What are you reading?

[Philotomy Jurament]

Sabatini's Scaramouche

[grodog]

Before bed, I finished reading aloud "The Gray Havens" chapter from _The Return of the King_ to Henry, ending our long reading of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Onto (some of) the Appendices, and perhaps The Silmarillion or The Children of Húrin next!

Allan.

[artikid]

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

[gizmomathboy]

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

What a coincidence. I just started reading that as well. After I finished "The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian". I skipped the appendices however.

I also pulled out my recently purchased Vols. 1 & 2 of the Clark Ashton Smith collections by Nightshade. Not sure when I'll get to those, maybe after Diamond Age. Also in the "top of the top" of my reading queue is "The Conquering Sword of Conan" and "The Bloody Crown of Conan" (yes I have the set of three, along with the Solomon Kane and Kull books).

[Welleran]

I also pulled out my recently purchased Vols. 1 & 2 of the Clark Ashton Smith collections by Nightshade. Not sure when I'll get to those, maybe after Diamond Age. Also in the "top of the top" of my reading queue is "The Conquering Sword of Conan" and "The Bloody Crown of Conan" (yes I have the set of three, along with the Solomon Kane and Kull books).

Those CAS books are next in my queue after I finish my Complete Weird Tales of Robert E Howard series. I just finished up Hour of the Dragon last night. I love that story -- Howard would've made a great D&D player and wargamer! I can just see him playing out the battle at the end of the novel!

[Flambeaux]

Finally throwing Ready Player One into the cd player on my commute. I needed an antidote to the steady diet of finance and management books/articles I'm reading for school right now.

[rogatny]

Reading the Hobbit for the first time in about 3 or 4 years.

Love the first chapter.

A few things I noticed...

1. Don't know if Gary was directly inspired to create level titles because of the Hobbit, but Gandalf and the dwarves make four direct references to people using D&D level titles, and it's clear these are titles or professions - Burglar, Hero, Warrior and Necromancer. All capitalized. Also, Gandalf is a "wizard." So that makes 5.

2. Adventuring is a thing people do. It's a concept recognized by Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves. There is a subculture to it, and people make a trade of it to such an extent that there are well-recognized signs indicating when people are hiring themselves out. Even Bilbo knows enough about it to ask some of the right questions and use some of the right terminology.

3. Tolkien does a masterful job of presenting the homey Bilbo and then gradually showing how much of his conservative stance is a front. He remembers Gandalf's old stories in great detail. When pressed, he's immensely proud of his "eccentric" Tookish ancestors. He has a big freakin' map of the area and has marked all of his favorite hiking paths in red ink.

4. Thorin refers to Smaug's attack as if it were fairly typical. Something that occurred relatively often 100+ years ago. Leading one to believe that there are a lot more dragons sitting on a lot more piles of gold. Gandalf refers to "the warriors" off fighting in a far away land. Bilbo mentions the East-of-East and "the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert." We get the picture that the world is a lot bigger, weirder, and more action-packed than we get to see in the Hobbit and LotR.

[Falconer]

Great observations well articulated!

[rogatny]

Read chapters 2 and 3 of the Hobbit:

Chapter 2:

As good, maybe better than the first.

1. More use of "Burglar" as a title. More adventurer as an established profession with Thorin & Co.'s contract with Bilbo.

2. In the half dozen or more times I've read the Hobbit, how is it possible that I never really glommed onto the fact that Bill had a magic purse that cried out when it's being stolen? That's awesome. Unfortunately it seemed to have turned to stone with its owner.

3. The trolls are played for laughs, but you learn how scary they really were when you get the complete picture of their backstory. They had just recently left the mountains. We don't know how long exactly, but not very long. A couple months maybe. Bill says that Bert and Tom had eaten a village and a half of people between them. Their lair, which - again - they'd only been in a a few months at most was littered with the bones of their victims along with their. victims' personal effects. Basically, they'd managed to depopulate the entire area of intelligent life in a couple months or probably less considering how tired they were getting of mutton.

4. Given the above, Thorin is an utter badass. He held his own against the three of them, wounding two - UNARMED!

5. Burglars are expected to pick pockets and back stab. Both became D&Disms characteristic of the thief. Gandalf casts Ventriloquism. A criminally underutilized spell in my D&D experience. In fact, the whole episode reads very much like a random wilderness encounter.

6. In chapter 1, there were various allusions to the dwarves using magic in the mining and crafting of their treasures. There was also Thorin playing the magical smoke ring game with Gandalf. In Chapter 2, there is an explicit statement that they cast spells over the buried treasure they took out of the trolls' lair. Concealment and protection spells, I'd imagine. The point is, while it's generally held that D&D dwarves are Tolkien dwarves, Tolkien's dwarves are quite a bit more magical than D&D dwarves.

Chapter 3

A quite a bit more empty chapter.

1. Another reference to dwarves' magic with the Moon Runes. A really cool concept. It's enough to start me thinking about how I'd make dwarves magic in D&D.

2. The elves are more flighty than I'd remembered. More like the wood elves from later in the book. Elrond is explicitly presented as being both of the elves and apart from them, being descended both from elves and "the heroes of Men." (Heroes again.). So he was more "of" the world than the other elves and more practical and able to help the dwarves out.

