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The Spacing Guild refuse to put satellites in orbit around Arrakis. They claim that the static of the storms makes them useless, but in reality they're being paid off by the Fremen using spice they're mining in the south. The Harkonnens and the Emperor suspect this but cannot prove it.

I think the film did a reasonable point of making out that the Fremen in the northern hemisphere are only part of the entire Fremen culture, and those who are actively fighting and engaging the Harkonnens are really only Stilgar's forces from Sietch Tabr and a few allies. So the numbers of Fremen involved in combat operations is minuscule compared to their true numbers. When the other northern Fremen and all the tribes of the south ally, their numbers completely take the Harkonnens and Emperor by surprise. By blowing the Shield Wall with atomics (the use of nuclear weapons in warfare is prohibited; their use against geographical features is permissible) they are able to attack from an unexpected vector. The storm also grounds Harkonnen airpower. Without that the Fremen are technologically much closer to their opponents.

The Fremen are not badass just from living in harsh environments, but from their personal mantra of discipline and warrior culture, not just on Arrakis but on every planet of the Zensunni Wanderings before that, stretching back well over ten thousand years. The reason the Fremen are so good is that there is no real technological disparity (versus Native American warriors, whose bravery and skill was often not in doubt, but were outclassed by the discipline, superior firepower and superior numbers of the invaders), with them also having firearms, las-weapons, aircraft (in small numbers) etc, as well as having Reverend Mothers with skills comparable to Bene Gesserit, contacts in the Spacing Guild and so on.

Admittedly one area the 1984 movie improves on is giving the Fremen the weirding modules to give them a technological edge on the Harkonnens to entail a speedy victory, whilst the novel has Jessica teaching many of the Fremen the weirding method of combat (hyperfast martial arts) which doesn't happen in this film for some reason.


Ciaphas Cain #8: The Last Ditch

Commissar Ciaphas Cain and the Valhallan 597th are deployed to Nusquam Fundumentibus to deal with an incursion of orks. The campaign promises to be standard, although still dangerous, until Cain learns of a far greater threat lurking on the planet, one which sees both the humans and orks as enemies.

The redoubtable Ciaphas Cain - the science fantasy by-product of an unholy union between Flashman and BlackAdder - returns in his eighth novel. Once again, Cain is deployed to a trouble spot which seems a bit iffy, but practical to deal with. Also once again, complications ensure which gives Cain an enormous headache and results in a highly enjoyable adventure for the reader.

The previous Cain novel, The Emperor's Finest, was solid but did not represent the series at its best, with too much of Cain and Jurgen running around in isolated corridors where the opportunities for Cain - and Mitchell - to show off their skills with entertaining dialogue and character observations were limited. Fortunately, The Last Ditch is a return to form. Whilst we once again get a lot of action sequences, we also get a lot more character development and even politics, as Cain has to balance the needs of the 597th in fighting the ork incursion with the civil administration of the planet, who are trying to hold things together in the face of collapse. Of course, Cain (and the aromatic Jurgen) ends up at the hot end of the fighting despite desperately trying to find reasons to stay behind the lines.

The timeline means we get to spend more time with the characters of the 597th, including the batty Sulla, whose insane hero worship of Cain (further enhanced by excerpts from her later-published, badly-overwritten memoirs) remains extremely amusing. However, by this time Cain has been fighting (successfully) alongside the 597th for so long that Colonel Kasteen and Major Broklaw just go along with anything he suggests, which means relatively little tension in that quarter.

Tension is restored by the difficult relationship between the 597th, Cain and the planetary governor, who for once is (relatively) immune to Cain's charms and tries to continue politicking even in the face of an overwhelming alien threat. This is promising, but Mitchell punts off this storyline for Kasteen and Broklaw to deal with off-page, meaning we only get edited highlights from the subplot whilst Cain is off elsewhere.

Another potential source of rich conflict is Cain encountering a younger, more gung-ho Commissar fresh out of the academy, all too eager to start executing Imperial troops the nanosecond they slack off. Cain's more pragmatic, cooperative approaching clashing with the raw orthodoxy of the Commissariat would again be an interesting storyline, but again it's cut short by Commissar Forres relatively quickly coming around to Cain's way of thinking and becoming a useful ally.

Still, if Mitchell dodges these potentially engaging storylines, what we have is fun enough. A relatively epic narrative featuring a raging war across an entire planet told in a commendably concise number of pages, with enough plots twists, reversals, action sequences and wry humour to satisfy fans of the series, The Last Ditch (****) is entertaining. The novel is available now as part of the Ciaphas Cain: Saviour of the Imperium omnibus, along with the preceding and succeeding novels and several short stories.


Final trailer.

The show launches on 22 February, so not long to see if they've nailed it.


Ciaphas Cain #7: The Emperor's Finest

Having narrowly escaped from an encounter with the feared necrons, Commissar Ciaphas Cain finds himself assigned as liaison to the Reclaimers Space Marine chapter, noted for their formidable weaponry, immense bravery and sometimes over-eager interest in technology. When rebel insurgents launch an uprising on Viridia against the local government, Cain fancies they are in for an easy campaign against an inferior foe. Of course, it's not long before genestealers abound, and Cain finds himself stuck with an overeager noble lady keen to ensnare him in political games, and a hellbound pursuit of a rogue hulk through deep space.

The misadventures of Ciaphas Cain are probably among the most purely entertaining in the Warhammer 40,000 canon. Whilst most books focus more on the "grim darkness" and "only war" bits of the setting, Sandy Mitchell's signature series instead tries to lighten things up, at least relatively. Commissar Cain believes himself to be blustering, cowardly and too eager to run at the first sign of trouble, but is constantly manoeuvred by fate into positions where he has no choice but to apparently-eagerly run to the front lines or into the most dangerous area possible, often surviving by the skin of his teeth and sometimes unexpectedly saving the day in such an outrageously public way. By this seventh novel in the series, things have gotten ludicrous enough that Cain is now getting full honour salutes from squads of Terminator Space Marines for his bravery (roughly akin to an angel saluting a particularly tenacious chimpanzee).

Of course, Cain's complaints about his cowardice and self-serving needs do seem to be contradicted by his actual proven ability to get tasks achieved and his impressive combat skills, and his constantly-present (via footnotes of varying degrees of bewilderment) editor-confessor, Inquisitor Amberly Vail, seems unsure about to what degree his "confession" is actual modesty, or even some psychological defence mechanism to rationalise a deeper-seated need to face death on a daily basis. This deep in the series it's a still a mystery (one I doubt will ever be solved), so it's probably best to move on and enjoy the ride.

