Another Review

I guess with all the blogs and stuff there are in the world, I should expect a fair number of non-professional reviews. It's nice, though.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/01/rpg-review-discworld-2nd-edition-gurps.html

The Continuing Saga of the Discworld RPG

Aaaand another review...

• http://oneyardhex.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/discworld-rpg-review.html

The book is definitely in UK shops now. There've been reports of limited supply in some outlets - apparently the distributors underestimated demand - but restocks appear to be coming in. So if your shop claims that they can't get hold of the thing, tell them to press their distributor, hard.

(Amazon UK still don't seem to have it, though.)

More Regarding That Book

A second review of the Discworld RPG is now up at http://www.letthedicefall.com/2017/01/the-discworld-roleplaying-game-review.html.

Also, the book will be hitting retail in the UK this week. British gamers who lack a friendly local game store may wish to mail order; I thoroughly recommend Leisure Games for this. See https://leisuregames.com/collections/new-releases-week-commencing-9-january/products/gurps-discworld.

Discworld Reviewed

The first (gratifyingly positive) review that I've seen of the Discworld Roleplaying Game has now appeared on the Web, at http://justroll3d6.com/discworld-roleplaying-game-review/.

It's Alive! It's Alive!

It's taken a while, but yes, today I held in my bare hands, irrefutable physical evidence that the second edition of the Discworld Roleplaying Game actually exists in material form!

The official street date for publication was this Wednesday just gone, the 21st, and I understand that people in the USA have indeed actually acquired copies from shops. The book doesn't appear to have made it to retail here in the UK just yet, but I guess that we can hope for next week.

Expand, Contract (49)

Yes, it's been a while since I've had anything to announce here. Various projects have, shall we say politely, been hanging fire. But now, after a year or two in the writing, some time in the revision (in which time, Terry added a whole new and significant sapient race to the setting), the horribly sad death of the setting's actual creator, and a heck of a period, umm, heaven knows, maybe with the book buried in peat maturing while SJGames cranked out a few dozen more Munchkin variants, I can actually, officially, mention the forthcoming onset of the new edition of the Discworld Roleplaying Game.

It's scheduled for November, in fact. I very much hope that remains true, because it'd be nice to do some kind of quasi-official launch at Dragonmeet.

(I'm honestly trying not to be cynical about launch dates these days, y'know, but it's difficult.)

Anyway, we definitely have an official cover design now an' all. I must come up with at least one more convention demo scenario...

Gone Postal

Going Postal, the third of Sky's adaptations of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (recently released on DVD), is the first that really seems to work quite right. The first two (Hogfather and The Colour of Magic) had their virtues, but the problem with genre fantasy on screen is that it's hard to avoid it looking silly, in a bad-'80s-Conan-clone sort of way - all those robes and swords and medieval towns are hard to make convincing, and "It's meant to be a joke!" doesn't save things the way it does on the page. With a recent Discworld novel like this one, however, the style of the setting has moved forward through history very significantly, and the production design could go for something much more Victorian than cod-medieval - which looks fine, even cool, without being unduly distracting. This in turn means that, for example, the cast could be as ludicrously good as in the earlier movies, while looking like a bunch of good actors who've been cast for their suitability for the roles, rather than a bunch of famous thesps doing panto. They were clearly able to get their heads around their lines and deliver them with some conviction, rather than seeming to wonder what they were doing here.

The two leads - Richard Coyle as Moist von Lipwig and Claire Foy as Adora Belle Dearheart - weren't the most famous of these people, of course (that would probably be Charles Dance, completely walking it with casual ease as the Patrician), but both managed very well indeed. Special mention, though, has to go to the perfectly chosen Tamsin Greig as Sacharissa Cripslock - a piece of casting that makes me dream of a prequel production of The Truth, just to see Greig playing  Sacharissa as a developing character rather than a cameo/plot device.


Of course, compressing a full novel into three hours of film requires a certain amount of brutal surgery, which was mostly executed quite well here, leaving a film that worked on its own terms - although the psychic power of the undelivered letters ended up seeming less subtle, and the big emotional thrust of the book - Moist's redemption and discovery of his own conscience - certainly became a much cruder process, being largely forced on him by visions inflicted by the letters (rather nicely depicted in the form of black-and-white silent movies, but still). Likewise, Adora Belle seemed slightly softened - she was still a dangerous character, but her hardness was depicted entirely as a reaction to family tragedy; likewise, perhaps inevitably these days, her cigarette addiction was shown as coming from the same source and as something she really needs to discard, rather than being an integral feature of her character which Moist's emerging masochistic side could find attractive. Less crucially, but rather sadly perhaps, there was no room for Anghammarad the Golem, while Moist's visit to Unseen University was gone, its expository role being filled by a visit from Archchancellor Ridcully - giving us the joy of Timothy West in that particular role, but should the Archchancellor show up in the Post Office at the beck and call of a golem?

But that's quibbling - and a really successful screen adaptation of a Discworld novel is too good a thing to deserve excessive quibbles. If Sky are going to continue doing these adaptations once a year, I hope that this one sets a pattern.

Theatre (sort of): Nation

National Theatre, London, transmitted to the Arts Cinema, Cambridge, 30/1/2010

The trick of taking operas and plays from major venues and transmitting them live to substantial cinemas via high-definition channels and appropriately competent display technology is a nice one, and this is the latest instance I've caught at the Arts in Cambridge; the National's Christmas show, an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's younger-readers alternate-world story by Mark Ravenhill. It seemed to be using more cameras and camera angles than previous transmissions of this type that I've seen, sometimes showing the projecting-stage performance from close up or even, bizarrely, from above. However, it was still a stage performance, using stage effects (puppets, cast members moving in and out of the spotlight, a model ship on yards of rippling fabric to represent the sea), rather than a movie with fancy CGI. For the first ten minutes or so, I found this a bit disconcerting, even silly, but the human brain can adjust to things; it came to work.

