What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Chronicles of the Black Company

As I've mentioned more than once in this blog I'm not a fan of the grimdark direction Fantasy and Science Fiction has gone in the past couple of decades. My quotable quote on the emphasis on personal suffering by the protagonist and a high body count among the supporting cast has been "If I want that out of a story, I'll watch the news."

So why did I find The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook so interesting?

The Chronicles contains the
first three books in the series.
Official pic is from Amazon because
I was lazy and didn't want to take a
pic of the book myself.

That I'll never know for sure, but I think some of it has to do with Glen Cook's writing style. He writes in a sparse style of prose that suggests a background in newspaper reporting, but from what I can tell he hasn't any training in that area. Glen's writing style does evoke a bit of Stephen King --who did have some experience as a newspaper reporter in his youth*-- and Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short stories did influence him.**

Another reason why I guess I feel comfortable with these books is because of the very nature of the story itself. The Black Company is a mercenary company in a similar vein to the Free Companies of the Medieval and Renaissance eras; they are professional soldiers who accept a contract and follow it loyally, despite any misgivings they personally have. The Black Company is likely a bit more professional in stance and loyalty to a contract than historical Free Companies, but that professionalism is rooted in Glen Cook's own experience with the navy in the Vietnam war era. (Yes, Glen is a few years older than my mom.) I suppose you could also argue that his experience working at a General Motors assembly plant has an influence as well, where you do your job even if it's not the most mentally stimulating thing out there.

I'm not giving away any spoilers here when I say that the Black Company accept a contract that turns out to be held by the big stereotypical "evil empire" of this fantasy world. The members of the Company don't like it, but they honor their contract. I suppose you could call the series grimdark because of the nature of that internal conflict, but the Company's moral quandry is lessened quite a bit because the "rebels" they frequently fight against are little better than the "evil empire" itself. This isn't a matter of the rebels going down to the level of the Empire to survive, but rather the rebels are almost trying to outdo the Empire in morally reprehensible behavior. 

In this world, which evokes a lot of the Sword and Sorcery subgenre, the members of the Company are loyal to each other and to the contract, which keeps them together as a unit. 

I led him back to the fire and settled beside him. "What's the matter? What happened?" I glimpsed the Captain from the corner of my eye. One-Eye stood before him, drained by a heavy-duty dressing down.

"I don't know, Croaker." Goblin slumped, stared into the fire. "Suddenly everything was too much. This ambush tonight. Same old thing. There's always another province, always more Rebels. They breed like maggots in a cowpie. I'm getting older and older, and I haven't done anything to make a better world. In fact, if you backed off to look at it, we've all made it worse." He shook his head. "That isn't right. Not what I want to say. But I don't know how to say it any better."

"Must be an epidemic."

"What?"

"Nothing. Thinking out loud." Elmo. Myself. Goblin. A lot of the men, judging by their tenor lately. Something was wrong in the Black Company. I had suspicions, but wasn't ready to analyze. Too depressing.

             --From The Chronicles of the Black Company, Shadows Linger, by Glen Cook. pp 244-5

Yes, people do die in the books, but in a mercenary unit it's established up front as fact of life. There's no excessive body count for drama or gravitas, and the members of the Company basically try to keep themselves as far away from politics as possible. Well, that doesn't exactly happen, but they do try.

The protagonist in the story is Croaker --not his real name, but the one he enlisted with in the Company-- who is the Physician and Annalist of the Company. If you remember your Top Gun, everybody has their own "name" or handle within the group: One-Eye, Silent, Goblin, Elmo, Raven, Otto. I always wondered if that aspect of Top Gun was the most fake, but apparently that's not the case. At the same time, the names in The Black Company are more accurate than what you find in Top Gun because they're more ironic or snarky or referencing a screw up rather than the dramatic sounding Iceman or Maverick. After all, a physician named Croaker evokes black humor in spades. 

***

War is war. Fighting is fighting. And The Chronicles of the Black Company don't try to sugarcoat it. The first novel, The Black Company, starts so abruptly without much of a lead-in that you're thrown into the deep end of the pool before you realize what's happening. It took me about 40-50 pages before I kind of caught up with a background as to what I was reading, although people who have performed some military service or grew up in a military household will probably have an easier time of it than I did. The setting may be Sword and Sorcery, but the people evoke a more modern military viewpoint. Not necessarily the official modern military, where author Myke Cole described the modern US military as basically driven by rules, not gung ho fighting. 

Still, in spite of this trilogy being everything I ought to not like in a SF&F series, I did like it. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I guess in the right conditions I enjoy a Dark Fantasy series. Maybe it's because the story is never quite hopeless in scope, unlike some other grimdark stories. Or that Glen Cook doesn't take perverse delight in killing off characters that you cheer for. 

