Zornhau!

Wannabe Writer, German Longsword Smiter

Sunday, May 11, 2014

YOU CAN FIND ME AT MY AUTHOR BLOG WWW.MHAROLDPAGE.COM!!!!

I don't really blog here anymore. You can find me at:

www.mharoldpage.com

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot
learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target
practice.
(From The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord)

We all laugh at the evil overlords of TV and cinema Fantasy. We tolerate them because – like 1970s gays embracing their own particular reading of Batman – we’re pathetically grateful for whatever bones mainstream culture deigns to toss our way.

This, however, is not true of printed Fantasy. The budding - mostly wannabe – author might argue, “But it’s Fantasy – I can make anything happen if it’s cool.”

We respond, “But your novel is rubbish.”

If we’re sober, and asked politely, we might expand on this statement:

If your Evil Overlord does not exploit his every possible advantage, then we cease to believe in him (if he’s so stupid, how come he got to be an Evil Overlord?), and the hero’s victory is unearned – and sometimes both.

If we cease to believe in the Evil Overlord, then our suspension of disbelief collapses, and we are catapulted out of the story. In other words, you have failed to achieve Verisimilitude.

If the hero’s victory is unearned, then any deeper themes are undermined or invalidated, so your story is devoid of Truth. This bears some explanation.

For example, if you want to say that bravery and ingenuity will prevail, you have to put the hero in situations where his bravery is convincingly tested and his ingenuity stretched to its limits. A backdoor raid on the Evil Overlord’s castle, opposed only by inept uncoordinated minions, neither tests nor stretches.

If the reader spots this lack of Truth, then the story merely feels thin. If your fine writing carries them along… well then I’m afraid you’re a liar, cheating in order to teach fallacious and dangerous life lessons, such as “If you stand up to a bully, they back down.” (Like fuck they do, but we’ll come to that.)

Thus, though you have a lot of freedom in your world building, if you want to attain Truth and Verisimilitude, the Evil Overlord must behave authentically.

This is the sort of authenticity which matters.

OK (says budding wannabe). I get the point. I’ll make my Evil Overlord act like he’s played by an experienced roleplayer. Now shut up, I have to write this bit where the plucky ploughboy sneaks into the castle using an ingenious scheme and then faces off with the Evil Overlord’s chief henchman guy man-to-man, and uses his manly strength and faith to prevail…meanwhile the Princess is using a cunning device to disorder the Legions of Doom so that the peasants can defeat them. Then- Ouch! Ouch! Stop hitting me. Ouch! I mean it. Oof! (Thud)

These things - castles, swords, military drill - you treat as mere props or amusing eccentricities are, unless explicitly stated otherwise, tools of established technologies (by which I mean systems of practical knowledge comprising know-how and the tool to exploit that know-how).

If your hero can easily get into a well guarded-castle, then building a castle and setting up sentries is a waste of time. If your untrained hero can defeat an experienced swordsman, then experience and training count for nothing. If a few cheap tricks with rope break up the serried ranks of veteran Legionaries, then all military training is stupid.

In short, if you write these things, then you are implying that the results of years of experiment and experience can be overcome by a few cheap tricks, and that 90% of human systematic endeavor is futile. Faith and bravery are all.

Is that what you really want to say? On some level, readers with any worldly wisdom will pick up on your improbably world view and - POP! - there goes your verisimilitude and any sense of depth.

All this said, the authenticity that matters is authenticity of human action. I’m not proposing slavish adherence to historical facts, and meticulous research of military martial arts systems. Rather, I’m advocating a realistic portrayal of how technologies break or are broken.

The obvious one from history is the good old technological paradigm shift: Polearms break chivalric cavalry, longbows break (some) knights, tanks and machineguns break 19th-century-style warfare, and so on. Give the hero or the heroine – by which I mean, let them earn – a genuinely new tool with which to win, but stemming from an application of some change in the world’s technology or magic.

For example, suppose – thanks to the Evil Overlord’s effete tastes – the silk import trade is booming. The hero is the first person to see that, with enough silk, you can make a rope which is light enough to enable a grappling hook to reach the highest tower in the Keep of Doom. Similarly, give the Heroine access to early gunpowder weapons, or to mass produced polearms – now her peasants can take on the Legions of Doom. The thing is, you can make this stuff up. The technology doesn’t have to be real, just plausible. Issue the peasants “Elvish Shield Breakers” if you want.

