Despite several near-disasters, it's been a good week. Wednesday could have been very bad, but it turns out I am competent enough to replace the motherboard of my own desktop.
This week has been very good to me is the excellent media I've been soaking in. It's difficult to get excited about new stuff these days, because so much stuff out there is crud. I'm pleased to mention three excellent examples of the media I spend a lot of time with: a books, a television series, and and a computer game.
The
Fallout Game of the Year edition has been wonderful. I have already played through the main plot of
Fallout, but I missed a large number of the side-quests, and the additional content offered by the downloadables has been amazingly fun. Killin' inbred hicks from Maryland? Yeah, I can get behind that. Murdering slavers in the industrial wasteland that was once Pittsburgh? Surprisingly fun. Me and my Power Armor getting abducted by a giant tin-toy alien mother ship? That was pretty cool. The game has a lot of interesting story and development. The plots and subplots are solid, and are sold to you in different ways. Not a lot of repetition in
Fallout 3, although sometimes, the combat is a little overdone. Random encounters add length to the game, but not a lot of interest. Fortunately, it never becomes a
Diablo grind of waves upon waves of monsters that exist solely to die, give you experience, and drop stuff for you to sell.
Rome is one of the best TV series I've ever watched. Although it's got some historical inaccuracy, mostly for the sake of drama and the convenience of keeping the same actors, it also is steeped in history. It's the little details that are so fascinating: watching the Town Crier read out the news and then pause to advertise a sponsor; seeing the swirl of ethnicities and peoples in the dirty streets of Rome; feeling the rise and fall of family prestige based on so many minor factors. It's delightfully complex and horrible and relentlessly human all at the same time. The sets are gorgeous, the acting top-notch. The plots got a little bit soapy toward the end of season two, but entirely enjoyable. This is excellent television.
When the Santa Fe Good Taste Factory recommends something, I listen. If he recommends something, it's usually quite good. Not that my other friends don't have good taste, but the Good Taste Factory suggests it, I'm guaranteed to like it.
The Gone-Away World arrived in the mail during a period in which I was having trouble reading books, partially because I was reading some crap I felt obligated to read and report on. And I'm having trouble with my own writing, which always effects my reading.
The Gone-Away World is not the sort of book I usually read. I like strong plots with muscular prose, something with a sense of where it's going.
Gone-Away World is loaded with digressions, strange introspection, a semi-halpess protagonist who wanders through his own life. However, the prose is
brilliant. A quote: "Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously, the tree of nonsense if watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster." I went on this ride with author Nick Harkaway because I was seduced by his prose, and the funny, strange, human way he has his protagonist think and put things together. An excellent book, probably the best one I have read this year.
Pyramid is an early adventure for the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It's a good adventure with many solid ideas, and, rather unusually for a D&D adventure, an sense of humor. The adventurers are begged by the ghost of the pharaoh Amun-Re to rob his magically-trapped tomb. There's a lot going on inside, including excavation by spoon, and Amun-Re's remaining priesthood, which still lurks in the pyramid itself. 
I was very excited to hear that Paizo's Pathfinder game was going to include a close parallel to Egypt called Osirion. One of the first adventures they put out involving Osirion was J1, Entombed with the Pharaohs. Adventure structure has changed a great deal since Pyramid was put out. The adventurers expect to be interested in the adventure, not placed at the edge of a desert thanks to actions they had no say in. So there's background, a bunch of stuff that happens before the party even gets to the pyramid, which affects what happens when they're in the pyramid. Quite notable is that the adventure does not stop when the tomb-raiding does. There are hints and riddles of things that may come to pass in the campaign, if the Game Master wishes. It's a nice way to layer on experience, allowing the literary device of foreshadowing in the campaign. yes, I am one of those snobby players who thinks that virtually any literary device can be used to enhance play in an RPG scenario. 
Paizo's follow-up has several structural similarities and some very interesting differences from Kortes' first pyramid adventure. Again with the wacky magical traps (and I like wacky magical traps), but there is a logic to these, because this pyramid was meant to be accessed from time to time. As such, it's got a very different feel from the previous two adventures. Also like Entombed with the Pharaohs, there is a breaking of the walls, a hint at something in the scenario that is beyond the confines of the adventure. 
It was kind of a shock to read The Lost Pyramid of Imhotep and realize how like the majority of first edition D&D scenarios it was. It's a dungeon crawl; go in, kill the monsters, avoid the traps. There's a lack of description that I find is good for the immersion experience. The monsters, complex traps, and other immediate goals are well described, but there's a flatness to it that leaves me cold.