As you may have surmised, The Chronicles of the Black Company leans hard into the Military F&SF subgenre, and I've seen it noted more than once that Glen Cook's books have a cult following among the military. I can certainly see why, but one thing that I did note is that the first three books in the series don't hew toward a political standpoint that some other Military F&SF have (such as John Ringo's Into The Looking Glass or Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers). The focus of the story being on the Company itself and their reactions to the world help tremendously in that regard. Croaker himself is a likeable protagonist who tries to make sense of the bigger picture but recognizes that's of secondary importance when fulfilling your contract and staying alive are of primary importance.

One thing that I did note is that there's a dearth of female characters in the story. Yes, I know, there's The Lady and the White Rose as well as a few others (sorry, spoilers there), but for the vast majority of the novels the fact they are women is almost incidental. The Black Company is pretty much an all-male outfit, but the very nature of The Lady and The White Rose is such that people in the world don't think of women as a weaker sex and that "fighting is man's work". 

The stories were written in the early to mid 80s, and yes it shows. I'm still surprised that I missed these stories when they first came out because there weren't nearly as many SF&F novels released back then as there are now, but I might have dismissed them when the back blurb begins with "Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead." But I also think it possible I missed these stories because I was busy reading the "classics" from an earlier era: Michael Moorcock's Elric and Corum stories, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and the old Grand Masters of SF (Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein). The F&SF of the 70s/80s that I did read were of the Epic Fantasy variety, such as Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga, David Eddings' The Belgariad, Dennis McKiernan's Iron Tower Trilogy, and Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords. 

Mea culpa on my part, because I think I'd have liked it back then.

Will I pick up the other books in the series? Probably not. I'm happy that the trilogy ended as it did. Sure, there are some loose ends, but I'm comfortable with it as it is. 

*Stephen King, On Writing, pp 55.

**I found this out when I began writing this post, and when I discovered that interview I linked to above I thought "Oh. Of COURSE. That makes sense." It's become more difficult to chase down copies of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, which is a shame. They kind of stood somewhere off to the side in their own snarky little corner away from Tolkien's good and evil epic fantasy and Michael Moorcock's antihero counterpoint, although the stories were closer to Moorcock than Tolkien by far. 

EtA: Grammar corrections.

Fun With MMOs: The Elder Scrolls Online

The Elder Scrolls Online is one of those MMOs that was built on an existing (and wildly popular) video game property. Unlike other well known properties turned into MMOs, The Elder Scrolls franchise is strictly a video game property, as opposed to the broader scope of the properties behind MMOs such as LOTRO, SWTOR, Neverwinter, etc., etc.

But that's not a bad thing. After all, the biggest MMO out there, WoW, is a video game property. As is Final Fantasy XIV, for that matter.*

The Elder Scrolls Online was developed by Zenimax and published by Bethesda, and after a reported seven years in development was released for PC on April 4th, 2014. In June 2015, ESO released for the PS4 and XBoxOne.

And I'll freely admit that when I first heard of ESO, my first thought was "Why?"

This never gets old.
From all over the internet, really.

After the WoW-killer failure of Rift and SWTOR** as well as the tremendous success of Skyrim, it seemed very foolish to tempt the MMO gods by creating a huge MMO for the Elder Scrolls franchise. Additionally, the release date in 2014 didn't really have the same buzz for ESO that another 2014 release, Wildstar, had. Wildstar was also getting a lot of press because it was moving in the direction of "old school MMO" in a way that most major MMOs had long abandoned, such as heavy grinds, really tough raid bosses, and tons and tons of attunement. When ESO was mentioned, one of the first items that you'd typically see was "oh, it's a subscription only game, just like Wildstar". Not exactly the sort of hype you want to see in an upcoming game.

However, the year is now 2018 and ESO is still adapting and thriving, while Wildstar is about to be shut down. ESO has moved into the buy-and-play model of GW2 with a cash shop and an optional subscription, and with that move along with several critical major updates the game is chugging along quite nicely. The developers at Zenimax must be doing something right, so it's time to login to The Elder Scrolls Online and find out.

Fun With MMOs: TERA

I first became aware of TERA when reports surfaced about the so-called "panty run". You know, the YouTube videos that showed a female toon half bent over, running in such a way that you could see her panties quite easily. It was designed to titillate, and meant specifically for the male gaze to a degree I'd not seen in an MMO since Age of Conan.

ALL of Age of Conan.

For the longest time, I just simply wrote off TERA because of that video and how much it disturbed me. This was an MMO I'd be embarrassed to have the mini-Reds --or my wife-- find me playing, and if I did play TERA it would be really late at night or early in the morning, like Age of Conan.

So why review TERA at all? Like I said in the previous post, if I'm going to be asked my opinion, I need it to be an honest one, not just a knee jerk reaction to what I've seen via YouTube. And the longer TERA has hung around the MMO field, the longer my curiosity has grown. How has this MMO survived out there? Is it all strictly a young male fantasy, or something about Asian MMOs that I simply don't get? You'd think that if the male fantasy angle were the thing, then Age of Conan wouldn't be on life support. And I'll freely admit that I don't watch anime (at least anime newer than the original Speed Racer and Star Blazers), so there's likely a cultural component I'm missing.

