The Secret Lair

Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invade Britain

Previously, on History of English:

• Introduction

Last time, we covered some basic introductory material, but now it’s time to dive into our subject, as the kids say, for realz. So let’s go back to the first time English was spoken and… umm… well, hrm.

Turns out that figuring out just when a language got its start is not as easy as you might at first think. Most people don’t roll out of bed one day and say, “Y’know, today seems like a good day to create a new language. Let’s get on that, then.”¹ In fact, sometimes it can be pretty difficult to tell when one language ends and another begins, due in part to some of that murkiness with dialects that we discussed last time. So first, we need to talk a little bit about where new languages come from.²

There are two main ways that new languages emerge: language contact and language change. Language contact is when speakers of two different languages come together, usually for an extended period of time, and their languages sort of mix. This can happen in a number of different ways, on a number of different levels, but for now just note that sometimes languages can mix together and change each other, or even have new little baby languages (this will be important later).

Language change can be a little more complicated. One thing that seems to be a constant in human experience is that languages do change over time and distance. There are a number of theories as to why this is, and it happens at various rates in different languages, but in the end it seems that we sort of have to take it as a given that languages will change. In once sense, this seems perfectly obvious: we always need new words for new things, right? But the changes can go far, far beyond that, into areas of grammar and structure. As Clive Upton famously commented, “The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”

(As an aside, even that can be a little misleading, since sometimes languages don’t really die; they just change into new ones. We call Latin a dead language for example, when really it just turned into French, Spanish, Romanian, and others. In a very real way, Italian is nothing but modern Latin. In fact, as we’ll soon see, the earliest forms of English are about as different from what we speak today as Latin is from Italian.)

Imagine it something like this: a tribe of hunter-gatherers moves into a new land. They all speak the same language, of course. There’s some argument about exactly which way to go, though, and where to settle. Since the tribe is getting pretty big, half of it decides to go one way, and the other half another. Over time, the two groups start speaking a little differently, then even more differently, enough that when they run into each other again a couple generations later, they can’t understand each other anymore. Then, later, those two groups branch out into more, and so on, and so on…

As you can imagine, though, since these groups started out speaking the same language, the new languages that emerge are pretty similar to each other in many ways. They share certain root words, and though they may not sound the same in each language, they probably will end up having similar sounds. They’ll probably put sentences together in similar, though different, ways.

Linguists say that languages like this are related, and group them into families. These language families are even put into a family tree, which is exactly what you’d expect: languages are grouped into subfamilies and branches of families, all going back to a single common ancestor.³

English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. That is, it’s a group of languages that can all trace their ancestry back to a single language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European, and which is the ancestor of the majority of the languages spoken in the area between Europe and India.⁴ Specifically, English is a member of the Germanic branch of that family, making it related to languages like German, Swedish, and Dutch. If you want to see where English falls on the ol’ family tree, Wikipedia has a great chart (I’d embed it here, but it’s huge!).

Okay, so remember what I said about language contact? Let’s get back to that.

English as a new language got started sometime around 450 AD⁵ when several groups who spoke various Germanic languages all decided to go and invade the British Isles. Why? I don’t know. Maybe invading things was all the rage back then. Maybe it’s what you and your friends did after a few too many rounds of mead. I mean, I personally think it would take more than a few pints to make “Hey, let’s go take over that cold rainy island!” sound like a good idea, but maybe that’s just me.

Prior to this, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages (Celtic is another branch of the Indo-European family, like Germanic) such as Welsh, Cornish, and Gaelic. The common wisdom is that the invaders pushed these Celtic languages aside, never to be heard from again in the history of English as a language (hint: we’ll be hearing about them again). As I said, there were several groups of Germanic invaders, most notably the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Each group spoke their own language (or more likely, several dialects of their own language), and though these languages were related, they weren’t the same.

Now that the new invaders had established themselves as the new guys in charge, they needed a way to talk to each other (but not those wussy Celts who let themselves get all conquered, presumably).⁶ So, like people do, they found ways to make it work. Their languages were already fairly close, as such things go, and what started to emerge were various hybrids. Over here, you got a little Anglic mixed with a dollop of Saxon. Over there, some Jute spiced up with Anglic, with maybe a little Frisian thrown in for color. These mixtures were all pretty similar, enough that you could communicate with your buddy who maybe grew up up north speaking a different mix. The mix that eventually emerged is what we call Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.

What’s important to note here–and this is really important, even down to today–is that there never was one original version of English from which all others descended. Instead, you have various different versions emerging as different groups settled and met in different places and at different times. Eventually, these all coalesced into a bunch of dialects similar enough to clump them together as a language, but it’s more of a fuzzy accumulation than a hard boundary. In England, you can still trace dialect lines today that correspond to the locations where different groups of invaders settled.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language and see how, by modern standards, calling it “English” might be a bit of a stretch. Oh, and if we’re lucky, we might even get a visit from our friendly neighborhood Vikings, too! (Hint: the Vikings are not friendly.)