The Emperor's Finest is, like most books in the series, fairly short but also packs a ton in. The book has three distinct sections, which less-disciplined authors might have tried to expand into a whole novel by themselves. The battle for Viridia is entertaining, with Cain acting as a liaison between the superhuman Space Marines and the ordinary human defenders, and getting into a Warhammer 40,000 meetcute (which means moderate flirting over the roaring exchange of bolter fire) with the governor's daughter, Mira. A slightly more interminable middle section follows as the Reclaimers try to track down the origin of the tyranid infestation, a space hulk cheerily named the Spawn of Damnation, whilst Cain tries to both win the respect of the Reclaimers and fend off Mira's attempts to lure him into political intrigue. The final section sees Cain, Jurgen (Cain's aide, think of the product of an unholy union of Baldrick and Gregor Clegane) and the Reclaimers let loose aboard the space hulk and finding things are far more complicated then they first imagined.

Mitchell delivers this with typical panache, with moments of humour and levity mixed in with above-competent action sequences and Vail's wry footnote interjections. However, the formula feels a tad off this time around. After a promising start, Mira never really develops into an interesting character and her storyline feels a bit rote. Cain's interactions with the Reclaimers and their crewmembers also hold a lot of promise but again are not fleshed out well: Cain's achievements in the book (from an outside POV) are highly impressive but I'm not sure he's done enough to earn the Reclaimers' overwhelming respect at the end. Cain is also at his best when in circumstances with lots of options for his natural self-serving tendencies to emerge and the reader to be left in doubt about his selfish/brave motivations. Here he spends a third of the book trapped on a space hulk with his back to the wall and no choice but to proceed to survive, which makes for a solidly tense adventure but doesn't service the character's best attributes.

Still, the book is short, to the point, has good action and some doses of light humour that the setting rather badly needs at time, so it's hard to complain too much. The Emperor's Finest (***½) delivers the required entertainment, but doesn't go above and beyond like the better books in the series. The novel is available now as part of the Ciaphas Cain: Saviour of the Imperium omnibus, along with its two succeeding novels and several short stories.


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Baldur's Gate III was a well-deserving winner. The combination of traditional RPG mechanics with modern production values was hugely compelling, even if, strictly speaking, many other Gatelikes had better stories or mechanics or both (Pillars of Eternity 2, the two Pathfinder games from Owlcat, Tyranny).

Basically, any game where you can interrupt a villain's long monologue to yeet him into lava is going to get a round of applause from me.

Alan Wake 2 was outrageously good as well. The rotating between the two protagonists, the mechanics allowing newcomers to get onboard without any familiarity with the first game (which has aged middlingly, being generous), the excellent voice acting, the ludicrous graphics (the first time a game has actually tricked my brain into seeing it as photorealistic, at least in certain areas/lighting conditions) and the "walking around inside a music video" sequence which is easily the best single video game setpiece of the year (BG3 actually has its own banging musical number during the battle in Avernus, but it's not quite as impressive).

Phantom Liberty was also both excellent in its own right and completed Cyberpunk 2077's redemption arc in full. Getting Sad Keanu on the train (and being able to use trains!) was the icing on the cake.

Starfield was okay...ish, but easily Bethesda's weakest game since Daggerfall. Some interesting stuff in there but also some genuinely baffling design decisions.


Book 2: Blade of Dream

Garreth Left is the heir to one of the merchant families of Kithamar, but their economic prospects have become dire. An alliance with a faction outside the city provides salvation, but at a price that Garreth is not willing to pay. Elaine ab-Deniya Nycis a Sal is a princess of the city, the daughter to the heir apparent to the throne. Moving into the palace for the first time, she uncovers mysterious secrets that she should - but cannot - let go. Elaine and Garreth's destines entwine with those of a city watch captain and the ruler of the city's criminal underground, and a tumultuous year continues to turn around the great city of Kithamar.

The Kithamar Trilogy is Daniel Abraham's latest fantasy work. The co-author of the Expanse space opera series and the solo author of the Long Price Quartet and the Dagger and the Coin series, Abraham has long been praised as an author of character-based fantasy with interesting, original worlds and forms of magic. This trilogy takes a new approach, with three books set in the same city at the same time but involving different characters, sort of a fantasy version of Krzysztof Kieslowski's classic Three Colours film trilogy. Each story more or less stands alone but reading the whole trilogy results in greater understanding of the epic events unfolding under the surface: each book has a piece of the puzzle that becomes clear when all three are read.

Balancing this metaplot with the needs of the book at hand can be tricky, and the first book in the triad, Age of Ash, did not always succeed in doing so. It remains an excellent book but there was a greater feeling that you didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle. Blade of Dream is much more successful in crafting a compelling narrative on its own as well as working as part of a broader whole.

The story this time is perhaps a tad more traditional fantasy. Garreth is the young man unsure of his station and ambitions who rebels against the stifling destiny his family want to force on him. Elaine is the noblewoman likewise unsure of her station who has few friends she can trust, as opposed to those who want to take advantage of her station. They are thrust together by circumstances and find a new way forwards, through political intrigue, back-alley stabbings and full-on conflict between the city guard and a criminal organisation. Blade of Dream is literally a "higher" book than Age of Ash, taking place in the mercantile and royal districts whilst Age of Ash was more at home in the downmarket slums.

Blade of Dream certainly works as a far above-average example of a medieval (ish) city-set fantasy, but it's also a powerfully emotional book. Abraham delves into his characters' heads to craft very three-dimensional and interesting protagonists, and what drives and motivates them. I've occasionally mused that Abraham could be the closest author we have to becoming a natural heir of Guy Gavriel Kay, but that feeling is hugely intensified by this book. The traditional fantasy trappings could be dropped altogether and this would still work wonderfully as a character study. But those traditional fantasy trappings are here, and realised well with a compelling mystery and some fascinating worldbuilding.

Blade of Dream (****½) is an improvement on its forebear and marks this trilogy as Abraham's most mature and interesting work yet. The final novel in the trilogy, with the working title Judge of Worlds, is due out next year.


Discworld #30: The Wee Free Men

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Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is serious and studious for her age, and has little truck with myths and superstition. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil supernatural force from another universe and she is offered an alliance with the Nac Mac Feegle, a species of diminutive-but-psychotic warriors, this offends Tiffany's worldview. But pragmatism wins out, and she has to reluctantly embark on an adventure.