This was, as it proved, a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, even preserving Pratchett's slightly cumbersome outer framework - although the first scene of chapter 1 was moved to late in the play (which I thought was a small mistake). A stage production couldn't convey the apocalyptic sense of the early scenes, of course, and the wildly (excessively?) dramatic flight from the great cave was necessarily lost; come to that, at a few times, the mime depiction of grand actions looked a bit silly. But - so far as I could recall, not having read the book for a year or so - pretty much everything seemed to be in there. The most substantial change was to the nature of Cox, the major villain of the piece, who was transformed from one of Pratchett's quasi-motivelessly malign psychopaths to someone with a personal connection to Daphne, the heroine; I guess that this gave the plot a bit more sharpness and focus, but it did have something of the loathsome Hollywood/kung fu movie habit of making every conflict personal.

Anyhow - on its own terms, the play worked pretty well, playing out Pratchett's intricate dance of ideals and ideologies, complete with lapses into mysticism despite the general humanist-materialist tenor of the argument. I get the impression that people who didn't know the book have been a bit confused by this thing, and to be honest, the book isn't one of Pratchett's best; both book and play may be a bit too schematic, really. It was well cast, though, I thought; Gary Carr and Emily Taaffe made attractive young leads, while Jason Thorpe had a gift of a role as Milton the parrot (no, really). The visual effects and puppet-work were great, too, helping to transport the audience into this strange tale. I wonder if the audience in London had a big advantage in being in the same room as all this stuff, or whether those of us watching the transmission, with all those multiple angles and close-in shots actually did better?

Whatever. An entertaining afternoon, and a good use of promising technology. Hey, if they just doubled the bandwidth, they could do this stuff in 3D...

Recent Reading: Unseen Academicals

by Terry Pratchett

I was significantly distracted from this book a couple of times during the reading of it, from which you may reasonably infer that it isn't apex Pratchett, in my opinion. I finished it, and sometimes I laughed, but this is an author who's set himself stratospheric standards in my eyes. It's a book about football on the Disc, which didn't help to begin with; I'm not a fan, but the real problem may be, I suspect, that nor is Pratchett, much. I really don't have much of a sense for the core imagery of this topic, but I remember enough from my childish phase of petty enthusiasm and the general experience of growing up in the UK to feel that Unseen Academicals just doesn't catch things quite right. Where Moving Pictures nailed Hollywood perfectly and hilariously, and Soul Music showed us that there is a mythology of rock and roll of which we were barely aware to exploit, this book has a bit of a tin ear.

For example, the story climaxes - naturally - with a football match, but this is cut short, going to a sudden death option for vaguely plausible but not overwhelming reasons. I can see why a writer would do this - drawing a full ninety minutes of back and forth could easily get very boring - but a real footie fan wouldn't have ducked the challenge. (Interestingly, another of our current brilliant genre-loving humorists, Aaron Williams, similarly truncated a soccer match in PS238 #38 - for, I suspect, very similar reasons.) Even within the match, the climactic moments are described in the voice of a journalist who hasn't invented sports writing yet, giving things a deadening distance; compare the breathtaking Tower of Art/giant blonde scene in Moving Pictures.

The point of the book, in terms of the great accumulating Discworld epic, is another step in the Disc in general and Ankh-Morpork in particular's accelerated evolution from medievalism to modernity, manipulated by an increasingly philosophical Patrician but triggered by a vague outburst of divine intervention. Football is the nominal theme here, and it turns out that Ankh-Morpork has a game of that name, but it's still a distinctly medieval street brawl; various protagonists find themselves obliged to transform it into a game of rules and green fields. There's a brilliant natural player to be encouraged, and his born-to-WAG true love to wander through glowing passively, but Pratchett's lack of deep engagement is shown by the number of other sub-plots. In the depths of the increasingly comic-Gormenghastian Unseen University, we find Trevor Likely, the natural player who avoids playing but who has the gift of the gab (and it's to the book's credit that it never actually uses the hugely appropriate pun that his name demands), but also more importantly, Mr Nutt, one of Pratchett's annoyingly omnicompetent plot-moving heroes, who turns out to have more or less literally wandered in from a completely different fantasy universe. Meanwhile, above stairs, the Archchancellor is suffering annoyance caused by the (initially absent) Dean, who has defected to another university. There is also some stuff with a brilliant cook and with the arts of dwarf fashion, into which Miss Born-to-WAG wanders...

And so it goes on. Trevor must deal with his nemesis, one of Pratchett's petty-nasty sociopaths but not a very clever one, two familiar members of the Watch get a half-page each, a couple of old friends from Uberwald wander past in person or passing description, and eventually the book shudders to a halt. There are interesting hints that this book is Pratchett's reflection on the 1980s and their aftermath, as football is transformed from a faintly violent working-class preoccupation to something more acceptable to the bourgeois wizards, and the mess left by a failed Evil Empire must be cleaned up - but my overwhelming sense at the end was of loose ends untied and plot threads forgotten.

Ah, forgotten... The elephant in the room here is Terry Pratchett's famous health issues. Are they affecting his writing, we have to wonder. Well, he can still create crackling dialogue, eye-grabbing metaphors, sympathetic and unsympathetic characters, and some good jokes. But the loose plotting and uncertain handling of theme may be symptoms of a memory that's not what it was. Or perhaps this book just represents an off year. We'll just have to wait and see.