1. Though sometimes people actually do do this, but that’s a slightly different subject. [↩]
2. You see, when a Mommy Language and a Daddy Language love each other very much… [↩]
3. In fact, linguists use this family metaphor extensively. There are mother and daughter languages. Languages are said to be genetically related, though this has nothing to do with the real human genetics of the people who speak them. [↩]
4. In some older sources, you’ll see these referred to as the Aryan languages, but that term understandably fell out of favor following World War II. [↩]
5. Or CE, if you prefer. I’ve always been accustomed to using BC/AD instead of BCE/CE, just as a matter of habit. I intend no religious preference by this. [↩]
6. One can practically hear the high fives and fist bumps ringing across the centuries. [↩]

“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”

~ Walt Whitman

The English language is weird. In some ways, the English language is really, really weird. But if there’s one thing we know here at The Secret Lair, it’s that weird things are generally awesome. Especially when those weird things are mutant cross-species hybrids, patched and infused with alien DNA, which are then forced to stand on their heads and jump through flaming hoops while ten people shout out suggestions for what tune it should be whistling. And yes, I’m still talking about English.

Let me back up a bit. A week or two ago, Overlord Miller pointed me to a humorous video purporting to convey the entire history of the English language in ten minutes.¹ The video’s wonderfully British narrator was accompanied by cartoons,² and it was overall very funny, with a couple genuine laugh-out-loud moments. The interwebs junkie in me was sated, but my scholarly side felt it left a lot to be desired. For one thing, it focused only on individual words, while ignoring vast shifts in grammar and pronunciation. For another, it seemed to pass on (or at least gloss over) some common myths about dialect, spelling, and language contact.

Clearly, as Governor of Purposeful Obfuscation and Lateral Linguistics, I could not let this lack of information stand! While I may not be the most expert on the subject, I do know a pretty good bit about it. Back in my college days, I took a course on the history of English and found it to not only be fascinating, but also surprisingly useful. In fact, in studying the history of the English language (both in that class and in later exploration), I learned that much of what I had previously thought about English (and languages in general) was, in a word, wrong.

So in this series of articles, I hope to not only give you a little more information about where this crazy, Frankenstein-esque language of ours came from, but also to correct a few of the more common myths about English, such as:

• You can’t split an infinitive (no matter how badly you want to boldly go somewhere).³
• You can’t use a preposition to end a sentence with.⁴
• English isn’t spelled at all like it sounds.⁵
• English is being ruined and dumbed down by too many people learning it (incompletely) as a second language.⁶
• There is one pure, perfect, Standard English language, and all other dialects are corrupted versions of it.⁷
• The way I learned to speak/write/read English is and always has been the correct way!⁸
• Languages are logical.⁹

But before we can really dive in and look at these things, we need to define a few things to make sure we’re all starting in the same spot. This can be a trickier point than you might expect; you probably know most of these words, but the way they’re used in linguistics might be slightly different than you expect.

Here’s one to get you started: what is a language? We use the word in all sorts of ways–the language of love, body language, the language of flowers–but for this series, I’m going to define “language” like this:

Language: A rule-based system of communication capable of conveying a wide range of information and ideas.

The most important thing to note here is that languages are rule-based; that is, even if you know all the words in a language, you can’t just string them together randomly and be speaking that language. For example, the sentence “Store at me yesterday toward go,” is most definitely not a correct English sentence, even though every word in it is valid on its own. Instead, you’d of course say “I went to the store yesterday,” because you know the rules for putting together an English sentence.

In linguistic terms, we call these rules grammar. ((Yes, I know I’m blurring the line a bit between grammar and syntax, but for our purposes we’re going to keep it simple.)) Now, this is another tricky word, because you probably think grammar is something you’re taught in school, what with diagrams and objects and parts of speech and oh look I’ve fallen asleep. In linguistics, grammar is the rules you know without knowing you know them.

Huh?

Well, let me give you an example. In English, words can be either singular or plural, as you know. Setting aside words borrowed from other languages, we make words plural by adding one of three sounds to the end of the word. This can be a little confusing, since we represent these three sounds all with the same letter: “S.” But when you think about it, there’s three actual sounds: there’s the “hard”¹⁰ S at the end of “hats,” which we’ll write as /s/; there’s the “soft”¹¹ Z-like sound at the end of “mugs,” which we’ll designate /z/; and there’s the extra syllable version at the end of the word “peaches,” which we’ll call /ez/.