So I decided that the only way to understand TERA was to actually get into the game, so I downloaded TERA, made sure it was late at night, and clicked "play".

The original TERA box cover artwork.
Because of the En Masse logo, this was
for North America consumption.
From Wikipedia.

Fun With MMOs: Rift Revisited

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
--Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Back in late 2010, WoW released Cataclysm. There was a lot of initial enthusiasm for the expac and the number of subs to WoW swelled to their highest point at that time of 12 million. However, by March 2011 the number had fallen back to 11.4 million and some of the playerbase had become restless. There were the usual gripes of "nothing to do" on reaching max level as well as the "instances are too hard" refrain, but there were also complaints from some traditionalists who missed the talent trees and a lot of quirks that Blizzard had eliminated in their desire to make WoW fresh and exciting.

Into that atmosphere came the software company Trion Worlds with their new MMO Rift.

This is one of five copies around the house, courtesy of Gen Con 2011's
goodie bag. Yes, even the youngest mini-Red got a goodie bag, which
inclued a mini-deck for Magic: the Gathering,  a.k.a. a free sample of crack.

Fun with MMOs: The Reviews' Guiding Principles

If I'm going to actually review some new(ish) MMOs*, I'm going to provide some parameters for both the effort itself and what I'm evaluating. What I don't want to do is just play for a few minutes and give the game an evaluation, because that's not so much an evaluation as taking a look at a trailer for the game.

That said, what I will review will be different than what other people review. Some reviewers focus on gameplay, sound, graphics, story, endgame, and polish, but I don't want to be constrained to that. I want to focus on the sense of immersion and whether there are things in the game that break it.

Here's a short example of breaking immersion from a non-video game aspect: the story in the film National Treasure. Yes, I'm aware National Treasure is a fun action movie --and it plays out like an RPG campaign, to be honest-- but I'm also a history buff.** When I first watched that movie I was glad I was at home, because I could then get up and go into the kitchen and silently rage at all of the misrepresentations of history before rejoining my wife. Fun movie, yes, but boy did it break my sense of immersion.

You got that right, Sean. Fun fact: Sean Bean's character
doesn't die in National Treasure, which is a pretty rare thing.
From quickmeme.

How do I intend to do all of this? Well, here's my process:

• Create a toon for each faction represented in the MMO.
• If there's only one faction, I'll still create two toons, one male and one female.
• During the creation process, I'll take a look at all of the options to see where the limiting factors are. I'm thinking in terms of agency here, as I want people to not be restricted to playing a very specific type of player. I'm not using this as an excuse to push any sort of prudishness or moral/political viewpoint, I just want there to be options for people to play the way they want to play.
• To properly evaluate gameplay and story, I'll play through the intro zone and the first low level zone to get a good feel for the game. Preferably, if the game has one or more capital cities, I want to at least reach that city before I end my evaluation, but I want to avoid the issue of Age of Conan where the intro zone --Tortage-- was fantastic but the low level zone (right after arriving at the capital city) was just so-so. My initial review of AoC was that it was a really good game, until it became a huge grind once you got past Tortage.
• How other players interact, how global chat operates, and how other players present themselves will factor into my evaluation of immersion. I'm not going to get on a RP server if I can help it, but I will definitely stick to PvE as much as I can. I'm no longer a world PvPer, and I don't want that to factor into my evaluation.
• I'll also keep an eye on how NPC's behave, look, and interact with the players. Clues as to what sort of game the developers want to present can be found in those details, as what developers present in game may be different than when they talk about the game.

Curse you, Steam, for making it too easy to find all of these games!

I realize that not everybody is going to find these reviews valuable, particularly given that some of these MMOs have been around for several years. Chasing the new hotness is pretty much always in vogue, and I'm definitely not doing that nor examining the most popular aspects of MMOs. My viewpoint is decidedly non-raid and non-world PvP, which puts me at odds with a significant portion of the MMO community; people who want to see those aspects in an MMO aren't going to get much of anything out of my reviews.

But that's fine with me. I'm not trying to keep up with the latest MMO out there, so when I get to it, I get to it. And I'm not likely to be the only person who comes into an MMO late, so taking a gander at an MMO that has had time to mature isn't a bad thing at all. And really, people who read this blog are well aware of my lack of time/desire to go raiding, so there's no real surprises.

So let's do this. First up, an MMO that I examined six years ago and found a lot to like, but I didn't want to leave the confines of WoW to explore something new.





*For my purposes if not for anybody else's. As the youngest mini-Red pointed out to me, her sister is quite capable of making the decision of whether or not to play on her own. "True," I said, "but if someone asks me for my opinion, I want to give an informed one, not one driven by the internet." She was fine with that response.

**I minored in History in college. No, it didn't have anything to do with my major (Physics), but I enjoyed the subject enough that I took a lot of my electives in History (and Philosophy) just because.