The Wee Free Men is the thirtieth Discworld novel, and when you're thirty books into any series you might be forgiven for resting on your laurels a bit, especially when the previous one, Night Watch, is often cited as the best thing you've ever written. For Sir Terry Pratchett, this was not an option. Having experimented with a Discworld book for younger audiences, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, he decided to start a whole new sub-series within the wider Discworld framework that would be aimed primarily at younger readers.

Pratchett being Pratchett, this meant relatively little changes or compromises to his usual vision. Some of the very occasional double entendre gags are gone, the book is somewhat shorter than usual, but beyond that Pratchett didn't really censor himself at all. If anything, this is a more thoughtful, contemplative Discworld book than the norm, with some enjoyable setpieces interrupted by Tiffany's internal musings on life and her ambitions.

Tiffany is smart, curious and sensible, not given to recklessness but also having a strong moral centre. She may be a quintessential Discworld protagonist, being often the only sane person in the room and constantly wondering why selfishness and hatred even exist. She is cut from the same competence cloth as Granny Weatherwax and Samuel Vimes, but lacks their experience and cynicism. She is a well-drawn protagonist who has to overcome problems presented by capable enemies, rather than because she's holding an idiot ball (something many other writers could learn from).

What is impressive about The Wee Free Men is how much of it is told from within Tiffany's head: the Nac Mac Feegle are not given to in-depth dialogue (although they have a few bon mots of wisdom) and many of the other characters are evil, monsters, stupid adults or even less-communicative children. Just about the only person Tiffany can have a decent 1:1 conversation with is a sentient toad. This means we get to lock into Tiffany's thought processes and motivations in a lot of depth, which is refreshing.

Taking part in a hitherto-unexplored part of the Disc with almost no recurring characters (not even Death, making this the first Discworld novel that he skips out on), at least until the last chapter, The Wee Free Men also makes a viable on-roading point for the entire series. Technically the main villain did (briefly) appear in Lords and Ladies, but that is really not alluded to in the book so is not hugely important.

The Wee Free Men (****½) sheds a lot of the extended subplots that had started padding out the Discworld books around this time and is focused and entertaining, with a small but well-drawn cast of characters. It's funny, but intermittently, with musings on growing up and responsibility. For the first in a new, YA (or outright children)-focused series, it's surprisingly contemplative and thoughtful, and all the richer for it.


Impressive.

Guns, speedboats, some "hey fellow kids," humour (an ingame version of TikTok I could do without), races, and graphics that blow everything else out of the water. They're back in the zone.

The biggest gawp-worthy thing here is the crowd density. Games have been making big strides here (Cyberpunk 2077 and even Starfield had huge improvements in this area), but GTA6 might be the first time the crowd density for a Miami-level city looks convincing.

Also, the series' first proper female protagonist in a singleplayer, mainline title, as people have speculated for years (you could play a woman in both GTA1 and GTA Online, but no real storyline to speak of).

Unsurprisingly, it's back to Vice City with a very strong "Florida Man" vibe. Alligators look like they're going to be a huge, constant threat in the game as well.


JoelF847 wrote:
I meant the pip-boy "character" not the device.

The release date announcement trailer is an animation of Vault Boy.

Apparently Vault Boy (and possibly Vault Girl) not only appears in the TV show but even get an origin story.


She does have a Pip-Boy, it's just not as bulky as the ones in the games.


First trailer.

Looks very good. They lean into both the humour and the horror of it all. And they have their own Dogmeat!


Major preview of the TV series.

Salient points:

Set in 2296, 219 years after the Great War and 9 years after Fallout 4.

Starts in Vault 33, which is ruled over by Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan).

The show has three main characters. Lucy (Ella Purnell) is our main POV character, Hank's daughter from Vault 33. She has to leave the vault for the first time in her life to recover a technological gizmo necessary for the vault's survival (or something).

The second POV character is Squire Maximus (Aaron Moten), an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel. They are also on the trail of of the tech-artifact, and dispatch the airship Caswennan (a sister-ship of the Prydwen from Fallout 4) to recover it.

The third POV character is "The Ghoul" (Walton Goggins), formerly Cooper Howard, a family man whose life was obliterated on the day of the Great war. Cooper was exposed to radiation, becoming a ghoul with an unusually sharp intellect. He is somewhat mean and morally dubious, but has his own, rough code of honour.

The TV show will predominantly be set in California and will feature several locations, including the ruins of Los Angeles (presumably the Boneyard from Fallout 1), outposts of the New California Republic, Vault 33 and a frontier, Wild West-looking town.

As well as the 2296 storyline, a major subplot is a flashback to the Ghoul's younger days, when he had a family. Through him, we get to see the buildup to the Great War and its aftermath.

The show debuts on 12 April 2024.


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Fallout: The TV Show will hit Amazon Prime on 12 April 2024.


From the look of it, in the show Padan Fain is more directly an agent of the Shadow rather than being a random wild card.


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As for combining books 2 and 3...eh. Did they at least sound the Horn and the Heroes arrived? That's kind of important to me.

Yes, in the Season 2 finale. That was a pretty good scene.


I'd say Season 2 has been a comprehensively better season than the first (and infinitely better than the mess the last two episodes degenerated into, although I try to give them some leeway due to COVID). The writing is better, there's a clearer vision of what the story is supposed to be, the effects are better, and more consistent, and the Seanchan have been depicted reasonably well (even down to the American accents). The actress playing Lanfear is also great, although the actor playing Ishamael I think has turned out to be too limited.

However, the show has also accelerated into what was always going to be its biggest issue, that they will (assuming 8x8 episodes) have less episodes than GAME OF THRONES to tell a story almost three times as long, which would always entail a very high degree of adaptation. For Season 2 they linearly adapted Books 2 and 3 and merged them into one story, which isn't actually a bad idea (The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn repeat a huge number of ideas and tropes between the two books) anyway, but is 100% necessary for the story they're telling. I would have personally merged them by having the Seanchan caputre Tear and still have the Sword in the Stone in play, but maybe they felt that was far too on the nose.

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I would rather have the red eagle people that did that one minute introduction of Ishmael that was shown once at midnight to keep the development rights working on this than the current crop of people.

They are working on this. They're the main rights-holders, and provided the rights for Amazon and Sony to make this show.

Red Eagle have, pretty consistently across multiple projects, shown they have zero problem dumping any kind of fidelity in return for money.