So, three sounds for making things plural: /s/, /z/, and /ez/. And you as a native (or fluent) speaker of English always know which one to use. I can give you a word you’ve never heard before, and I bet you can correctly tell me which sound to use to make it plural. So for example, which one would you put on the end of these words:

• Chrob¹²
• Frink¹³
• Mudge¹⁴

You might not be able to explain how you know which one is correct (beyond just “it sounds right”), but you’ll get it right every time. And more importantly, every other English speaker will do the same. What that means is that there’s a rule there for choosing which sound is correct. You might not be able to articulate that rule,¹⁵ but you know it and you use it. And that’s what a linguist means by grammar, those rules that you as a native speaker of a language know that just “sound right.”

One other term that we need to define is this one:

Dialect: A specific variety of a language that may have its own variations on vocabulary, grammar, and/or pronunciation.

Or, in other words, a dialect is a flavor of a language. It’s a specific way of speaking a language that may be unique to an area or group of people. It’s not just accent, though pronunciation is a part of it. For example, we know that Standard British English and Standard American English sound very different, but someone who asks for a biscuit is going to get something very different in New Orleans than in London, no matter how they pronounce it.

It’s also very important to note that the word “dialect” isn’t a pejorative term. That is, to a linguist, a dialect isn’t worse than a language; it’s not a “bad” version of a language, or one that’s “fallen away” from the standard. (In some ways, this may be especially true of English, as we’ll see next time.) Linguistically, no dialect is inferior to any other dialect, and any dialect is just as capable of conveying ideas and communication as any other. In fact, it has been famously opined that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

Now, this leads to another question: how do you draw the line between a dialect of a language and a separate language altogether? The general criterion is inter-intelligibility; that is, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another dialect. On paper, this seems pretty clear, but in reality the lines can get fuzzy. Scots, for example, is right on the line between a separate language and a dialect of English. Speakers of other varieties of English can understand some of it… sometimes… but maybe only just.

In the next article we’ll start looking at the very early origins on English, including where some of these dialects got there start. Come back next time for History of English: When Angles Met Saxons.

1. I’d embed it here, but it’s since been taken down. [↩]
2. It’s a well-known scientific principle that everything is better with cartoons. [↩]
3. Hint: I just did. [↩]
4. Hint: See what I did there? [↩]
5. Hint: Pronunciations change, but spellings don’t. Additional hint: silly English kuh-nigghts. [↩]
6. Hint: This has already happened–at least twice, and possibly three or four times. [↩]
7. Hint: This is akin to saying “Chocolate chip is the original cookie and all other cookies are corrupted versions of it.” [↩]
8. Hint: The person who wrote _Beowulf_ probably said the same thing. [↩]
9. Hint: You ain’t seen nothing yet. [↩]
10. Technically, unvoiced. [↩]
11. Voiced [↩]
12. /z/ [↩]
13. /s/ [↩]
14. /ez// [↩]
15. If you’re curious, it’s roughly: /s/ after an unvoiced consonant, /z/ after a voiced consonant or a vowel, and /ez/ after a sibilant. [↩]

CC BY-NC-SA image from Brandon Koger via Flickr

Anyone who is familiar with the goings-on here at the Lair knows that I tend to work with Minister Lynn on his Crackpot Schemes and Unfortunate Synergies. And by “work with”, I mean “clean up the worst of the mess after the fact, and hopefully limit the loss of life and equipment”. To wit, we recently had the following conversation:

Minister Lynn: “It strikes me that our audio podcast is better than most things that air on the radio. It’s funny. Educational. Informative.”

Bad Doctor: “Agreed. We do some seriously good work there, and I know it improves the lives of anyone who listens to it. I mean, just look at the minions! We pipe the podcast feed into their private chambers on a continuous loop, and it clearly enriches their existence. Each new episode increases their work efficiency by over 79% compared to control subjects who are forced to listen only to a constant track of ‘A Man and His Unicorn’.”

ML: “This is something that needs to be better recognized by the world at large. If only there was a way to pipe audio from The Lair out to the global populus…”

Lynn sucks thoughtfully on the tail of the reptosquirrel he has tucked under his arm.

BD: “Did… you just lick that reptosquirrel?”

Lynn stares into the distance for a moment, glassy-eyed.

ML: “Yes. Yes, I did. It helps center me.”

BD: “That explains quite a bit. And not just why the reptosquirrels in The Menagerie have been avoiding all human contact of late.”

Lynn gives the tail a final slurp.

ML: “What? I mean, right, so I have already have been putting hundreds of hours into a virus that will let us infect our podcast episodes on to every portable MP3 player in existence. It works by piggybacking on both Windows Updates and Google Ads. I’m still fighting with a few firewall issues, however…”

BD: “Or, we could just stick with iTunes, like we have been for years-”

ML: “…so I’ve decided to take another, more ambitious track. Now, I know you enjoy doing medical outreach on Doctoring, both Good and Bad.”

Doctor nods, sagely.

ML: “I’ve repurposed some of our orbital satellites that make up the communications and defense grid, and will use them to transmit audio of your pontifications to all the peoples of the world into their most private of settings, where they least expect it – into their homes, cars, and even their personal computers! It will be a grand task, and require much labor and upkeep, but in the end it will spread your sonic emanations far and wide! It will be glorious!”

