Dungeons & Dragons

happy 50th birthday, Star Trek!

September 8, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

Star Trek and I were born in the same year: 1966. Naturally, I missed the show in its original broadcast run on NBC from that year until it ceased production in 1969, but since the show was so successful in syndication in the 1970s and 80s, I grew up with it. My brothers and I could usually find an episode playing once or twice a week, maybe more, even though back then we could count our TV channels on one hand. For a while there we even had a Star Trek Saturday morning cartoon, and once the movies started coming out I went to all of them—one movie every two or three years from 1979 until 1991.

My appreciation of the show was avid but not excessive. I’d seen all the episodes several times and knew a fair amount of Star Trek trivia, but I wasn’t a Trekkie. I checked out Star Trek books from the library, but never wrote any fan fiction of my own. For some reason I had a Captain Kirk poster in my dorm room at college, but I never went to a Star Trek convention. By the time I finished grad school and embarked upon my adult life of family and work responsibilities, I had drifted away from TV almost entirely. I guess you could say I had “gotten a life.” I had “moved out of my parents’ basement and grown the hell up.”
Then, in 2006, both Star Trek and I turned 40. It occurred to me that my children were growing up in a world where the Starfleet communicator and Uhura’s earpiece had become essential personal accessories, where the sophistication of those little square computer tapes had been exceeded, and where you really could make entries into a notebook-size computer with a stylet pen. Allusions and references to the original series were commonplace.
The children were certainly old enough to enjoy and appreciate Star Trek, so why not? I went down to the library and checked out as many DVDs of the original series as they had available, plus my favorite of the six movies–Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And there we sat on mid-winter evenings, bundled on the couch in blankets, munching on popcorn, going where our little family had never gone before.
I suppose if this is the extent of my mid-life crisis—reliving my geeky childhood—I can count myself lucky.

I knew I was onto something when one of my kids, after flipping through the latest stack of library DVDs, said, “We’ve seen all these. Are there any more?” Or when my kids would sit at the kitchen table gnashing their teeth over their homework, muttering to themselves, “Study, study, study! Or bonk bonk, bad kids!” Or when Number One Daughter raises a Vulcan eyebrow and declares, “That is not logical.” Or, worse, when someone sings, “Ah-ah-ah-ah…scrambled eggs” to the tune of Spock’s horrible song in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.”
Somehow, despite the dated, bongo-laden opening theme music, the low-tech special effects, and beehive hairdos of the original series, and amid the beeping and squawking of a CGI-savvy, handheld game system-playing bunch of children, the next generation of Star Trek fans was born. I think this is because the artistic and cultural achievement of Star Trek transcends its stylistic appearance and any technological limitations of the show’s production. The stories speak for themselves, they speak universally, and they stand up under scrutiny over time, which I believe are the criteria for a work of imagination to earn the title “classic.”
When I began introducing my children to Star Trek, I was actually reintroducing myself to it. I hadn’t seen an episode of the original series in probably 20 years and hadn’t seen a Star Trek movie since the theatrical release of Star Trek VI in 1991. I had only experienced Star Trek as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult.
At the age of 40 I came back to Star Trek with freshness, maturity, and a perspective formed by over twenty years as an adult. I saw and took note of things that had eluded me before. I discovered that the stories I had enjoyed so much as a child were even more appealing and entertaining to me now. Star Trek has universal appeal.

Now, in 2016, both Star Trek and I celebrate our 50th birthdays. Star Trek has rebooted and presents a fresh vision of itself. Geek culture has emerged from the basement and become synonymous with pop culture, and people are rediscovering the 80s. Case in point: my brothers and I are now playing Dungeons & Dragons with our offspring and our mom!
So, happy 50th birthday, Star Trek! See what you started?

book review: Exile by R.A. Salvatore

March 2, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

My Dungeons & Dragons geek-out continues with the second book in R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf trilogy, Exile.

As the book begins, Drizzt Do’Urden, the drow elf with a heart of gold, has been surviving in the wilds of the Underdark for ten years. Meanwhile, his evil family back in Menzobarranzan have not forgotten about him. In order to appease their evil spider goddess deity, they send out the reanimated corpse of Drizzt’s father to kill him.