[Terrex]

Read chapters 2 and 3 of the Hobbit:

I'm enjoying this.

Back in high school Middle-Earth was the default setting for a few years for the other DM in our group. He knew Tolkien better than the rest of us, esp. at the time, having read not just the Hobbit and LOTR, but also Silmarillion, Lost Tales, etc, etc. We had no problem playing AD&D in a Middle-Earth that felt like Middle-Earth. We dropped in Vancian magic-users and the clerics stated "Illuvatar" as their deity, rather than D&DG gods we used in my campaigns. I think the DM kept the monster list just a bit thinner and had a knack for picking the items that were good fits.

It was only after finding discussion about D&D on the internet that I "learned" Middle-Earth was completely incompatible with D&D.

[bobjester]

Read chapters 2 and 3 of the Hobbit:
[snip]
1. More use of "Burglar" as a title. More adventurer as an established profession with Thorin & Co.'s contract with Bilbo.
[snip]
5. Burglars are expected to pick pockets and back stab. Both became D&Disms characteristic of the thief. Gandalf casts Ventriloquism. A criminally underutilized spell in my D&D experience. In fact, the whole episode reads very much like a random wilderness encounter.

This. I, along with the guy who wrote one of the first versions of the D&D thief based on his reading of "The Hobbit" were "shouted out" of an OD&D thread at Dragonsfoot over the writer's assumption that Bilbo was somehow a wrong model for the D&D thief. This was one of the moments that made me say "Fuck the OSR!"

2. In the half dozen or more times I've read the Hobbit, how is it possible that I never really glommed onto the fact that Bill had a magic purse that cried out when it's being stolen? That's awesome. Unfortunately it seemed to have turned to stone with its owner.

3. The trolls are played for laughs, but you learn how scary they really were when you get the complete picture of their backstory. They had just recently left the mountains. We don't know how long exactly, but not very long. A couple months maybe. Bill says that Bert and Tom had eaten a village and a half of people between them. Their lair, which - again - they'd only been in a a few months at most was littered with the bones of their victims along with their. victims' personal effects. Basically, they'd managed to depopulate the entire area of intelligent life in a couple months or probably less considering how tired they were getting of mutton.

4. Given the above, Thorin is an utter badass. He held his own against the three of them, wounding two - UNARMED!

6. In chapter 1, there were various allusions to the dwarves using magic in the mining and crafting of their treasures. There was also Thorin playing the magical smoke ring game with Gandalf. In Chapter 2, there is an explicit statement that they cast spells over the buried treasure they took out of the trolls' lair. Concealment and protection spells, I'd imagine. The point is, while it's generally held that D&D dwarves are Tolkien dwarves, Tolkien's dwarves are quite a bit more magical than D&D dwarves.

I really have to re-read the book. I don't recall any of this!

[grodog]

6. In chapter 1, there were various allusions to the dwarves using magic in the mining and crafting of their treasures. There was also Thorin playing the magical smoke ring game with Gandalf. In Chapter 2, there is an explicit statement that they cast spells over the buried treasure they took out of the trolls' lair. Concealment and protection spells, I'd imagine. The point is, while it's generally held that D&D dwarves are Tolkien dwarves, Tolkien's dwarves are quite a bit more magical than D&D dwarves.

1. Another reference to dwarves' magic with the Moon Runes. A really cool concept. It's enough to start me thinking about how I'd make dwarves magic in D&D.

I've always had a strong desire to allow dwarves to be MUs---to focus on their abilities as artificers from Norse mythology, and in earthy magics*. This has also lead to contrasts with elves, and perhaps pushing them closer to illusionist, and spirits-masters/summoners/binders (a la Melnibonéans), with airy and druidical foci. The battles between the two in their pasts would be driven by their opposite approaches to magic---fundamentals in their racial, fey characters.

Allan.

* Roger Moore wrote some good ideas about how to make dwarves more Norse-like in Dragon #90.

[EOTB]

I really have to re-read the book. I don't recall any of this!

Neither do I, and I just read it with my daughter. Is this specific to one edition of the book?

[rredmond]

I don't think so, I remember them and I don't have any sort of special editions . Except #6 I thought it was Gandalf adding the spells of protection. But I definitely remember the purse because every time I read it I'd think it was weird. But IIRC Tolkien justifies it with an off-hand "trying to purloin a trolls purse is always going to cause a problem" or something like that.

[rogatny]

Except #6 I thought it was Gandalf adding the spells of protection.

It's only one sentence, and says that "they" cast the spells. I suppose that could mean it was just Gandalf doing the casting while the others sat around and watched, but that would be a pretty strained interpretation of the sentence. Especially since there had been other allusions to the dwarves using magic, and nothing about Gandalf's personality would indicate that he gave a crap about the gold one way or the other. It's right in the contract that he doesn't get a share of the gold and isn't really a member of the adventuring party.

I'm finding it interesting on this read through how economic Tolkien is with words. He's often criticized for his florid writing in Lord of the Rings, but the Hobbit is concise to the point of being terse. It leaves plenty open to interpretation. I think the idea is that Bilbo is the narrator of the Hobbit and Frodo is the narrator of LotR and the different writing styles reflect their different personalities. We can see when reading the Silmarillion how conscious Tolkien is about narrative voice.