BD: “Or, I could just infiltrate an established radio station as a regular guest.”

ML: “Oh, come now, doc. That’s just crazy.”

Lynn takes a slow, long lick on the reptosquirrel.

BD: “Stop that.”

ML: “I really should. It’s hypnoslime is about depleted anyway. Can you get me another from The Menagerie?”

BD: “How about this – you hand me that poor traumatized reptosquirrel, and I’ll give you this bottle of Purell.”

ML: “Oh, that’s even better!”

Lynn squirts several shots of Purell into his greedy mouth.

BD: “NO! THAT’S NOT what I… meant.. Actually, go town with that. It might be for the best.”

And so it came to pass¹ that yours truly, The Bad Doctor, is now the new monthly health guest on the Midday with Dan Rodricks show on 88.1 WYPR radio in Baltimore. My first stint will be today at 1pm EST, where I will be chatting with Dan about the Human Papilloma Virus and the vaccine that prevents the strains of it that are responsible for cervical (and other) cancer. There has been plenty of manufactured controversy in the media about the HPV vaccine, especially with the recent recommendation that it be given to young men as well as young women, so I expect there to be a lively discussion.

You can listen to the audio stream online at the appointed time here, or download the show after the fact here. Additionally, you can follow Dan on Twitter @DanRodricks, WYPR @WYPR881FM, and the Midday show @MiddayWYPR.

To quote a former Lair military advisor, I love it when a plan comes together.

1. Clearly, this is an accurate representation of events. [↩]

You know that moment when you walk in on people talking and hear something like, “… and that’s when he looked up and saw a giant monkey Abraham Lincoln,” and you think that there’s no possible logical path that could explain how the conversation got there? What about when you join a conversation halfway through, and raise a point only to be told that Isaac over there already said that an hour ago? What about when you praise something really clever that a friend said, only to have people point out later that he was just repeating something he got from someone else?

That’s why (and how) you should read the classics of your chosen genre if you’re a writer.

Wait, I lost you? Okay, let me back up a bit. Over at the excellent¹ I Should Be Writing blog, Mur Lafferty recently admitted that she has trouble reading some of the classic works of science fiction:

“You know the stuff that was groundbreaking with its expanse of ideas that hadn’t even been considered yet? But it was also the stuff that was very likely sexist, had cardboard characters, was completely lacking women or POC, used what we consider now to be hack tools (eg “looking in a mirror to describe the protag”), and may have protags that are total jerks.”

…

My problem is: how can I appreciate the classics when I run into such painful roadblocks like this? It’s hard to read things I’m not enjoying, even for academic purposes.

I’m fairly certain that everyone who’s ever taken a high school or college literature course can empathize with that last part. But even setting that aside, Mur raises some very valid points. Reading some of these works can be annoying, difficult, or downright frustrating, what with their whitewashed sexism, alcohol abuse, and rampant cliches. And that’s not even getting into the SF-specific problems of talking head syndrome, “As-You-Know-Bob”ing, and use of scientific and other theories that are laughably outdated. So why bother? What’s worth taking out of these, except that people used to think this passed for good?

When I was in college, I had an English professor who was fond of saying that literature is a conversation stretched out over centuries. One person writes a novel, or an essay, or a poem. Someone else reads it and thinks, “This guy is dumb! I’m going to write my own version that’s better.” Or else he or she thinks, “You know, that’s an interesting idea, but what if I go this way with it instead?” Or maybe, ”Hey, that’s great! I wonder if I can do something similar…” So that person writes his or her own creative work in response. Then a third person jumps in and says, “Well yes, but what about…” And on and on we go.

Homer famously wrote the epic poem The Illiad, the tale of Achilles and his embodiment of the ancient Hellenic ideas of individual heroism. Centuries later, Vergil wrote his own Trojan War tale The Aeneid, with its hero Aeneas reacting against the personal glory of Achilles and embodying the Roman virtues of loyalty to gods, state, and family. Ovid was deeply envious of Vergil, so he decided to write his own epic. He recast and rewove the myths and stories handed down to him into one epic tale of change, The Metamorphoses. More centuries passed,  and Shakespeare took the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s work, reset it in his own time, and expanded it into Romeo and Juliet. Still further centuries later, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and and Stephen Sondheim decided to update Romeo and Juliet for their time, added music, and we got West Side Story. And that’s just one path in this long conversation, with tons of other offshoots!

SF is full of similar conversations. Isaac Asimov famously coined his Three Laws of Robotics, then proceeded to write lots of stories exploring them. Rudy Rucker read those stories and though that it was completely ludicrous that any self-aware entity would allow itself to be limited like that, so he wrote Software and its sequels to counter Asimov’s ideas. Works like Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime and Gibson’s Neuromancer even launched entire sub-genres.

