*thud*

I am home and have had all manner of exciting Adventures over the past week or two, including several thrilling games of Bird Or Stick? I have acquired one game, around ten books, a free round-trip ticket voucher for anywhere in the continental US, and a head cold. Expect travelogs to trickle in (possibly backdated) over the next twenty-four hours or so. Some with photographic evidence, even.

?skip=400. Not so bad. I got nothing better to do this evening, since the head cold and the voucher have conspired to cause me to call in sick to work tomorrow.

tcon!

For me Technicon this year consisted primarily of boardgaming, with a few side excursions into sociability. I suspect I've played more games in Blacksburg than in the DC area this year. Highlights included:

• Dungeoneer, a fairly nifty card-based dungeon crawl game. I suppose at base it's a simple American take-that with a map and a hefty dose of theme, but since you're somewhat in control of how much bad stuff you can get it works out alright.
  
• Traders of Genoa, a deal-making game in which nearly everything is up for grabs. Played twice. It may unseat Quo Vadis as the Best Negotiation Game Ever.
  
• End of the Triumvirate, a three-player game which Ross disliked because he was tired and Chris disliked because it's pretty dry. I enjoyed it well enough. (Photo courtesy sir_alf, featuring me, Ross, and the back of Chris's head.)
  
• An epic round of Blue Moon. Both players had all three dragons at one point and just couldn't quite eke out a win. (Final score: all three dragons in the centre, and I ran out of cards first.)
  
• A game of Antike that I feel like I played well in, which is pretty much a first for me. Good stuff.

There was also the obligatory pilgrimage to Zeppolis. This was much easier this year since the hotel was right next door.

Friday night I called them to ask about their specials, specifically to see if the gorgonzola chicken was going to be one of them. "No," said the manager, "but if you come in and tell me I can ask the cook if he's willing to make it special for you." So, after much herding and cajoling, ten of us ended up at Zeppolis on Satyrday evening. Much good conversation was had. And the gorgonzola chicken was of course simply amazing. I wrote them gushing fan-mail after I got back.

Overall, a pretty good time. If it were more often than once a year I'd have second thoughts, but it's pretty reasonable for one solid weekend of gaming per annum. Plus a chance to see a lot of people I'm not always around anymore. Good stuff.

Orthe: Chronicles of Carrick V

Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed

If Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Moorcock were to team up to write A Song of Ice and Fire, it would probably not end up looking like Golden Witchbreed at all, but people who have read Mary Gentle's book would find the resulting concoction eerily familiar.

A representative from technologically advanced Earth comes to the planet Orthe (or 'Carrick V' as the Earthers call it) and hangs out with the six-fingered vaguely-reptilian natives. There's an awful lot of intriguing, and even more wandering around. The Ortheans (at least, the ones we see for most of the book) are descendants of a race that overthrew an empire (the Golden Witchbreed) even more technologically advanced than Earth several thousand years ago; they now live simple tech-less lives plotting against each other. Christie (the Earth envoy) is nearly poisoned rather early on and spends most of the rest of the book on the run from one faction or another. In the process she visits a race of barbarians who live in the ruins of Witchbreed cities, a very creepy Hexenmeister who appears to be functionally immortal and thinks it's his job to keep the peace on Orthe (and may be right), and even gets a glimpse of the heir to the Golden empire.

It's rather good stuff. Genuinely alien bits are tossed in on occasion, not because they're important (though sometimes they are), not to make it seem stranger, but just because they're how the culture works. The children who have no gender until they go through puberty. The odd strategy game of ochmir. 'Past-memories.' All kinds of really interesting things that make it feel all the more genuinely alien.

It's not perfect. A (minor) character is killed off for no reason other than that she would have been in the way during the next few scenes. I'm not convinced as to the motivations of the main antagonist. But it worked really well for me: at the poisoning scene it grabbed me and just wouldn't let go. Good stuff.

(It also gets lots of bonus points for actually managing to have a lot of very strong female characters, both in terms of characterization and political power. I kept thinking 'that's a lot of women!' before realising that no, that's an appropriate number of women.)

---

Mary Gentle, Ancient Light

Ten years later, Christie has sold her soul to a corporation intent on milking Orthe for all it's worth. They start by getting thrown out of the remnants of the Golden Empire; they then proceed to piss off just about every other political entity on the planet. Interesting enough, I suppose. Apart from Christie there are exactly three characters from the first book that we see again: one was irritating to start with and is more so, one has a few walk-on parts only, and the third doesn't show up until about a third of the way through and is much changed for various reasons.

This was a slog. I didn't like the changes in Christie's character, I /really/ didn't like the invalidation of a major plot-point from the first book (although that is later revealed to be a lie. Bah), and the political maneuvering that felt so slick in the first book turned into pushing pieces around a chessboard. Yes, the big denouement required all the manipulation that had gone before, but it just didn't hold my interest.

(Don't get me started on the ending, or lack thereof. "Everything has gone to hell and we are standing around bickering about it" is not an ending.)

---

Mary Gentle, "The Crystal Sunlight, the Bright Air"

A short story set in the Hexenmeister's city, sometime before the second book. It mostly touches on themes from the first book's section in the city, but it's decently well-written. Not worth chasing down on its own but if you wind up with the Big Book Of Orthe you can skip Ancient Light and read this one.