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This was pure Star Wars. The slightly goofy, friendly aliens, the non-verbal creatures with a vague comedy presence, the evil-but-competent Imperial commander planning stuff with more mystical bad guy Force-users, some stunning vfx (the arrival of the Chimera is an all-time epic shot), the young callow hero(ine) being somewhat out of her depth but also competent enough to deal with the situations. Thrawn is very hard to get right but they seem to be doing a really good job, and the actor playing Ezra is pretty spot-on. It's also doing an interesting mix of deepish lore cuts (the idea of Bokken Jedi, the Dathomiri witches) and new stuff, even if some of the new stuff is a remix of the old stuff (non-Tusken Raiders and Ewoks-but-they're-turtles-I-guess).

The show was far too slow to start with, but the last two episodes were outstanding. And it's odd that it's taken this long for someone to actually say "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." in dialogue (and it's amusing that it's Doctor Who who gets to say it).

My guess is that next week is Ahsoka arriving and trying to stop their departure, and in the last episode Thrawn returns to the SW Galaxy and wreaks some havoc, leaving things on a cliffhanger for the movie. Which I'm guessing they were expecting to be shooting by now and out next year, which now won't be the case due to the strike.


I thought that was very good. Some outstanding, epic imagery: the Clone Wars battles, the Ghost and the X-wings skimming along the water, the rescue, the New Republic cruisers amongst the whale pod. This is one of the rare nu-Star Wars episodes that feels like they actually spent the rumoured $15 million per episode.

I think I get what they are going for with the rest of the season and maybe into the follow-up movie:

> Both Team Baylan and Team Ahsoka find Thrawn in the other galaxy.
Shenanigans ensure to stop Thrawn's return. During this, they find Ezra. Maybe he's a prisoner or maybe he's joined Team Thrawn or he's escaped and is MIA in the new galaxy. Ahsoka, Sabine and Ezra form a power trio to stop Thrawn.

> The shenanigans fail. Thrawn returns to the Galaxy Far Far Away, probably at the end of Episode 8.

> The movie or Season 2 (if there is going to be a Season 2 before the movie) is then Thrawn uniting the Imperial Remnants into a single fleet and fighting the Republic. A wild card is Moff Gideon's cloning plot, which culminates successfully in the creation of Snoke.

> Huge war ensures. Thrawn is killed and both the Imperial and Republic fleets are decimated. The Imperials and Republic agree to a truce, with official recognition of the Imperial Remnant as the First Order, with Hux's dad and Pellaeon playing a key role. Pellaeon signs the peace treaty with the New Republic (I swear to god if they do this, we just need to lynch the person responsible for terminating the EU, this is just a mildly time-disjointed version of the EU at this point).

> Wild card possibility: an alien threat in the next galaxy. Not the Yuuzhan Vong (way too NSFW for Disney-SW) but a force fulfilling a similar threat. They invade the Galaxy Far Far Away and the Republic and Imperials stop fighting to unify and defeat the invaders. Thrawn is killed in the process (maybe Ahsoka as well?) but the victory allows for a New Republic/First Order peace treaty.

Something someone on Reddit pointed out: the only shot from the trailers left is the one of Thrawn. Absolutely everything else was seen in Episodes 1-5, and we don't know anything from 6-8 at all apart from (SPOILERS) they find Thrawn.


With a couple of weeks in Starfield now, some thoughts.

This game is pretty much what I expected: FALLOUT/SKYRIM in space. It's a Bethesda game through-and-through, and beneath the excellent graphics (this is easily Bethesda's best-looking-on-release game since OBLIVION) and the space travel side-game, you can see the same structure and paradigm purring along. The apple has not fallen far from the tree.

On the plus side, the game has taken a step back from the streamlining/simplification of SKYRIM and FALLOUT 4. Advancement trees are a bit more involved, with you having to use your existing skills in a specific way to unlock the next point in that skill (i.e. to open the next level in Physical, you need to put in some cardio by running full-tilt for x number of metres whilst 75% encumbered). The game tells you what each goal is. This is fun, giving you lots of short-term goals for your character's advancement. You can, in superb Bethesda style though, cheese it. Your jetpack skill requires you to use your jetpack 25 times in combat, so simply aggro a bunch of bad guys three rooms over by firing a shot and then keep jetpacking into the ceiling, wait for them to give up looking for you, then rinse and repeat.

Combat is much improved, with more physicality to the weapons and the jetpack allowing you to dynamically move across the battlefield quickly. Enemy AI is still dumb but not as dumb as before, and will occasionally make impressive moves (trying to stunlock you with an electrical attack before rushing in to melee, for example). It's still pretty easy, especially as the game seems to prioritise criticals if you shoot someone in the head.

Quest design remains the Bethesda standard, but better. The main questline is fairly rote sci-fi, but it has a couple of shifts that I wasn't expecting. The faction storylines are better, sometimes leading to really great rewards (the Freestar Rangers storyline leads you to getting a really cool starship, far better than your starting one). It's the barking mad side-quests where the game excels, including a riff on ALIEN and another one which is pure STAR TREK (a bunch of slower-than-light generation ship colonists have arrived at a planet they have a legal claim to to find some people showed up a century and a half earlier via FTL and have colonised their planet). If you choose the "Have Parents" starting perk, you get supportive parents who consistently show up through the game, visiting you at work for maximum cringe and even bumping into you whilst on vacation on other planets.

The biggest departure from the Bethesda norm is how it treats exploration. In most Bethesda games you have a large-feeling map and various objectives, and as you walk towards those objectives, you bump into random encounters or new locations along the way, which may open side-quests or you decide to explore a cave or vault you've found on a whim. By it's nature Starfield can't have that, and instead you find yourself traversing the map screens to get to destinations. This encourages even hardcore FALLOUT and SKYRIM fan who refused to ever use fast travel to just fast travel everywhere.

You can avoid this by selecting your quest, manually taking off from the planet, selecting the target destination in your ship's HUD, jumping to the target system and then autopiloting to your destination. This gives the game a chance to trigger random space events and even entire quest chains, which are surprisingly numerous, which otherwise you'd just bypass altogether. For example, with this method I encountered a bunch of quarrelling farmers whose system had been invaded by pirates, and I undertook a quest to resolve their differences and forge them into a fleet capable of destroying the pirate threat, which resulted in several massive space battles and a final storming of the pirate headquarters on an old space station.