Well that’s great, of course, but how does that help you enjoy the classics if you just plain don’t like them? Well, a couple ways, I think. Maybe you start from something you do like and trace the conversation backwards. Pick an author or a novel that you really enjoy, and see if you can find who influenced them. Maybe they were writing in reaction to a specific other work. Maybe you really like that author’s style, and you look at the styles that he or she admired. And then you go back a step, and another, and another… You might not enjoy every step along the way, but you might find some things that surprise you.²

It’s also in the mindset. Maybe you can’t enjoy that classic (whatever that means), influential work on its own. That’s fine! No one’s saying you have to.³ But instead of trying to make yourself like something you never will, see if you can try to figure out why other people do like it so much. Why did it influence so many other people? What made it so popular (or infamous) when it came out?

Think of it as a sort of literary forensics. You dig through the distractions to find the little nugget of goodness⁴ that made the work so influential. Maybe you find it and say, “Well, okay, that’s great, but I think Later Author X did that bit better.” Or just maybe you think, “Hmm, so that’s why people like this. I wonder if I can do that myself, but without all the stuff that bothers me.”

Because the great conversation of literature is still going. Find a part of it you like (or really don’t like!) and join in. Heck, you might even end up making monkey Abraham Lincoln make sense.

1. If I truly took the time to give that blog and podcast the praise it deserves, I would probably be making an end-run at finishing a NaNoWriMo word count. [↩]
2. As a personal example, I never would have discovered Lord Dunsany if I weren’t looking for people who influenced H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien, but now Dunsany is one of my favorite fantasists. [↩]
3. Well, okay, there are probably a lot of angry people on the Internet saying you do, but are you going to let them run your life? ARE YOU?? [↩]
4. “Nugget of Goodness” is the name of my John Scalzi cover band. [↩]

Canyon (Grand)

I’m sure that many of you, like me, grew up hearing rumors that in the magical¹ land of Arizona there is a canyon. A canyon which, many say, is considered “grand.” Never being one to rely on rumors and hearsay, I decided to investigate this so-called Grand Canyon for myself.

Turns out that these rumors are pretty accurate, yet greatly understated. During my visit to the Grand Canyon, I found a sight that was not only awesome and beautiful, but humbling, empowering, and thought-provoking as well.

“Awesome” is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but the Grand Canyon is a place to which that epithet literally applies. At 227 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and over a mile deep, it’s hard to come across it without feeling a sense of awe and, well, smallness. It’s no wonder that so many people have felt that it must be the handiwork of a higher power, since it’s drawn across the earth on a scale that makes the human mind reel at first glance. Standing beside it, I found myself struggling to take it all in. I caught myself breaking the view down into smaller, more manageable pieces: here was a single tall rock spire to admire, there a cliff wall undulating like a breeze-blown curtain frozen in a moment. And  yet, the whole was much greater than the sum of its parts, and I kept having to force my perceptions to widen again, to even attempt to appreciate the whole vista spread out in front of me.

Canyon, with a side of me

But awe is a funny thing, in a way; like most good things, it seems you can have too much of it. By the end of the day, I found the panoramas stretching as far as I could see to be almost… routine. I asked some of the other people around, and they reported similar feelings. This got me to thinking (as things often do); how is it that, in the course of a single day, the mind can reduce one of the most amazing sights on the planet to something dull and ordinary. Is it some sort of awesomeness overload? Maybe we just aren’t mentally equipped to deal with grandeur of this magnitude, or at best to only process it in small chunks until we feel we understand the whole.

And, my thoughts continued, if something this awe-inspiring can be reduced to the mundane, what other things do we see and do every day and not realize how amazing they are? Earlier in the week, for example, I hopped in a giant metal tube and was whisked away in a matter of hours on a cross-country journey that, two centuries ago, took months and involved risking your life. And I got a free delicious beverage, too! I can pull an object only slightly larger than a deck of cards out of my pocket and talk to people anywhere in the world, in real time. And my voice was being transmitted there by satellites IN SPACE! Heck, I can even use the same device to see them face-to-face. Holy crap is that cool!

Later that night, the stars came out.² Sure, most people already feel pretty amazed by the sight of a bright sky full of stars. Some people so much so that they decided they had to figure out how to get up there with them, even if it meant strapping themselves to giant towers of fire and hanging on for dear life.³ But again, I decided to see if I could tweak my perceptions just a little bit. I started considering distance and time. Sure, we all know that the stars are really, really far away and that the light takes a long time to get to us. But exactly how long? What’s the scale of reference? I started doing some mental calculations and realized when the very photons that were hitting my eyes were first emitted, there were dinosaurs walking on the earth. Dinosaurs. BOOM! Mind. Blown.

