, giving way only to a bigger and better armored vehicle, the cybertank. Invasion of the Air Eaters (Microgame 12), and its deluxe sequel, Air Eaters Strike Back, imagined a near-future Earth united against an exterminatory alien menace, and a victorious human civilization fighting a second invasion 100 years hence. Something in this speculative world spoke to me: I've written an essay on Invasion, as well as a write-up on one of the scenarios from its sequel. Further from home, Chitin (#2) envisioned an alien world where giant, semi-intelligent insects battled one another for food. Rivets (#5) created a similar conflict with a more tongue-in-cheek premise: unintelligent, cartoonish robots fought one another on behalf of automated factories in a future without humans.* And One World, a micro-mini-game included in a two-for-one pack (#14), featured two immobile, Buddha-like gods flinging their children at one another, in the form of blades and clouds and stones. It was the first time my brother and I had encountered something like a modern Euro-game, with an abstract fantasy setting joined to a simple rules system.

In a few cases, a microgame's setting or design proved more interesting than the associated game. This was particularly true of Holy War (#13), designed by Lyn Willis, which took place in a pocket universe created by an intelligent cloud-being named Amtik. Amtik's universe evolved faster than he** could control it, developing stars, planets, life, intelligence, and an interstellar civilization, the Eltani, within a few days. Just as Amtik began deciding to switch off the experiment, the Eltani discovered his sensor ducts, and thus the existence of “God.” This divided them into two warring factions. One, the Holy Band, wanted to ask Amtik not to turn off the universe; the other, the Sunthrowers, wanted to attack him by flinging a star into his ducts. The game simulated the two factions' interstellar war, in which they used fleets of starships to fight one another and shepherd their specialty craft – Pressorships and Emissaries of Prayer – to Amtik's sensor ducts. The universe and its star systems appeared on an innovative map that simulated three dimensions: a grid of large hexes showed the X and Y axes, and a “stack” of smaller hexagons within each larger hex represented the vertical. The rule book also included several pages of notes listing the many types of ships in the game's universe – some created the warp lines that allowed FTL travel, some gave “luck” on die roles, etc. – along with their Eltani names. In gaming terms, Holy War had a lot of appealing “chrome” for its size and price. I never got around to playing the thing, however, and I have read only mixed reviews of actual game play. Perhaps I will give it a try anyway, one of these days.***

Some of the microgames' worlds lacked appeal, and some of the games seemed thrown-together. Olympica (#7) featured a future battle on Mars between U.N. Space marines and slaves of a self-aware computer network, the “Webbies,” who could tunnel under the battlefield. Perhaps the premise appealed to some, but the game didn't do much with it. Those who actually played Olympica (this was part of my “owned-but-never-played” pile) note it was imbalanced in favor of the U.N. Black Hole (#10) pitted two mining companies against one another for control of an asteroid with an embedded black hole, which mainly provided an excuse for a wrap-around battlefield feature. Hot Spot (#15) had two armies of light infantry dueling on the surface of a molten planet, seeking control of large, floating stone platforms called “crustals” - a gimmick that didn't add much to the game's rather generic rules and dynamics. Annihilator (part of #14) was a low-quality rip-off of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker. Dimension Demons (#17) I never purchased or played, but reviewers said it was pretty bad.

Most of the Microgames had a science-fictional or science-fantasy theme, but several of the classics were pure fantasy, notably Melee (#3), Wizard (#6), and Lords of Underearth (#18). At least two of these led to bigger and better things, and all deserve a separate blog entry of their own.

* My brother and I owned Rivets but never played it, and I suspect we would have found it boring. One had to “program” the robots to attack specific enemies, which in practice meant they often failed to find the right target and had to go back to the factory for reprogramming.

** Or she. Amtik's gender was never clearly established.

*** There was apparently an episode of Futurama with a vaguely similar theme, though a smaller scale.

(Above images via http://ixians.blogspot.com/2011/01/holy-war.html and boardgamegeek.com, respectively.)

In the Realm of the Three-Dollar Cybertank: Metagaming's OGRE

For sci-fi fans of a certain age (middle age), the word “ogre” conjures at least one very specific memory: a pocket-sized game containing a two-color folding map, a sheet of flimsy playing counters, and a thin rulebook on whose cover a giant war machine prepared to crush four tanks and hovercraft. Ogre, the first of a series of small, light wargames manufactured by now-defunct Metagaming Concepts, had a price tag ($2.95) low enough to appeal to geeky kids with small allowances.* These microgames had three distinct features: crude, cheap components, a sci-fi or fantasy theme, and a gimmick or special feature adorning their otherwise straightforward move-and-fight rules. Ogre's gimmick was the giant machine featured on the cover: an artificially-intelligent giant tank, the "Ogre" of the title. Each of these cybertanks had, instead of two or three numbers indicating its capabilities, an entire “character sheet” listing the missiles, nuclear cannons, and anti-personnel weapons it carried and how much damage its massive treads had taken. In the game's basic scenario, one player took the role of one of these behemoths, and the other deployed a multi-unit force of ordinary tanks, artillery, armored hovercraft (or GEVs), and infantry, all trying to stop the Ogre from destroying their command center.

