OSR Commentary - Beer,The State of the Campaign, The Gaming Scence In Ct, & The OSR

So Sunday was a really interesting day in many ways, it was another Ninety something degree day & it was one of those sort of lazy Sundays we seem to have here in Connecticut. Except it wasn't in one two ways. First I ran into a very good  friend of mine who I had not seem in some years. He works in a brick & mortar hobby shop about fifty or so miles away. We were B.S.ing about this and that in the table top hobby as friends are prone to do. Games Workshop came out with a new edition of 40K and so forth. 

 But what struck me is the sheer disconnect that there is between the retail side of the hobby and the internet side of the community. He had no idea what the OSR was or the paradigm shift towards older editions & retroclones. We compared notes on friends X & Y as well as a number of events that I didn't know about in the state. We exchanged phone numbers & I went home to pizza, movie with my folks, etc.


Later that night I got together with some friends to discuss gaming related stuff with the upcoming fall campaign. We're still tossing around science fantasy & sword & sorcery elements, its leaning more towards a Thundarr/ Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea game using the current incarnation of Tegel Manor to bridge the two game settings. More on that in another blog post in the near future.


What stuck me is the sheer discontent from the local scene of table top that I've got in my home town of Torrington Ct. Like so many other gamers in my home state you cultivate a certain group of friends & players that you as a dungeon master stick with. These are friends that you know love, and trust to play with for years. This is one of the ways that the table top rpg  hobby works. I've heard some folks compare D&D & AD&D 1st edition as 'Satan's game and all of the rest of the 'Satanic Panic' clap trap. Sure table top role playing games attract big & often very strong personalities but on the whole its made a huge difference by bringing life long friends to the table. 


One of the events that really galvanized me back in '08 was the death of Gary Gygax, sorry if I'm bringing up a painful memory folks. But this death really up ticked and up ended the table top rpg hobby as a whole. Suddenly it brought home the fact again that we've only got so much time on this Earth. So write, design, map, and most of all play! Get together with friends and get a game going today!
So life moves on and another Fall is coming up fast. Make the most of your gaming my friends and we'll see you around the table. I've got more OSR content coming up friends and fellow gamers! Play on!

A Quick Appendix For Some Of The Most Influential Lady Authors Of Sword & Sorcery Fiction

Cover chosen for added irony. ;-) 

Swords and Sorcery fiction has always sort of been the odd man out in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Despite the trappings of magic, myth, and legend the pantheon of fiction has its genes in many realms such as both science fiction and fantasy. It seemly belongs in both worlds as well as others. But I've heard sword & Sorcery fiction last night over a gaming table described as the refuge of misogynistic writers and reprobates. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fiction of Sword and Sorcery has at its roots attracted some of the most incredible lady writers seen.

 Many of the ladies of Sword and Sorcery's work is available through the Internet Archive
HERE
 A bit of quick background on Sword and Sorcery fiction, we owe the term to Michael Moorcock and a certain Mister Fritz Leiber  who coined the term in 1960.
According to wiki: 

The term "sword and sorcery" was first coined in 1961, when the British author Michael Moorcock published a letter in the fanzine Amra, demanding a name for the sort of fantasy-adventure story written by Robert E. Howard. He had initially proposed the term "epic fantasy". However, the celebrated American sword-and-sorcery author Fritz Leiber replied in the journal Ancalagon (6 April 1961) suggesting, "sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field". He expanded on this in the July 1961 issue of Amra, commenting:

I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too! (Fritz Leiber,Amra, July 1961)

From within the pages of AMRA came the birth of the a whole plethora of stories and writers. 

 
Starting with C.L. Moore whose Jirel of Joiry needs no introduction.


Andre Norton's Witch World series 

The following is part of the list of impressive writers who paved the way for others to follow.
In no particular importance of appearance are:
C.J. Cherryh 

Jane Gaskell 

Barbara Hambly 

Katherine Kurtz 

Tanith Lee 

R.A. Macavoy 

Sherri S. Tepper 

Joan Vinge 

Patricia Wrede 

This is a very quick list off the top of my head and by no means I'm an authority on the subject but this is the best I could do on short notice. The list also reflects only the first wave of Sword and Sorcery writers there have been many,many, others since.
But that is a blog post for another day.  

Thrilling Thursday - The Last Star Fighter!

Hands down one of the most thrilling movies back in the 80s was the Last Star Fighter. It had everything & then some. I saw this movie in a little drive in back in the later days of 1984. The movie touch way to many nerves & still does in my 40s now. 

The movie had a sense of fun about it & used all of the science fiction clitches with abandon really.. For me it was Centuri who was the show stealer & made me a life long Robert Preston fan. The Last Starfighter was Preston's final film role. His character, a "lovable con-man", was a nod to his most famous role as Harold Hill in The Music Man

The Plot from Wiki : 

Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), is a teenager living in a trailer park with his mother (Barbara Bosson) and little brother (Chris Hebert). Outside of being an handyman at the trailer park, his sole hobby is playing Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends "the Frontier" from "Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada" in a space battle. Eventually he becomes the highest scoring player of the game. Shortly afterwards, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri (Robert Preston) who invites him to take a ride. Alex does so before discovering that the vehicle is actually a spaceship; moreover, Centauri is a disguised alien who whisks him off to a far away planet called Rylos, leaving his family and girlfriend, Maggie Gordon (Catherine Mary Stewart). So that his absence goes unnoticed, anandroid named Beta (Lance Guest in a dual role) is left in his stead.

