Sunday, December 29, 2013

What the Elephand Lands are Like

I tried to write this post in my more usual long form, but it wasn't working.  So here's this instead.


Precis: A cold, bitter frontier beset by inhuman enemies; fantasy Russia by way of Byzantium

Conspectus: Monomakos, the Overlord of the White Throne; ice age megafauna; dark forests crawling with the twisted results of failed experiments from the ancient elves tinkering with the now lost technology; the twisted, half-fish immortals in the service of His Piscine Majesty, the Viridian Emperor; tribes of fearsome Leiber-style "Ghuls;" Orcs! (it's been years since I've had them in one of my games); Kelnorian ruins in their marbled splendor crumbling in the cold snow; the remnants of Markrabian star-cruisers leaking "magic" into the surrounding area; blue "northern" elves; the ice wizards of Valon; demons trapped for millennia beneath glaciers; forest products; the screaming banshees of the Sidhe Hills; Rigorn the Magnificent, a Ghul Mage of terrifying power and mercurial mood;  The White Throne with its scrimshaw panels of mastodon tusk and tiger bone depicting the conquest of a people; Bullywug ruins in the marshes of the Greatflood River; cavemen morlocks and white apes, oh my!; amazons riding polar bears and sabertoothed tigers; a bitter but petty skirmishes along a long and wild border; strange pylons that create the warm weather found in the Land of Beasts, where dinosaurs roam free; the lost elven city in the mountain; cairns and barrows of a peoples lost to historical record; the whip-wielding disciples of the fish god Armadad-Bog; the cold bodies of dead gods of wood and stone who were dead before the first man walked the world

Taste; Sound; Image: "Winter's Wolves," Laketown from The Desolation of Smaug*


A Note on the new look: I decided changing the name of my blog temporarily would probably get confusing, and I liked the vaguely purple color scheme so I found another picture on my hard drive that fit it.

*I actually have some serious problems with this movie, and it's not very Tolkien, but its combination of cold town on a lake with medieval Russian looking guards mimicked what I was already thinking about for Damkina very well.



1 comment:

  1. I don't like that they vary so differently from the books either.

    Jackson and del Toro freely admit that the movies are a miss-mash of all the books.

    Legolas is indeed alive at the time of The Hobbit, but he makes no appearance in the story (book).

    Again, there is no girl heroine.

    Gandalf discovers that the Necromancer is Sauron and is captured in The Silmarillion. While there, he dscovers Thrain, Thorin's father, and gets the map and key from him.

    In the movies, Gandalf has already given the map and key to Thorin, so this scene shouldn't even be in the movie.

    So Jackson and del Toro freely mix up the books to suit their "vision" of what the movie should be.

    I appreciate that "money" rules and they will do what it takes to make money, a.k.a. get "girls" to go see the movies.

    But that doesn't mean that I have to like it.

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