Compared to the conventional units in the game, Ogres were nearly indestructible. Every successful “hit” in combat destroyed or at least disabled a regular tank or GEV, but only knocked off one of the Ogre's weapons or injured its treads. Players formed many different strategies to stop the Ogre before it stomped their command center: sweeping the battlefield with immobile but powerful howitzers, swarming the Ogre with fast and fragile GEVs, targeting the cybertank's treads. No method was foolproof, if only because the Ogre player had the advantage of force concentration – having only one unit to protect and maneuver. This wasn't an obvious advantage to my brother and I when we started playing Ogre in 1981; we just thought a giant robot tank with its own character sheet was cool.

Ogre not only launched the Microgames series, it also jump-started the career of its designer, Steve Jackson, who took Ogre with him when he left Metagaming to start his own company. Steve Jackson Games also assumed the rights to GEV, the inevitable sequel game, which added new units (like light tanks and mobile howitzers), more complex terrain, and more scenarios. Some players, myself among them, considered GEV the superior game, though both remain playable. Thereafter, alas, SJG began layering complexities upon a good, simple idea: creating another sequel, Battlesuit, that provided overly-complex rules for infantry-level combat; licensing Ogre miniatures and miniatures rules; and bringing out a Deluxe edition in the late '90s that retailed for about $100. Your Humble Narrator had bailed on the franchise by then. But Ogre had done its job: persuading young sci-fi geeks that a simple game could have strategic depth, and that it could create an imaginative little world of its own.

*My brother and I each got $2.50 a week in the early '80s, which if we pooled it together would pay for a microgame or a D&D module.

The Villages of the Sun

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

Modern Greek, which Madison Leake learned in the Cyprus War, was not a common language in pre-Columbian America, and by "not common" I mean "unheard of." Hearing it spoken by a southeastern Indian almost certainly shocked Mr. Leake. The speaker, who introduces himself as Took-His-Time (a reference to his mother's difficult labor), tells Madison that he learned Greek from a group called the Traders. Waldrop leaves their identity a mystery for the time being. Took notes, with no signs of modesty, that he and his countrymen are fairly sure Madison isn't either a Trader or a local Indian because his “dong isn't whacked,” and circumcision is the norm for both groups. Took's fellow townspeople, meanwhile, are less interested in the newcomer than in his horse, and are delighted when the gelding takes a nibble from an edible plant.

Having assured himself that Madison isn't dangerous, just lost, Took brings the visitor home for dinner. His pregnant wife Sunflower is preparing a corn-and-meat stew, using heated clay balls to boil the water. This is a nice touch; I know of no other authors who give much thought to the difficulty of cooking with ceramics. The house is full of intricately carved tobacco pipes, and when Madison asks if his host made them, Took replies bashfully “They say I do.” Another nice touch: boasting had its place in Native American societies, but self-deprecating modesty was more common.

Walking around the town before dinner, Took-His-Time introduces Madison and the readers to the local human landscape. The town has a plaza and a temple mound, where Sun Man (the principal chief) lives. Took mentions that social rules prevent Sun Man from passing his title to his lineal successors, an observation Waldrop probably took from the eighteenth-century French colonist Antoine Le Page du Pratz. Pratz was describing the culture of the Natchez Indians, whom we long assumed were the last Mississippian chiefdom, but whom we now suspect were a post-colonial Indian society in Mississippian drag. Since, however, we don't know how inheritance rules worked among medieval Mississippians, Pratz is as good a source as any.

During the tour Took tells Madison that the local villages all worship the Sun and the Woodpecker, whose image adorns their temples. They form a loose confederation which alternately trades and fights with the “Huastecas” west of the Mississippi River. In this continuum the Huastecas (the Aztecs, I presume) apparently expanded earlier and farther north than they did in our own time. All of these Native peoples trade locally-made “gewgaws and doodads” with the Traders, receiving textiles and metal wares in exchange. Took calls the latter “things we're too lazy to make for ourselves,” preserving his people's collective ego by side-stepping their lack of weaving or metallurgical skills.