Drizzt’s decade as a savage in the Underdark has been lonely: so lonely that eventually he journeys to the city of the deep gnomes and turns himself in, just to have some contact with other living beings. He knows there’s a good chance the deep gnomes will summarily execute him, since drow elves and deep gnomes are sworn enemies, but he believes that’s a fate preferable to what he sees happening to him: his exile in the Underdark has unleashed a primal, instinctive killing machine side of him that even he finds frightening. However, his friendship with Belwar, and their adventures together, reconnect him with other living beings and help him rediscover his true self.

Another thing I found interesting was how the author addressed the body/spirit dualism so common in modern science fiction and fantasy. This is the idea that the spirit of a person (sometimes called mind, or soul, or personality, or essence, or simply described as all the person’s knowledge and memory) exists within the body the way a computer program exists within a computer. The “memory banks” can be separated from the “hardware” and copied onto any other piece of hardware. Or, conversely, the “memory banks” of a person can be erased from the hardware and replaced with other “software.” You see this trope in Star Trek a lot, like the one about the three beings who live in those glowing globes and switch places with Kirk, Spock, and another crew member. There’s an episode of The X-Files where a character hooks herself up to a super-computer and uploads her “self” onto the Internet. (That episode was written, BTW, by William Gibson, originator of cyberpunk and coiner of the phrase “cyberspace.”) Zombies are another version of this, in which the soul is gone but the body still somehow functions physically.

The body/spirit issue comes up when Malice Do’Urden, Drizzt’s mother, conducts a diabolical rite to reanimate the dead body of Drizzt’s father and send him out into the Underdark as an assassin. It is under Malice’s complete control, and she uses it as a remote-controlled puppet to hunt down and kill her son. The body retains all its amazing sword skills but none of the father’s personality, memory, or emotions. Drizzt, however, believes that this is a load of hooey:

The physical powers of the body cannot be separated from the rationale of the mind and the emotions of the heart. They are one and the same, a compilation of a singular being. It is in the harmony of these three–body, mind, and heart–that we find spirit.

The spirit cannot be separated from the body. Not in life. And not in undeath.

Well said, Drizzt!!

I won’t spoil it for you, but the final confrontation between Drizzt and his zombified father is quite good!

Book I in the Dark Elf trilogy: Homeland

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Exile

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Sojourn

book review: Homeland by R.A. Salvatore

February 2, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

My brothers and I (all in our 40s) are reliving our geeky childhood by starting to play Dungeons & Dragons again — now with our offspring!

We’re really enjoying the 5th edition of D&D. It has a “back to basics” feel to it, more focused on the broader strokes of gameplay than the minutiae of movement, skirmishes, and what-not.

So, in order to catch up on what I’ve been missing for the almost 30 years that have elapsed since I last attempted a d20 saving throw, I started reading about the various “worlds” in the D&D “multiverse.” Little did I know it, but I started with a great one. I began Homeland, the first “Legend of Drizzt” novel, with a bit of skepticism, scoffing a bit to myself, “A Dungeons & Dragons novel? Really? I’ll give it a try, but if I feel like I’m reading a transcript of a D&D game session, I’ll put it aside.”

I was not just pleasantly surprised — I was really impressed. Salvatore is a good writer: smooth prose style, engaging characters, interesting plot, snappy pacing. This book is also a marvelous feat of world-building.* I was entranced. The culture of the drow elves is truly terrifying and oppressive, and from this dark world a believable hero arises.

Salvatore’s only misstep, in my opinion, is the name of the main character, or rather, the fact that it’s quite unclear how to pronounce his name. If there’s an audio version available, I’d like to hear it; it could be quite a challenge even to a professional voice performer!

This is a good “origin story” for the dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

*Note: I’m not sure how much of the world is original to Salvatore and how much derives from Ed Greenwood’s “Forgotten Realms” D&D campaign setting, so my praise for the world-building perhaps is as much for Greenwood as for Salvatore. As I said, I’ve only just now picked up D&D after 3 decades away from it, so I’m way behind in the development of the various worlds within the multiverse.

Book I in the Dark Elf trilogy: Homeland

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Exile

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Sojourn