Upon his arrival, Alex discovers that the images and territories in the Starfighter arcade game represent an actual conflict between the Rylan Star League and the Ko-Dan Empire; the latter is led by Xur (Norman Snow), a traitor to whom the Ko-Dan Emperor has promised control of Rylos itself. The game was designed as a test to find those "with the gift"; Alex is expected to pilot an actual Starfighter spacecraft called the Gunstar. He also discovers that The Frontier is an array of planetary-scale force fields that protect Rylos and its surrounding planets from invasion and that Xur has given the Ko-Dan the means to breach it.

Before Alex can fully understand and dispute his induction, Xur appears (via a holographic projection) inside of the Starfighter base and reveals he has discovered an infiltrator in his ranks and proceeds to broadcast his death by torture to the entire base, including his father, Ambassador Enduran (Kay E. Kuter), the Starfighter commander. He then proclaims to the people of Rylos that once Galan (Rylos's moon) is in full eclipse, the Ko-Dan Armada will begin their invasion and not even the Starfighters will be able to save them. When Alex asks to be taken back home, Centauri does so, giving him a means by which to contact him, should Alex change his mind. After they leave, the starfighter base is attacked- a saboteur eliminates the base's defenses, causing the base to sustain heavy damage, killing all starfighters save for a friendly reptilian alien navigator named Grig (Dan O'Herlihy), and destroying all Gunstars, save for an advanced prototype.

Once home, Alex discovers the android who assumed his identity and contacts Centauri to come and retrieve it. An assassination attempt by Xur interrupts this, and Alex realizes that the only way to protect his family (and the Earth) is to pilot a starfighter. Returning to the ruined base, Alex meets up with Grig and they set out in the Gunstar to battle the Ko-Dan Armada by themselves.

Alex and Grig attack the Ko-Dan mother-ship, crippling its communications system; catching the Ko-Dan fighter wings off-guard. The battle reaches a fevered pitch; Alex keeps the upper hand, using the "lone fighter-against-hordes" tactics he mastered by playing the coin-operated video game. Soon, however, his weapons are depleted. Desperately, he activates a secret weapon installed in the Gunstar: "Death Blossom", which destroys all the remaining Ko-Dan fighters. Lord Kril (Dan Mason), captain of the Ko-Dan mothership, blames Xur for this turn of events. After relieving Xur of command, Kril orders him executed. Instead, Xur takes advantage of Alex's attack and kills the sentries escorting him from the bridge. He then flees the mother-ship just before Alex destroys the ship.

Alex is proclaimed the savior of Rylos, only to discover from Enduran (who escaped from the Starfighter base before its destruction) that the Star League is still vulnerable: The Frontier has collapsed and Xur escaped, and will continue to be a threat as long as he still lives. Alex agrees to stay and recruit other Starfighters, rebuilding the Legion. He returns to Earth, dramatically landing his Gunstar in the trailer park. Grig tells Alex's mother and the people of the trailer park of Alex's heroism in the Rylan War and that he will be a Starfighter of great potential, who will teach future Starfighters.

After explaining to his friends and family where he was, Alex reveals that his services as a Starfighter are still needed by the Rylan Star League. He then asks Maggie to join him in space. Maggie's grandmother, Granny Gordon (Meg Wyllie) gives her blessing to her granddaughter, and Maggie returns to Rylos with him. Alex's little brother Louis is inspired to follow in his brother's footsteps and begins playing the game, so that he too can master it.

There were lots of awesome moments in this movie but have you ever noticed that many space ships during the 80s in movies looked the same as if you might during a game see striking similarities? That's because of the genus of Roy Cobb whose work is now gracing Prometheus. 

Whose's Rob Cobb? Go  here Ron_Cobb 

One of the coolest things about the movie was the arcade game that sends Alex to the stars. I wanted to play this thing so badly.

The other thing that was unique was the humor in Star Fighter. The movie was funny without being an over the top farce. Just a simple fun movie..

I haven't mentioned the CGI work of the film which was ground breaking at the time. Basically it worked out something like this:
The computer graphics for the film were rendered by Digital Productions on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. The company created 27 minutes of effects for the film. This was considered an enormous amount of computer generated imagery at the time.^[4] For the 300 scenes containing computer graphics in the film, each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygons, and had a resolution of 3000 × 5000 36-bit pixels. Digital Productions estimated that using computer animation required only half the time, and one half to one third the cost of traditional special effects. The result was a cost of $14 million for a film that made about $21 million at the box office

One of the real stars of the movie was the sound track. It was EPIC! Craig Safan's score for the film calls for an unusually large orchestra, including six trumpets and six trombones, which are used simultaneously to play the main theme in twelve-part harmony.

They don't make 'em like this any more. Stay tuned for more Galactic Memories