So the Grand Canyon was an awesome experience for me, but not just in itself. It made me realize that sometimes the most incredible things in the world are all around you, if you only change how you look at them just slightly.

So what awesome things have you seen again today?

1. For very small values of “magical” [↩]
2. If you’ve never seen a starry night in the dessert, you really need to add an item to your bucket list. [↩]
3. And probably having more fun than any other time in their life doing it! [↩]

Image by thejedi via Flickr

Now that you have your pumpkins carved unlike any other on the block, and you have a selection of pumpkin ales close at hand, it’s time to have friends, minions, and overlords over for that supremely geeky pastime: Halloween Gaming!

For many years, our gaming group hosted a game on Halloween. It was either part of the currently running campaign, or more likely, a one shot adventure where the theme was horror, suspense, and attempted terror. Anything could happen, and often did. Unfortunately, everyone knew it was Halloween, and we were long time gamers, inspiring fear in the players was nearly impossible. For many years we searched for the perfect way to inject tension and suspense into the game, all for naught. That is until one of the folks at The Game Master Show¹ found Dread and it was perfect.

Dread was designed by the people at The Impossible Dream, one of whom is Epidiah Ravichol, the creator of Time & Temp², another supremely fun game.³ It’s mechanics are simple, and yet inject tension into games like none other I have played. It doesn’t use dice, rock, paper, or scissors⁴, cards, or any of the other normally used conflict resolution methods out there. It uses… Jenga.

Yep, you heard me right, Jenga, that tower of wooden terror that most of you have in your house and if not it’s fairly cheap to pick up at your local store. Now, most of you don’t see how Jenga could evoke tension and, dare I say it, dread into your and your fellow players. Well, let me tell you then. It’s really quite simple. When you pull a block out, if the tower falls, you die.

The mechanic is genius in it’s simplicity, but the devil is in the details. Dread itself guides you through character creation by giving you a list of questions for who your character is. The GM uses these questions to craft the game around the characters, making the characters face their fears and troubles as the game progresses. When something important in the game comes up, like running from a zombie horde, being in a firefight, or even just changing a lightbulb on a ladder⁵, the GM can call for a pull from the Jenga stack. If you decide to do the pull, and the stack falls… well, you know what happens.⁶

Dread itself goes into the details of what makes a good or bad conflict to force a pull, and the way players can elect to pull or decide against it, so I won’t go into that here. I can say that the game is great, and also lends itself to all sorts of hacks. For instance: need to put time pressure on the PCs? Have them pull from the Jenga stack. They can do anything they like in the game, as long as they like, but when the stack falls time is out. If they weren’t ready by then, bad things *will* happen.

Having Dread as your Halloween game is a great way to inject some suspense and fear into your players. You can run it as a one shot, or hack it and add it to your normal game. Overall, I recommend giving Dread a try. For those of you with clumsy players or players with shaky fingers, you should practice keeping a straight face, your evil grin is showing.

1. This really isn’t a blatant plug for http://thegamemastershow.com, since the show has podfaded, really! [↩]
2. He also goes by Epi, which is also a cool name. [↩]
3. Remind me to tell you about the time when Wil Wheaton attempted to change history by attempting to make Wesley Crusher liked as a character. [↩]
4. or even lizard or Spock [↩]
5. ala Final Destination [↩]
6. If you don’t know what happens when a zombie horde catches you, then you aren’t ready for the zombie apocalypse. [↩]

There are five things I look forward to in October. Pumpkin coffee drinks, outdoor campfires with friends, brisk hikes through the autumn woods, mugging small children for their candy, and pumpkin beers.  Each has its appeal, but since this year is the year I started homebrewing my own beer, it is only right that I take some time out to review the pumpkin beers I’ve had this year¹. In order of worst to best:

Punkin Ale

• Brewery: Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
• ABV: 7%

I label this one the worst because my expectations were so very high. I usually like Dogfish Head beers: I love their experimental approach to brewing and the passion with which they further the craft. Not every experiment is a successful one, and this one did not resonate with me. I think it’s only fair to note that when I picture a pumpkin-flavored product, I’m not thinking of the flavor of the raw pumpkin; I’m tasting the nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice and cloves, the brown sugar and molasses as well. Punkin Ale has none of this; it’s a straight up ale with pumpkin, no embellishments. Some find this to be a strength, but for folks like me who are looking for the best possible mix of pumpkin pie and beer, this is one to avoid. This makes me sad.

America’s Original Pumpkin Ale

• Brewery: Buffalo Bill’s Brewery
• ABV: 5.5%

To Buffalo Bill: Your sauce, sir, is weak. Hints of flavor come through, but not nearly strong enough. This is like drinking weak beer with a pumpkin-flavored crayon dunked in it. The ale itself leave much to be desired, and there is a strange not-beer not-pumpkin aftertaste that made me shiver. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Ichabod Ale

• Brewery: New Holland Brewing Company
• ABV: 5.5%

This is where things start getting good. The brew has an excellent body and smooth aftertaste. The pumpkin and spice flavor is hinted at in the bouquet on the pour and is especially strong on the finish, but there is a no-man’s land in-between that needs bolstering.  If you are introducing a Bud drinker to pumpkin beers, this is a good one to start with, as it is not overpowering. For those of us who want stronger flavor, you’ll be happier with one of the next brews.