Once on planets, each area you can visit is surprisingly massive - about the size of FALLOUT 4's map, maybe larger, and usually have a few Points of Interest. As well as that, dynamic quests can generate on any planet (so you might encounter a specific quest on Planet Feeblenarge and your friend might encounter the same quest on Planet Tricklephase), and random events can also occur, such as a ship crash-landing nearby and you can help out (or ignore them). There are potentially thousands of landing points on each planet, and over 1,000 planets (including moon, some asteroids, and space stations), so there is a virtually infinite amount of land to explore, but not a vast amount of reason to do so (aside from the often-gorgeous vistas). Most people I think will follow the main quests and only visit random locations for resources if they decide to pursue settlement building.

Both ship-building and settlement-building are fun, but the former is very, very fiddly and the latter is, weirdly, less involved than FALLOUT 4's settlement system.

Overall, this is a solid Bethesda game, but it's still a Bethesda game moderately improved, with a somewhat fiddlier system for getting around. There is a lot to enjoy here, but I'm not sure it makes a strong argument it needs to exist more than ELDER SCROLLS VI or FALLOUT 5 (in particular, STARFIELD's reliance on guns and underground bases and total lack of vehicles makes it feel a lot like FALLOUT, a surprising amount of the time).


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Aberzombie wrote:

Just curious - are you playing on a computer or console. Debating on getting the game, but if I did I’d probably need a new computer. I don’t have a console it would run on (I think).

Also, my 5E experience is lacking (though not completely). Do you think that would hurt?

On PC. I just bought a brand-new giga-machine, so it had no problems with BG3 on maximum settings (until Act III, when it gets a bit buggy because they've haven't fully optimised the city itself). I believe it scales down well to relatively older hardware.

It's out on PlayStation 5 next week and on Xbox Series X and S before the end of the year.

The last time I played D&D tabletop was in 2009 (my group split after a couple of 4E campaigns and half the group absolutely loathing it and the rest wanting to keep on it with it over 3.5, and rejecting Pathfinder as an alternative), so I have zero experience of 5E and limited experience of 4E. I had zero problems with BG3 at all, it's pretty intuitive very quickly (the main appeal - and drawback - of tt 5E, I believe). The tighter focus of 5E versus PF1 and 2 is beneficial in a video game setting, whilst I found the attempt to put every single ttrpg mechanic from PF1 in Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous too overwhelming.

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Honestly, this kind of coverage makes me want to play the game less. I hear about all sorts of weird things that can impact cutscenes, but not as much about the game play. I'd prefer a game with little to no cutscenes and just fantastic gameplay.

Not saying the gameplay isn't good, just that the almost non-stop - "look at this weird thing I did which impacted a scene" is anti-marketing for me. I'd rather watch a movie or TV show if I want great cutscenes - 100% cutscene then!

People have been talking about the gameplay, reactivity, storylines, character arcs etc nonstop for the last month. There's been very long reviews about the game going into that stuff in detail and explaining why they've made it their highest-scoring game for years (PC Gamer US just made it their highest-scoring video game of all time).


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Ray Stevenson killing it as the bad guy. A great shame he passed away just a few weeks ago.

Overall, pretty solid start.


I would not rush into getting it. It has some nostalgia value for hearing the old cast back together again (especially Peter Jurasik as Londo, who doesn't sound like he's aged a day compared to some of the others, especially Bill Mumy), and I have to say the new guy playing Sinclair is 100% on fire, but the story is all over the place and the story has a lot of JMS humour in it, which as we know from B5 itself is not the best. Zathras feels like a great 5-minute gag that's now been dragged out far beyond its lifespan.


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GM SuperTumbler wrote:

I hope this is a fun fact:

"The Best of Both Worlds" cliffhanger codified the season finale cliffhanger ending.

While it was awesome, I hate what it created. So many series ended with cliffhangers and were cancelled.

I'm not sure that the cliffhanger with Picard as a Borg was the first, but it was the wildly successful one that everyone copied and still copies.

And if you don't know, it wasn't known to the creators (or the fans) that Stewart was coming back after that finale, so the episode was left open so they could write him out. The plan if he didn't renew his contract was to make Riker the captain and Shelby the new XO.

The season cliffhanger concept was likely borrowed from UK space opera BLAKE'S 7 (1978-81), which ended each of its four seasons with a massive cliffhanger to bring people back the following year. B7 itself was influenced by the original run of DOCTOR WHO (1963-89) which often ended episodes on a cliffhanger (though normally within a serial, occasionally between serials and only a few times between seasons). A bunch of TNG writers were also massive fans of DOCTOR WHO (a list of the then-seven actors to play the role is on a background monitor in the TNG Season 1 finale and the Borg are, at the very least, influenced by the Cybermen and Daleks).


It's arguable if hinting of the existence of the Borg in the Season 1 finale was also a bit of a cliffhanger, as was the Romulans declaring they were back and a potential real threat.

The Season 2 finale didn't have any cliffhangery elements, apart from being the very worst episode of Star Trek ever made.

In The Way to Eden, the main hippy alien has at least two musical numbers where he sings. Hilariously, he's the same actor as the cigar-chomping US general in the DS9 Roswell episode Little Green Men, and he loved the massive dissonance between the two characters he played 30 years apart.


A bunch of players are going through the game as four angry halfling barbarians. The results are amazing.


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There is no more quintessential TTRPG feeling than a big bad making their appearance, making some BS speech about how they're going to kill you with ease, and you make a great initiative roll and instantly just shove them into the nearby lava without a second's remorse.


The goblin camp turned into a comical explosion of WTFery.

Spoiler:
I agreed to attack the druid camp to make the goblins think I was on their side, befriended the goblin priestess, agreed to a private meeting, killed her instantly in one blow, threw her body into a chasm to hide that, then fought her bodyguard ogre, then opened a secret path into the Underdark, which I don't think makes much sense just yet but noted that for later on.

Then I found my way into the Spider Pit, but managed to befriend the spiders. I couldn't leave due to the guards, so I used Mage Hand to open the gate. The spiders went around killing the goblins and I just helped heal the spiders to keep them going without aggroing the goblins myself.

I then used Speak with Animals to get the spiders' view on events and one of them screamed "FREEDOM!" in a Scottish accent and resumed their rampage whilst my entire team stood to one side and watched on, bemused.


Outstanding so far. I have some quibbles with poor UI and the game's multiplayer focus causing issues with how inventories work (everyone has their own gold stash rather than a shared pool, which is very annoying) and not being able to pause unless you go into turn-based mode, even in singleplayer, but the story, side-quests and characters are all excellent. There's also tremendous freedom in how you solve quests and how you resolve combat. Really tough fights become more controllable once you realise you can bring down the massive mega-chandalier hanging over the room, or you can Grease a surface and then set it on fire, or the three archers standing on a ledge firing at you can all be one-shotted by your mage casting Thunderwave at them and blasting them into the chasm.


