Rumors of my demise are slightly exaggerated. Rumors of my enemies' demise by way of large barrels of exploding pitch and naptha, however, are not. Make of this what you will.

I can promise you much more extensive updating later, once the events necessary take place, which should be in, oh, 20 minutes or so. For now, two things:

1. On the blog technical note, entry permalinks (which you may access by clicking the date in an entry) now lead to a page for each individual entry, rather than the monthly listing. I did this because it was impossible to link reliably using said monthly listing. This way is better. You can still browse the archives via the monthly pages.

2. For those of you playing or thinking about playing that most excellent Oblivion mod, AFK_Weye, you should download the new version here.

Thanks to Samson's help, bugfixes are legion in this release, and include everything from cell lighting changes and missing voice mp3s to fixes for quest breaking bugs. So please, get the thing. Please note, however, that this is not the final version, although you may find...evidence of further work being done.

Also please note that if you use the UL:Arrius Creek mod, there is apparently a fairly bad conflict between it and Weye. This will be fixed in due time.

First, for you Weye followers, you may find the version 2 beta here. Please note that this is liable to be updated as bugs are found, and if you do find anything busted, please do let me know about it.

On an entirely different note, if you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know that I'm a pretty big fan of S.M. Stirling's body of fiction, but especially the trilogies that start with Island In the Sea of Time and Dies the Fire, and his new one that starts with The Sunrise Lands.

Now, lately I've been doing a reread of those in a sort of bizzare order where I read Sunrise Lands, then went back and did the Dies the Fire stuff, then went back and re-read ISOT for the first time in a few years. And I had a few thoughts on that experience that I'll probably want to come back to later, so let's just blather on that for a bit, shall we.

As a native Oregonian, and, being from Monroe, I've lived most of my life pretty close to the main thrust of the action, I'm pretty well obligated to love Dies the Fire and its successors, because hey, it's set in Oregon, and how cool is that. Furthermore, if the prologue thank-yous are to be believed, Stirling himself relied on other people for the setting stuff, rather than actually going there, though I could be wrong. In either case, he got a lot of our local quirks right, including:

- Portland as the Evil Empire. Being a not-Portlander, that's hilarious.
- Every depiction of the Corvallis city-state ever. Especially the beaver flag. I'm an OSU alumnus, and I find that side-splittingly funny. About the only way to make that particular bit of nationalism more hilarious would have been to use UO and that whole "The Ducks are our civic religion" thing, but you know what? he leveled Eugene. As a Corvallan, I can't do anything but applaud that.
- The whole Eugene coven thing was pretty cool, although I have to alternate between thinking they're enormously annoying and kind of cute, which I guess is fair because I do it with their real life counterparts too.
- Since I pretty much have an inate superiority complex about my native state in any case, the fact that Oregon turns out to be one of the bastions of civilization in the Changed world is pretty awesome. Another is England, which as we know is another of my favorite places. It's hard to argue with that.

I also find it pretty cool that over the course of the books, I've learned quite a bit more about my native state's geography than I knew before, which is cool.

Also the books are flat out awesome, as I've said before. If sometimes we get a little too regional stereotyped, and maybe we're a little too fast on the decay of society thing, well, that doesn't make it any less neat. As I've said before, the whole guys with longbows and chainmail cruising around Oregon thing is great.

As to Island in the Sea of Time, I'm once again remembering how interesting this world would be for some kind of RPG. I'm also reminded that there are plenty of hooks left in the third book to support a bunch of sequels in various ways, and if he doesn't get to it in the current set of books, I sure would like to go back and see if Althea turns out to be awesomely evil like I want her to.

I had also forgotten how great the Babylon parts of the second two books are, and how they made the parts of the book that were NOT Babylon sort of drag a bit. Also, I really, really wish we could have seen more of Egypt, but again with that whole needs-a-second-trilogy thing.

I also forgot how...utterly tacked on the airship crew stuff felt, and how I couldn't care less about them. I realize why they're there, and other minor character couples in the same vein, like the Marine privates, work just fine, and I like them. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Cofflin and Stoddard are generally in the same scenes as other, way cooler characters like the Hollards and Kashtiliash. Along the same lines, the Ranger subplot bored me to tears this time, which I can't figure out because I liked it before.