Post Road Pumpkin Ale

• Brewery: Brooklyn Brewery
• ABV: 5%

Excellent beer.  This is the beer that started me down the road of trying as many pumpkin beers as I could find this year, and when you taste it, you’ll see why. Heavy nutmeg and allspice notes on the pour give way to a surprising light-bodied beer that is full of flavor. The pumpkin and malt flavors are clear and clean, and the finish is pure warmth and spice. Highly recommended.

 Harvest Pumpkin Ale

• Brewery: Boston Beer Company
• ABV: 5.7%

I’d rate this in the  class with the Post Road Ale: a solid beer with excellent spiciness to the flavor. The difference between this and the Post Road is that this beer is has a heavier body and a darker pour; there are elements of molasses in the flavor with the nutmeg and the clove. It is also best served chilled, and is amazing when used to chase a Buttery Nipple shot.

Pumpkin Beer

• Brewery: O’Fallon Brewery
• ABV: 5.5%

This was a surprise. I’ve never had anything else by O’Fallon, but if the rest of their catalog is as strong as this one, then I’ll be looking for more. Excellent color and pour, sweet and malty with the right balance of pumpkin and spices. There is also a slight citrus finish with was surprising but pleasing nonetheless.

And the clear winner was…

Spooky Tooth Imperial Pumpkin Ale

• Brewery: Fat Heads Brewery & Saloon
• ABV: 9%

Amazing. Just amazing. This is a Big Damn Beer with intense flavors: strong spices, sweet pumpkin maltitness throughout with a stunning hoppy finish. I was completely blown away. The perfect pumpkin beer, falvorful from the onset and you’re nice and toasty (both from the flavor and the ABV) by bottom of the pint glass.  Highly recommended.

Have you had any good pumpkin beers this season?  What did you think?

1. You can follow my other beer adventures on Untappd: http://untappd.com/user/ctmiller [↩]

Image via Wikipedia

Back, many years ago, I used to practically live at a friend’s house during college. I was already a geek, I thought I was quite steeped in the geek actually. I was a gamer, Doctor Who fan, chess player, avid sci-fi and fantasy reader, and computer programmer.

Boy was I wrong.

While all of those qualifications made me a geek, it was no where near the level than my friend Dan Lawrence was. His house was the geek mecca of Purdue University. He ran the Adventure Quest gaming club, which ran Adventure Quest (AQ) – a game of his own creation.¹ After gaming on Saturday night, people would trek across town to his house, an old Victorian place that was built shortly after the university.

There, people would socialize, play computer games in his computer room, play music in his studio, play board games like the original and still best version of Cosmic Encounter, or watch TV. He had a wall of CDs, back when CDs were the new hotness, and his music taste both mirrored and informed my own.²

Star Trek the Next Generation had started, and we watched the episodes every week on his projection tv. After, inevitably there would be a discussion of the episode while a new show or movie was put into the VCR.

One of those shows was Red Dwarf. Created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the show has always been quintessential British comedy / sci-fi to me. Special effects that just scrape by, great writing, and great characters, Red Dwarf is a show I go back to time and time again.

The show centers around Lister, a low level maintenance worker on the mining ship Red Dwarf; his roomate Arnold Rimmer, a hologram and a total smeg-head; Cat, a lifeform who evolved from Lister’s cat³; Holly, the ship’s AI; and later on Kryton, an android.

Watching the show always brings me back, go watch it and let it bring you back too.⁴

This article might seem short, and you would be right. That’s because I am watching Red Dwarf, and you should be too.

1. It still runs to this day, probably in Stuart Center for anyone interested in joining. [↩]
2. ELO and Alice Cooper being the top two influential artists on the list. [↩]
3. Think James Brown, with fangs [↩]
4. Minor warning – the language and situations aren’t always kid friendly. [↩]

Image via Wikipedia

Welcome back minions. Today we are embarking on something new, something glorious!

Stop looking at each other like that. No, it’s not another crackpot scheme. No, it’s not another unfortunate synergy! *zap*

There, now you’re all paying attention again…. someone make sure to sweep that up when we’re finished here and contact minion resources to get a replacement minion.

Where were we? Ah yes, the Plan. No, not plan, Plan, capital P. Yes.

For a while now I have been at work on something. A little here, and a little there. I put it in a drawer for a while and on going back to look at it, it’s amazingly near complete and yet at the same time depressingly far from completion.