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This was 892nd episode of Star Trek. All of the 891 other TV episodes of Star Trek and all 13 movies are not musicals (Data singing Gilbert & Sullivan for 1 minute in Insurrection excepted). So it's fine if they take a punt on one or two weirdly experimental episodes here and there.

Buffy did a musical after just 106 episodes, and IIRC Xena managed to do two in around 120 episodes.


There isn't a handy ledge available in every fight, so it's not always an option. Oddly, if you try to kick someone next to a wall, they'll fall over, but it's just an animation and they'll get up again rather than triggering an Attack of Opportunity or staying prone until their turn, allowing easier hits.

Minsc and Boo show up and I know are at least temporary NPC party-members. Jaheira as well, I believe. Larian have hinted that other BG1/2/ToB characters may show up or be referenced (Volo and Elminster also put in cameos, and I'll be startled if Drizzt doesn't show up at least once).


3 hours in, pretty good so far. I've basically just done the opening sequence and into the first open world bit and, er, the map is huge and there's a ton going on and this is like the opening 3% of the game. Some really good, morally murky decisions, and contrary to my usual preference, the game does a good job of giving you interesting outcomes for failing checks, rather than just some kind of screaming awful outcome that makes you reload instantly.

In 4K with everything on Ultra, the game is almost ludicrously pretty. There's barely a discernible difference between in-engine and cutscene (if anything, the cutscenes are a touch lower in quality because they put on a film filter thing).

I would say, apart from the AAA+ presentation and thankfully massively-better writing, the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is not massively different to Divinity: Original Sin II. I do like the dramatic "STUFF'S GOTTEN REAL, WE'RE ROLLING A DICE!" moments, although they might get wearying over the long term.

There's some very nice callbacks to BG1+2, including the exact same icons for spells and many of the same books can be found (some updated for post-Spellplague Faerun, some not, and some new books, including an awful pop history of the Bhaalspawn).

I did pick up several useful pieces of basic advice:

*At the very start of the game, when selecting your MC, you can bring up each of the main NPC companions and hit "Play Introduction." Each character then gives you a 60-ish second monologue on their backstory, motivation and ethos. Good way of getting a sneak preview of what they're about before committing to the full game.
*High-strength characters can jump further than they can move in combat. More than once, jumping instead of walking/running was the difference between being able to hit an enemy or not. For lower-strength characters, jumping is either equal or worse than standard movement. But! Jumping is great for evading Web or Grease.
*Shove is also an easy action to forget about, but very useful for controlling the battlefield or just doing a little more damage (or even outright kills) by pushing an enemy over a ledge.
*Chokepoints are a very viable strategy. Particularly good is being able to stand next to a door and keep closing it, preventing enemies from hitting you or forcing them to smash the door down before they can attack, wasting actions.
*Remember that special moves are only recoverable via short or long-rest actions, so don't waste them on low-level minions. Save them for the tougher engagements.
*Similarly, spells can only be regained through rests, but cantrips are once-per-round actions and can deal out reasonable damage.
The old "give everyone a missile weapon" tactic remains viable, and there's even a nice button you can hit to automatically switch between a ranged set up and a melee one.
*In a pinch, you can lob healing potions at wounded allies to heal them. Amusingly, although normal heal spells are not area of effect, smashing a healing bottle generates a small AoE and you can heal several allies at once that way.
*As usual with Larian games, Talk with Animals/Dead makes the game far more entertaining.
*As far as I can tell, the game always goes with the person you've selected to talk to NPCs. Make sure you have your most Charismatic/Persuasive or Main character selected before talking to someone you need to rally to your cause, not the a%$$~#~! githyanki (GRRM's lawyers stirring) who treats absolutely everyone like a piece of dirt. Although that can be quite funny.


Instant purchase.


Bethesda has released three animated shorts, showing slice-of-life moments for people in the Starfield universe.

I particularly like that Todd Howard got a nod to his MechWarrior/BattleTech fandom in there.


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Yup, M'Benga is in two episodes of TOS (A Private Little War and That Which Survives), played by Booker Bradshaw.


Discworld #29: Night Watch

Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh-Morpork, is having a very bad day. His wife is in labour with their first child, and it is the thirtieth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May. But rather than spending his day toasting fallen friends and greeting his child into the world, Vimes is instead chasing down Carcer, a notorious murderer and sociopath with a taste for killing Watchmen. The inadvertent combination of a lightning strike with the standing magical field of Unseen University transports both Vimes and Carcer back to the week of the Glorious Revolution, and Vimes has to stop Carcer and ensure that history unfolds precisely as it did before...which is a bit difficult when their arrival brings about the death of Vimes' old friend and mentor before his time.

There is nothing, or at least very little, as glorious in the world as Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) on his best form. Released in 2002, the twenty-ninth Discworld novel holds a strong claim to be the series' very best, although it is a crowded field.

As with the other (arguable) leading candidate for that title, Small Gods, Night Watch is a book that is both funny and angry. In the earlier novel, Pratchett was furious over religious fundamentalism and how personal faith could and can be perverted into a force of oppression and evil. In Night Watch he studies paranoia and fear, how crowds and masses can be moved by propaganda and oppressed by their own rulers because they fear them. The tone is darker and bleaker than most other Discworld books by design: this isn't the cosmopolitan, successful Ankh-Morpork of the later series, but an old, rough, poor and paranoid city ruled by a lunatic despot. There's a sinister secret police force, there's torture chambers and inquisitions, and there's casual racism (as usual in the series, filtered through the lens of speciesism) that takes even old-skool, dyed-in-the-wool copper Vimes by surprise. There is still humour here, but it's grimmer and blacker than in most of his books.

One of the novel's most impressive achievements is evoking such ideas and reaching such quality in the middle of one of the series' most tightly-woven sub-series. Small Gods was a complete standalone set long before the rest of the series, but Night Watch is a key book in the "City Watch" arc, with frequent continuity references to what's been going in that storyline. However, Night Watch's fish-out-of-water setting does render that somewhat moot: you really just need to know that Vimes is a successful, reforming police commander with a pregnant wife and an ambiguously motivated boss.