Equally obvious is, people break technology. Though the cleverness of one individual is unlikely to overcome the collective stored cleverness of the thousands of people involved in developing a technology, a single idiot, or an outmoded tradition, can very effectively sabotage a technology from the inside. Bored aristos make poor castle guards. Cultural conventions might make the Evil Overlord’s Henchman an excellent exponent of the dueling whip, but useless in real hand-to-hand combat. Similarly, major cultural movements can overcome tech, to an extent at least. Masses of peasants in the grip of religious fervor might just overwhelm the Legions of Doom, if they catch them in their billets, rather than in the field, which leads to the final method.

Again, you can make this stuff up. Culture and psychology are up to the author.

Now we come to the best way to break a technology, if you can’t supersede it: entirely avoid the technology. Don’t break into a castle. God’s Teeth! Don’t engage an experienced fighter in hand-to-hand combat. And don’t face a trained army in the open field.

I really do mean entirely. Smart-ass workarounds look good to outsiders, but rarely ever work because either (a) there’s a good reason why people don’t do it already, (b) they’ve been thought of and countered, and (c) they assume that the victim does not immediately adapt.

For example, if you roll carts at a Macedonian phalanx, Alexander’s men simply lie down under their shields. Trebuchets as field artillery – so beloved of Medieval Total War – would be utterly rubbish, because your army would have to move at their pace, with all sorts of strategic implications, and because it would be more cost effective to hire more slingers or crossbowmen.

Strangely enough, most real armies expect to be attacked in their camp and guard against it with piquets, stockades and divers spiky things. They also expect poisoned wells, hay carts crammed with bloodthirsty partisans, ambushes in defiles – which is why they have scouts – and pit traps and caltrops lacing fields which look suitable for a cavalry charge.

And – in hand-to-hand combat - throwing dust, if you can find enough of it, in my face might blind me for a moment if you’re lucky, but while you’re fumbling with dirt, I’m cutting off your head. Just throwing yourself at me “unexpectedly” isn’t unexpected at all. Whack! Thud. You are now looking up at your own headless corpse and wondering why you can move your lips but not talk.

The only convincing workarounds are the ones that the characters have to… well.. work for, and then live with the consequences. In other words, solutions work which are part of the plot, rather than something the author pulled out of their posterior.

You can get into a castle by carefully infiltrating the workforce. You can kill an adept warrior by stalking him for ages, then finally shooting him in the back. Your peasants can overcome a field army by lulling it into a false sense of security over several months, welcoming the soldiers into their homes, then – on the signal – falling on all those homesick young - not individually evil - men in their sleep.

And, that’s the thing. If you – the novelist – cheat, then you’re saying victory is easy, doesn’t have consequences, doesn’t leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

You’re saying that the world’s victims deserve their fate, since if they would just have faith, they could throw off their shackles, overcome even the most hardened death squads.

You’re also saying that those people who, with grim purpose, liberate themselves or others, have needlessly got their hands dirty: “You can’t build a civil society on a bloody revolution.”

If so, you are feeding a culture of entitlement and magical thinking. “Have faith, and it will be so.” In short, you are a liar.

But, I’ll be fair. If you care to dispute this before the God of Battles, let’s you and me try your righteous indignation and bravery against my seven-years training with longswords.

Are you feeling plucky, ploughboy?

Still here...

It seems the blogger enviroment has improved since I started this placeholder blog. My real blog is over at livejournal, but I'm tempted to cross post tidied up essays here.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Fixing Playmobil!


So, the arm came off Kurtzhau's Playmobil Viking. Being Playmobil - from the same nation that brought us the King Tiger Tank - it wouldn't just snap back on.
Google is my friend. I found a very good Playmobil Forum, and then, best of all, footage of how to dismantle a Playmobil figure.
You really have to watch the footage. But, in a nutshell: put the figure into sitting position, clutch the torso, and - holding at 45 degrees - bump the legs into a soft surface such as mouse mat or wad of paper. The whole thing just falls apart. Putting it back together is pretty easy.