One of the locals, whom Took calls Hamboon Bokulla, has a heavily tattooed face and hands. He is the leader of the Buzzard Cult, a group of death worshipers who have recently appeared in the Sun Villages. Robert Silverberg, in his writings on the Mound Builders – which I suspect were Waldrop's source for much of the book – notes that there is archaeological evidence for the emergence of such a cult late in the Mississippian era. Silverberg also provided the name “Bokulla,” a primitive hero from a nineteenth-century fantasy novel about the Mound-Builders. (“Hamboon” probably comes from “Hambone,” as I suspect Waldrop liked the idea of a southeastern Indian leader with a folksy Southern name.) Took observes that the Buzzard Cultist do not worship the sun-deity or the Woodpecker. Madison asks his host what he believes in. “I believe supper's ready.”

There may be more historically accurate Native American characters in fiction, but I don't think there are any more agreeable ones.

Coming next: Bessie, Kincaid, and the mysterious mounds.
 

The SFF Year in Review: 2015

Prolific SFF writer Tanith Lee left our mortal plane, at age 67. Linda Nagata completed her Red trilogy, demonstrating that it is still possible to write good military science fiction, provided one writes an actual story rather than erotica about ordnance. Adam Rakunas published a wonderfully competent first sf novel, with only one unbelievable element: the survival of labor unions past the twenty-first century. Alternate history and Philip K. Dick fans were treated to a new Folio Books edition of Man in the High Castle and an Amazon Prime tv series on same. The Nazis certainly were unpleasant fellows! Chris-Rachael Oselund wowed the Geek-o-sphere with her Dune Sandworm spice bread recipe. Quoth Stilgar, "Mmm! Shai-Hulud!" The oxymoronically-named Final Fantasy VII made it to iOS, so one can now play the RPG classic on a phone. Mad Max: Fury Road angered “men's rights” advocates (that's a euphemism for “assholes”) by including some competent female characters. Avengers: Ultron evoked no strong emotions whatever. The long-awaited Sandman movie did not materialize. The Sad/Rabid Puppies' effort to sabotage the Hugo Awards resulted in No Award in several categories. Of the second season of True Detective, we shall not speak, except perhaps in curses. Jessica Jones was awesome, but dark, dark, dark. The scariest super-villains are the unexceptional ones. Those seeking lighter fare found much charm and wit in Otherspace, an updated (and very funny) American version of Red Dwarf. The Anthropocene still grinds on toward its messy, fatal terminus, but in his meticulously-researched guidebook to our worst-case-scenario future, Frank Landis predicted that humanity would survive. Our current civilization - well, not so much. And in her much-hoped-for return to blogging, Ana Mardoll showed that if we do intend to preserve some part of our current civilization, it shouldn't include C.S. Lewis, because he's a wanker.

Oh, and there was some sort of Star Wars or Star Trek movie, too. Star Something, anyway.

Games That Don't Suck: Small World

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Small World, the second fantasy board game so far reviewed in this series, bears some similarity to an older and more complex game beloved of old hobbyists, History of the World (and to HotW's inferior predecessor, Risk). In both games players compete to control territories on the board, using empires that expand and then decline. Unlike those in History or Risk, the “empires” in Small World are fantasy races, some stereotypical (elves, dwarves), some more esoteric (ghouls, ratmen, tritons), all fighting to control a fantasy kingdom of rolling farmland, cloud-capped mountains, murky swamps, and eldritch forests. Small World gives each fantasy race multiple turns to expand, though a given race's military potential will diminish with each turn, and a player can only play one race at a time. Each player must decide on a given turn whether to keep expanding with their current active race, or put it “into decline” (ending the race's expansion and special abilities) and acquire a new race with new advantages. Players have a variety of new races to acquire, from a line of five that are replaced from the stock as other races are chosen – and each race has a different special Power assigned to it when it enters the line. This selection process adds another layer of complexity to the players' decision-making. While Small World's rules are simple, the strategic depth that these important choices lend to the game, combined with its high-quality components and light-hearted tone (the skeletons, for instance, all wear cowboy hats), makes this title one with great entertainment and replay value.

Small World employs a simple turn mechanism. Each player takes turns expanding into the board with a number of tokens – averaging a dozen or so – determined by the player's active race and special Power. An expanding race conquers a new region by placing at least two tokens on it, plus one for each opposing counter on the region. Opposing counters include mountains, special defensive tokens (like troll lairs), and the tokens of an opponent's race. Once the active player is nearly out of tokens s/he can attempt to conquer one last land by rolling the reinforcement die, which gives 0-3 temporary virtual armies to aid the conquest. The player then redistributes ("redeploys") tokens among their active race's conquered regions, perhaps stacking tokens in some particularly valuable lands to shore up their defenses, and counts their points. Play then passes around the table until everyone has taken their individual turn.