The book is dealing with a lot of inspirations: the cover (Paul Kidby's first regular cover for the series following the passing of his more idiosyncratic predecessor, Josh Kirby) is a riff on Rembrandt's "Night Watch," whilst the revolution itself plays on everything from France to Russia and even Bloody Sunday (the deployment of the military to deal with a civil order issue is uncomfortably on the nose, as it means to be). Pratchett is not really interested in a 1:1 copy-past of the real events, though, and is more interested into delving into the rationales for civil disorder, for popular rebellions and mass uprisings, and if revolutions ever really change anything, other than just swapping the name on the door of the top office, and if today's heroic revolutionary leader is tomorrow's tyrannical despot.

Night Watch (*****) is still funny, but Pratchett wraps the comedy around more serious, even grimmer themes than in many of his books. The story is excellent, the characterisation - especially of Vimes, who by this novel has become maybe Pratchett's richest protagonist - among Pratchett's best and the villain is one of the most genuinely hateful in the entire series. It's also an interesting morality play on political states, the meaning of power, and how the masses can be harnessed for good and ill.


Gnomes are in the game. You've been able to play them in Early Access since a patch update last year, and they'll be in the game at launch.


The life cycle of the illithids was laid out in 2nd Edition, with the seven-day timespan it took for the mind-tadpole to overwhelm the host and convert them into a mind flayer first appearing in The Illithiad (1998) and then being confirmed in Forgotten Realms in Drizzt Do'Urden's Guide to the Underdark (1999). It's been around as a concept for a long time.


DeathQuaker wrote:
If course, to me all I want out of another thing named "Baldur's Gate" is seeing Imoen again, and I doubt Imoen is in this, so it's not really Baldur's Gate for me personally (even if it takes place in the city of, which ironically Baldur's Gate 2 did not).

Jaheira, Minsc and Boo all show up, and I have zero doubt there will be other cameos and a lot of references to the first two games. Imoen showing up (in the present or in flashback) is certainly not impossible.

And yes, it does take place in BG itself, which wasn't the original plan. Originally you were only going to briefly visit one district, but fans moaned about that in EA so they put the entire city in, at a much bigger scale than in the original game (and in full 3D), and then went a bit berserk with it, allowing you to end many of the buildings in the city, fight across rooftops etc. It's one of the main reasons why the game was delayed so much.


We are three weeks from release and somehow haven't talked about the game for almost three years, which is quite impressive.

A ton of news was dumped about the game in the last few weeks and it's basically that the game is now detailed, open and reactive to an almost deranged degree. This interview touches on the permutations of the writing in the game, which sounds bonkers.

This week they also confirmed you can play a wholly player-generated character, any one of the companion characters in the game as the main character, a generated character with one of several preset backgrounds, and a "dark" background character which sounds like it ties more directly in with the events of BG1 and 2.

The Internet has also had a lot of memes with the revelation that druids can pursue romances and get hot and heavy even when in their animal forms, which is...something.

The scale of the game also sounds pretty bananas. They have the entire city of Baldur's Gate in the game at a very large scale, and a main questline+major side-quest combo they reckon will take around 100 hours, maybe triple that for an exacting playthrough that has people trying to 100% the game. Which is not even possible in one playthrough.


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Quark Blast wrote:

Good points but these are all writers. Painters sometimes too are known for producing their best works late in life. But for writers one often does not know how long the ideas were bouncing around inside their head before it finally got printed. Tolkien had been writing that story in dribs and drabs since the Great War and was expressly banging away at "the new Hobbit" for 15 years, more or less, prior to it's publishing dates. At any rate, a few exceptions doesn't really break the rule and it's not obvious to me that these writers are exceptions - though I think your strongest case is Cormac McCarthy!

* Shouldn't that be 2001?

JK Rowling is a writer as well, so the comparison seemed reasonable. Although I also noted Ridley Scott, a film director.

2001 is a film novelization that Clarke co-developed with Stanley Kubrick, and some people get antsy over its definition. Rendezvous with Rama doesn't have that categorisation problem, and was his most critically acclaimed novel. Although it is - finally! - getting a movie adaptation courtesey of Denis Villeneuve once he's done with DUNE.


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Quark Blast wrote:
I don't know any relevant facts re all the controversy but I do know that creativity wanes starting at about age 25 years, the decline is easily measurable by age 35, and is completely gone in the vast majority of people by 50. That's why JK is not producing anything new, and won't.

On the other hand, J.R.R. Tolkien published THE LORD OF THE RINGS at the age of 62, George R.R. Martin published A GAME OF THRONES at 47 (and its sequels at 50, 51, 57 and 62) and Arthur C. Clarke published his best-known novel RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA at 56. Ridley Scott directed his last great movie, THE MARTIAN, at 77. Cormac McCarthy published THE ROAD at 73.

It's also worth noting that Rowling is continuing her crime fiction series, but given it's somewhat tedious, that may actually prove the inverse.


This is taking forever - they started filming in November 2021 and wrapped in June 2022, after numerous delays - but we have a first look at the four main characters.

Unfortunately, it won't be out until early 2024. This is taking so long that original creators Michael Di Martino and Bryan Konietzko have had time to found a new animation studio and are already deep in production on an animated AVATAR movie for Nickelodeon and Paramount+. This new film will be set 10-15 years after the OG series and will catch up with the original characters having new adventures. They are also developing two other films and an ongoing TV show, which is rumoured to be focusing on the Avatar after Korra.


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A 45-minute mega-deep dive.

There's some pretty good stuff here. The first and most massively obvious thing they've been working on is a graphical glow-up. This actually looks like a 2023 release, and the first time that a Bethesda game looks contemporary or even cutting-edge since Oblivion came out in 2006. It's also way, way more colourful than it looked previously.

They also go into more detail on how the game actually works. As usual you have your Bethesda Main Quest Which Is Kinda Urgent But Also Not Really and you can follow that and meet all the factions and a bunch of NPCs and that'll take ~40 hours to complete. There's also a metric butt-ton of side-quests all over the galaxy, likely your usual mix of inventive and interesting stuff and glorified fetch quests. Plus faction quests, with you being able to work for Constellation, the United Planets, the Freestar Collective, the Crimson Fleet, Ryujin Industries, the Red Mile, the House of Va'ruun and the worshippers of the Great Serpent. If you just want to do "normal Bethesda Game Studios game stuff," that'll keep you occupied for many dozens of hours.

More interesting here is the freedom the game gives you to "go anywhere" on the game's 1,000 planets, moons, asteroids and so on. How this works is that each planet/moon etc has a map which is divided into numerous tiles. Each tile is extremely large (at least a kilometre long on each axis, possibly several times that, and in the hand-crafted zones, larger still) and you can walk from one tile into the next, allowing you to walk right around the planet if you want to spend many hours doing that. It's much faster to fast-travel to your ship, take off, and land again elsewhere.