What is this thing you ask? Why it’s a role playing game! Some of you long running minions will recognize the title: Vegas After Midnight.

Why do I bring this to you now? Glad you asked!

I plan on chronicling the journey, much like Overlord Miller has with his weight loss, of bringing this work from concept to publication. I’ll get into the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts, the trials and tribulations, of the work and process of everything that goes into the making of Vegas After Midnight ( VAM ). Hopefully, you will be up to giving your mandatory level of interest and enthusiasm, which I will tell you for this project is quite high.

We have to have a starting point, so let me give you that. First though, a little back story.

Several years ago, there was a podcast The House of the Harping Monkey, the proprietor of which was one Mick Bradley. Our own Overlord Miller was a host as well, though he went by “Christopher” or “Chris” back then. Mick is the braintrust behind Vegas After Midnight, the progenitor. On The House of the Harping Monkey, he released a series of short audio clips from one Micky Dylan, a sort of narrator, or bard if you will, of the setting. I was hooked already, but then he said he would be starting up a play by post game on that podcast’s message boards. The hook was set.

When he called for characters, I wrote up a short story of my character hopeful, Vic Dylan. Yes, I had the hubris to try to be Micky’s brother in the setting. Somehow, either my writing, the story, or just the sheer pluck of the idea that Vic was Micky’s brother got me into the game. Unfortunately, as many internet games go, it died before it was truly started.

Fortunately though, the bug in Mick’s brain over VAM wouldn’t let him go. He remembered my story, and we had become friends in the interim, he asked if I would like to partner with him on writing the setting for actual publication. Of course, I said yes.

That was the start of a busy year of email, IM, skype chats, and several cross state trips. In the space of which we hacked on the FATE system, put together the back story behind the setting of Vegas After Midnight, and came up with characters and the groups they belonged to. It was an amazing time.

What happened then? Life. Both of us were drawn into things going on outside of gaming and podcasting. I changed jobs, and was still raising two little ones. Mick had clients to appease and two of his own to attend to.

Fast forward about two years, to Gen Con 2011. There Mick and I got a chance to get together again, and his mere mention of VAM lit the fire in me again, and so, here we are.

I have been getting my files and things together, pulling out my copies of Spirit of the Century, and now Bulldogs, and getting to work on what I like to call my Year of FATE. Things are tougher now for me, since I have other things pulling at me in the rest of my life, but this *will* get done. To help me get there, I need you.

What do I need you for? I need to find artists. I need to find an editor. I need to find writers. Mostly however, I need you to keep me honest and moving. Mostly moving.

So at least once a month, I will be posting my status on the project. I may post more, but only if there is something of substance to post. If I don’t post for a month about VAM, I expect you to call me on it. Do you hear? Don’t make me zap another one of you. Really, don’t make me, the ash is setting off my allergies.

*achoo!*

Greetings all villains, super villains, overminds, lords, masters, middle managers, union bosses, department heads, and anyone that has designs on taking over the world that I might have left out.

It’s been far too long since we reached out to you. In fact, I believe that this is the first time we have reached out to you. Our bad. We’ll be correcting this now.

We want to know what you are doing. We can possibly help you in your endeavors even. There are many cast off… I mean, finalized projects that don’t quite fit into our schemes. We have a very large R&D department. Combine that with the department of Crackpot Schemes and Unfortunate Synergies, and we have a large surplus of schemes, devices, monsters, traps, and all sorts of plagues that just don’t fit our mission.

For instance, we have a giant spider that is great at statistics. Perfect for your plots where you want someone pulling the strings behind the scenes. The only special requirement is a steady supply of gamers that it requires to game with. It does have the drawback of using the same gamers as snacks from time to time when it gets peckish, so be aware of that.

Does this mean that we are getting into the business of selling off our inventions? By no means. We are still quite intent on taking over the planet, for starters. We just don’t have the room at the moment to keep everything we develop, so we wanted to offer these things to people who could use them.

So be sure to comment below with your plans, and we’ll see if we have anything you could use.

We also have another reason for reaching out, and this is important. There are a lot of us out there, and there is nothing more frustrating than attempting to take over something, only to have someone else come in with the same intent. The arguments that ensue invariably cause the authorties or heroes to come in and thwart us. This has to stop. I mean really, one of our latest conquests was nearly complete and someone, you know who you are, went and blew it up. Annoying! So let’s stop that by having better communication. Tell us your plans, and we’ll make sure to route them to the appropriate villain network.

Lastly, potlucks.

Everyone has the same problem, you get to working, thinking, planning, and scheming. Concetrating so heavily that you just forget to eat. So here at the Lair we’ve come up with the concept of getting together, networking, and making sure that at least once a month we all get a good meal. It’ll be set up in our remote Lair party room, all clean and white and sterile so that even those of you with germ phobias can attend.

So tell us, what are you up to?

(Be sure to let us know what you are bringing to the potluck.)