Now, on a more thematic observation. Somebody, who I suspect is a random Wikipedia editor, said something interesting, to the effect of Stirling's having a strong belief in the inherent goodness of Western civilization or some such. Now, keeping the acknowledgement in the front of Conquistador firmly in mind (and I'm pretty sure I was there for the discussions that provoked that), I find that observation to be pretty true, and you have only to read ISOT through Conquistador to figure that out. There's, for the most part, a sort of attitude to the characters therein that wouldn't be out of place in a late 19th century Englishman. More enlightened, of course, but not out of place.

The interesting thing, though, is that Dies the Fire onwards is, if not precisely the exact opposite of this view, then pretty damn close. You get the sense that everyone doesn't exactly miss the 20th century like they might, and indeed lots of them are actually pretty happy about it. Certainly they aren't going out of their way to keep bits of it alive, like Nantucket does - the Mackenzies are a moderately representative democracy, but pretty much nobody else is, for example. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but it'll be interesting to see how, if that whole vision thing turns out like people think, he resolves that dichotomy, or if he does.

And it's midnight and I'm incoherent, so enough of that.

One of those things about me that most people don't actually know is that I'm something of a map geek, especially when it comes to gaming maps. Now, most of you, my faithful readers, pretty much know this - the whole Cartographer's Guild thing for one, and I've posted plenty of Campaign Cartographer doodles up here.

One of the things that really really doesn't get talked about is the fact that, in amongst my D&D things, I have a box that, once upon a time, back when they were the height of technology, contained an external 100 MB Zip drive. Now it contains AD&D poster maps. 81 of them, to be exact, ranging from the 3rd edition FRCS map of Faerun to the Dragonlance maps from Tales of the Lance to maps of Europe from the Historical Reference series. About the only thing missing is my two-poster Greyhawk Wars map, which is still in Oregon.

Totally, they represent much of my spending money from my teenage years. Some kids collect baseball cards. Others clothes. Some people spend it on their cars, or dating. Me? I can recreate most of the Forgotten Realms in 30 miles to the inch poster maps.

With a larger version here.

That includes maps from:

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting: Revised (1993)
The Horde Campaign Setting (1990)
Maztica Campaign Setting (1991)
Spellbound (1995)
The North (1996)
Vilhon Reach (1996)
Lands of Intrigue (1997)
Empires of the Shining Sea (1998)
Storm Riders (1990)

Not pictured are the two 30 mile to the inch poster maps from the Al Qadim set, which would be somewhere south of the two brown maps from the Horde and Storm Riders, approximately where my kitchen cabinets are. We'll also skip out on the 15 mile to the inch map of Michaca from City of Gold.

Now, while the entire 2nd edition line of FR boxed sets was supurb (culminating in the ridiculously excellent Lands of Intrigue and Empires of the Shining Sea), I actually did a lot of my collecting not for the source material, but for the maps. These are the best sorts of maps, really, because you can point to some ruin on them, look up that ruin, and go imagine yourself having adventures there, which was incredibly important to my teenage self, and I suppose still is. In any event, I have a fair number of maps I've never actually used, such as:

With a larger version here.

You FR savvy types will recognize three of the great cities of the Realms there:

Waterdeep, from the 1994 City of Splendors box
Myth Drannor, from the 1993 Ruins of Myth Drannor box
Menzoberranzan, from the 1992 box of the same name.

Never used a one of them, but they sure are cool, aren't they? City of Splendors in particular was an awesome box for maps - in addition to the two-poster city street layout you see there, there are also maps for Castle Waterdeep, a tavern, and two photographed posters of miniatures layouts of parts of the city. Made of win. Also the books were great.

And this is the sort of thing that, aside from the actual 3rd edition FRCS, which is the best basic set for the Realms to date, is sadly lacking recently. By way of illustration, let's show this picture of my 90 miles to the inch FR poster maps:

With larger version here.

With maps from:

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting: Revised (1993)
The Horde Campaign Setting (1990)
Al Qadim Campaign Setting
OA6: Ronin Challenge (1990)

By contrast, do you see that sole, single poster, 120 mile to the inch map that's had chunks edited out of it to fit? That's the 2001 3rd edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting map, and it's pretty much the only one you're going to get in all of 3rd edition. And that's just sad, now isn't it?

Now, that's not the only thing hard to love about the new map. While, for gaming purposes, 30 miles to the inch is a great scale, and it's pretty much the only one I like to use, 90 miles to the inch isn't a bad scale, and those two FRCS:Revised maps in the northwest corner are pretty well-loved. But 120 miles to the inch? That's unusably small. Which wouldn't be so bad if 3rd edition products had made up for it, but they really didn't. And I for one am pretty sad about that.