Whenever you land on a tile, the game populates it with stuff from a massive database, including abandoned mines or bases, space pirates, wildlife (friendly or not) and resources. Your experience of the game will vary from a friend's, as you might both visit the exact same tile on the exact same planet, but it'll be populated in different ways. It sounds like some hand-crafted quests and questlines will involve visiting these rando-worlds, with the location of characters and events dynamically changing depending on the situation. That will give the illusory feel of there being handcrafted content and stories even on the random side-worlds. That's quite clever, but how successful is will depend on how much of that stuff there is and how long it will take to run out.

For the most part, the game's story will take you to hand-crafted places to visit, with New Atlantis being BGS's biggest-ever city. It's so large apparently it has a monorail you need to switch between different districts (unknown if the monorail trains will be elaborate giant hats sitting on little man underneath the map, which is the tech hack Fallout 3 had to resort to to get the trains working).

A very nice touch is the variable gravity from world to world. The guy punching the enemy on Mars and them flying over the edge of the chasm fairly slowly and then hurtling towards the ground below is quite entertaining.

The game has a massive skill tree system, and there seems to be a general "stop the rot" feel to the game's RPG systems, with the systems looking much more complex than Fallout 4 or Skyrim (which both "streamlined" the RPG experience to the point of almost eliminating it).

It also looks like they erred on the side of "freedom" in allowing both starship and base customisation. The massive cargo ship that looks like Optimus Prime is most entertaining, as is the Platypus pirate ship filled with stolen sandwiches.

The space combat side of things is more involved than I thought, with you having power control systems (like X-Wing and Freespace) and the ability to board disabled ships and storm them. You can also amass an entire fleet of salvaged ships and switch between them at starports (it's unclear if you can send them off on other missions whilst your main ship is doing hero stuff, like the X series, but I assume not for now).

The crew system is also more involved. You can recruit your normal assortment of NPCs, but they can all travel with your on your ship. You can also assign any of them to other roles (including going with you on jobs), on the ship or on your bases. The NPCs have skill specialisations which can boost your ship's capabilities (i.e. stick a laser specialist on your ship's weapon consoles and your laser weapons will be more effective). You can also hire generic crewpeople, since it sounds like the number of fully-voiced, "proper" NPC companions will be limited to Skyrim/Fallout 4 levels (around a dozen) and you'll need way more than that if you're building lots of bases and you have a really massive ship.

Overall, this is looking very impressive, certainly far moreso than maybe any Bethesda game since those previews for Oblivion. And it's out in 11 weeks.


They've been developing this for years though, and it's still not been greenlit. They might be waiting to see the numbers on the film and, if the numbers are not great, they might hold fire until it hits digital and physical media to see if that shifts the needle.


JoelF847 wrote:
My guess at the boss is the worm symbiotes from TNG season 1 episode conspiracy. I don't see how any of them could have been dormant in Picard all this time, since in that episode he never actually got taken over, but the methodology fits. And it's the biggest dropped plot thread from TNG, so bringing them back would finally address that.

The showrunner has already ruled this out. He considered it, but he felt they were a bit too tricky to manage plot wise, since they need to take people over and it's very hard to stun or disable them without killing them outright.

Unless he's lying, of course.


Quote:
Warner Brothers only has movie rights, not TV. Amazon has the TV rights.

Not entirely accurate, although it's a bit of a weird situation. Warner Brothers' rights grant them "screen rights" to Lord of the Rings, not specific TV and movie rights, since that wasn't really a thing when the original deal was done back in 1969.

There was a legal clarification issued in the 1990s, I believe, which ruled that the screen rights for Lord of the Rings included film rights and rights to a television series of more than eight episodes a year. The Tolkien Estate retained the rights to a television series of eight episodes or less a year.

That allowed the Tolkien Estate to do a deal with Amazon separately to make Rings of Power, because they'd produce less than eight episodes a year (and barely eight episodes every two years at this rate).

Amazon did strike a different deal with WB/New Line when Rings of Power entered development, but that appears to have been a clarification deal (to forestall any legal challenges) and also gave them the rights to use certain iconography from the movies in the TV show (i.e. that's why the balrog looks exactly the same, and possibly Sauron in his full armour).

In theory Warner Brothers could make - probably via HBO - a LotR-derived TV show as long as they produced more than 8 episodes a year, but that's a tall order and might lead them into a headache encounter with Amazon that's best left alone.


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For these films they have the rights to Lord of the Rings in its entirety (including the appendices), and partial rights to The Hobbit. To do anything with The Hobbit they need the other rights, held by MGM (now owned by Amazon), so have to do a deal with them.

They do not have, and probably never will acquire, the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the other books.

For what films they can make, it's probably a good idea to look at the first one already in production: The War of the Rohirrim. That's an animated film about Helm Hammerhand and the original battle where Helm's Deep played a major role. That has Miranda Otto returning as Eowyn to narrate the story from a post-LotR POV. That's due out next April.

So they could make a film based on Aragorn's younger days, or on the founding of the Shire, or the fall of Arnor in warfare against the Witch-King of Angmar, or they could do a story set 25 years after LotR about Aragorn's tax policies. As long as they can argue it's derived from LotR, they're fine.

Quote:
Has there been any really good adaptation of anything SciFi/Fantasy between Jackson's LotR trilogy and Dune - part 1?

Sure. The Expanse and Paper Girls were great, The Boys is pretty good and Shadow & Bone is decent (probably better than the source material). Tales from the Loop was good, although it didn't have a huge amount to do with the source material. Game of Thrones started off superbly, but fell off a cliff there towards the end. House of the Dragon and The Last of Us have both started superbly. The Martian, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and Station 11 were all excellent. Season 1 of Altered Carbon was very good. Sandman has been excellent so far, but early days.


That was an epic episode. So many cool moments and punch-the-air moments when familiar starships appeared, and a really massive cliffhanger ending.


Phillip Gastone wrote:
Ciphias Caine:HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!

Ciaphas Caine is excellent, but it's also the metafictional mickey-take of the setting. It'd be like making Spaceballs, Mystery Men, or Galaxy Quest and showing it to someone who's never seen Star Trek, Alien or Star Wars, or any superhero movie ever. It can work and be entertaining, but you lose a lot from not having the pre-existing context.

I think you do Ciaphas Cain around the 5th-6th project in the setting so people get what it's satirising, not the 1st. It would be very entertaining though.