On subsequent turns a given player can choose to put their active race into decline or continue expanding with it. If s/he makes the latter choice, the player gathers up all tokens but one from each land occupied by their active race, and uses that pool of tokens to conquer new lands, following the expansion rules above. Obviously, as a given race expands its pool of tokens will shrink by at least one for each new land conquered. I say “at least,” because when a player conquers a land occupied by another player's tokens, the defeated player permanently loses one race token for each conquered land. Eventually a given player will find that their active race has too few tokens to expand and that s/he has to put that race into decline (losing a turn in the process) and acquire a new one. Deciding when one's active race is “ready” to decline is up to the individual player, but if one leaves it too late one risks having a thinly-stretched race overrun by other players, without enough turns left in the game for a new race to earn lots of points. A race in decline, however, is more vulnerable because it loses its abilities and can only keep one token in any given land.

When it is active, each of the 14 races in Small World has a racial ability that gives it a point bonus or lets it bend the rules. Elves, for instance, don't lose a counter permanently when one of their lands is conquered; trolls receive troll lairs to help them defend territory; humans receive an extra point for each farmland region they occupy. Each race also has one of 20 Powers assigned to it when it first enters the game: a Stout race doesn't lose a turn when it declines, a Seafaring race can conquer water spaces, and a Commando race needs no underwear (just kidding). At the start of the game the players line up five races and powers at the edge of the board, and can either purchase whichever combination is at the head of the line, or pay victory points to buy more desirable combinations further back. New race-power combinations enter the line as old ones are drawn. A typical game sees 5-8 races and powers making it to the board, and since there are 280 race-power combinations, it will take many plays before the game becomes truly repetitive.

At the end of a player's turn, s/he collects one point for each region occupied by his/her active race AND by any race s/he has put into decline. (If a player puts two races into decline, the oldest one will disappear.) Players earn additional points if their active race or its associated Power receives bonuses for occupying particular regions. The game usually takes about an hour to play, as the number of turns varies inversely with the number of players; a 2-player game lasts 10 turns (per player), a 5-player game only 7. Whoever has the highest point total at game's end is the winner and receives all rights and prerogatives thereof, which presumably means s/he gets to wear the cowboy hat.

Moonlight Serenade

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

The third discrete story line in Them Bones the author enigmatically labels “The Box,” for reasons that will not soon become apparent. “Box” chapters each begin with a terse, bureaucratic report on an Army unit, with 146 personnel initially present for duty and one missing. They then take the form of diary entries by a low-ranking adjutant and former helicopter pilot named Smith, who, we quickly realize, is a member of Madison Leake's lost Army team - the group referenced in the aforementioned reports. Smith recounts the slow, deliberate passage of his twelve dozen fellow servicemen through the time gate, their establishment of a base camp near Suckatoncha Bayou (which buzzes with mosquitoes and lightning bugs), and his nervousness about the CIA agents, or “spooks,” accompanying the team. Waldrop was in the Army during the Vietnam War, and the tropes and assumptions of that era shape his presentation of Smith's cohort, even though the date on his first report is 1 October 2002.

Failing to locate Leake, the expeditionaries spend a week setting up camp, during which time one reveals he'd brought along a “mini-cassette” player (no CDs when Waldrop wrote this novel). Unfortunately, someone stole all of Spec. Jones' tapes before departure, except three. Here Waldrop gets to show off both his love of obscure music and quirky creativity, identifying the tapes as Roger Whitaker's Great Love Movie Themes, Moe and the Meanies' Rip My Duck*, and 16 Hits by Glenn Miller. The commandant allows his men to play a couple of hours of music every day around sundown, which is why Smith gets to hear “Moonlight Serenade” one mid-October evening in the late Mississippian era, as the moon rises “like a pumpkin over the water,” the surface of the bayou gleams like “a flat tree-lined sheet of glass,” and venison and catfish cook on his comrades' campfires. These serene and homely details heighten the contrast between the soldiers' first peaceful weeks in the past and the stormy confrontation that awaits them.

(I've skipped here one short anecdote about a dog the soldiers adopted up in the future, who helped demonstrate to them that their time machine would work. There's not much to it; mostly Waldrop puts it in to indicate that their chief researcher, Dr. Heidegger, is a douche.

Coming next: The crowd prefers to look at Madison's horse.

* Have I mentioned that I really want this album? Or at least the poster from the Meanies' first tour.