What Happened to Dolorous Edd?!

As a guy who grew up doing some pretty spot-on (if I do say so myself!) voice impersonations of the Muppets and other pop-culture characters, I appreciate a good voice. I've always admired the work of voiceover actors like Frank Welker, Peter Cullen, and the guy with maybe the best voice in the history of humanity, Keith David. As a gamemaster, I like to incorporate custom voices for key NPCs in my campaign worlds, perhaps most notably in the Druid Cycle setting; Cyfrinach, Iskander, Cerdyn, Pyrrhus, and many others have had very distinctive voices. 

Over the past year, I've been listening to the Song of Ice and Fire series on Audible. The books were narrated by the late, great Roy Dotrice and -- wow! -- did this guy have an amazing reading voice! Over the first three books, Dotrice built an immense variety of custom voices for the main characters. His work on this series wasn't just a reading, but a true performance. 

I'm now getting into the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, and, well, it's a different experience. I understand that Dotrice wasn't available to record this book when it first came out and then returned to read it many years after he had narrated the others in the series. The result is pretty jarring. There are major changes in how he pronounces names like "Catelyn" and "Petyr", but also in the voices he uses for the characters. Some of the biggest changes are to major players like Arya and Petyr. The one that really hit me the hardest, though, was the voice of my absolute favorite supporting character, Dolorous Edd. A member of the Night's Watch and close friend of Jon Snow, Edd provides a lot of self-deprecating wit and comic relief. Dotrice's original voice for Edd always put a smile on my face, but the voice used in Feast is so bland and undistinguished that I almost wince when I hear it. 

If I ever screw up the voices in our campaigns, please call me on it. An unexpected change to the voice of a character can really take you out of the moment!

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The latest GoT spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, premieres tonight on HBO!

Fun With Maps

We're all sick with the flu, but at least we got the opportunity to do a quiet, low-energy family project together -- a puzzle depicting a map of the Game of Thrones world. I'm falling in love with this world all over again as I listen to the series on Audible, so it's been great sharing little nuggets of story lore with Amy and the boys as we've built the map together. The first layer of the puzzle is a conventional jigsaw...

This set also includes an overlay with another (far less complex) puzzle of soft foam pieces into which you can insert three-dimensional plastic models of the world's most famous cities and castles. Here's a look at the puzzle with those elements included...

It's been a slow and kind of miserable week, but at least we did something, right?

A Stark Victory

With Matthew at a swim meet in Arizona this weekend, Amy, Nathaniel, and I kept busy with a lengthy Game of Thrones board game session that took us a pretty good chunk of the weekend to complete. Nathaniel played as House Stark, Amy was House Baratheon, and I was House Lannister. I was in the lead for much of the game, or at least tied with Nathaniel, and it all came down to the final turn, when Amy seized one of my castles, which gave Nathaniel sole position of the lead in victory points. So I guess Bran Stark ended up on the Iron Throne after all, just like in the show! How it all played out was quite different; for one thing, the standard version of the game omits those pesky Targaryens...

Home Field Advantage

Nathaniel got the highly regarded Game of Thrones board game for Christmas, and we recently gave it a whirl. First of all, the game is great. It mixes politics, combat, resource management, intrigue, and all the sorts of stuff you'd want to see in a true GoT experience. 

A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (the official title) is designed for three to six players, so with Matthew unavailable to join us, we each played two of the great houses -- he took Baratheon and Greyjoy, and I established an (unlikely!) alliance of Stark and Lannister. Why those four families and not, say, Martell or Tyrell? The number of players determines which houses are available and which are, essentially, NPCs that players can conquer. Therein lies the game's greatest flaw. Team Baratheon gets a huge home-field advantage in a three- or four-player game. While I was battling the Greyjoys with both of my factions, Nathaniel had Baratheon calmly marching across the southern portion of Westeros, gobbling up territories before I could get anyone down there to oppose him. For future reference, we'll have to make it clear to Matthew, Amy, and anyone else who joins us that Baratheon has the easiest path to victory, so it's important to team up against them early in the game!

Near Year, New Games!

Lots of great game stuff on tap for us here in early 2023. I need to challenge the boys to a rematch of Conquest of Nerath after they crushed my evil empires last week, and Nathaniel and I are both itching to get started with the Game of Thrones board game (although the real question is whether we can get Amy and Matthew interested). Both boys got lots of Warhammer stuff for Christmas (the new Astra Militarum boxed set for Matthew and the Warhammer: The Horus Heresy core set for Nathaniel) that still needs to be put together. On the RPG front, I'm almost ready to get the boys into a full-scale Doctor Who campaign using the Doctor Who Exterminate! wargame miniatures and a hodgepodge of other minis and maps. On top of all that, my niece and nephew are interested in joining us for some D&D, so I'll be creating a new campaign set in the Druid Cycle world. I guess I really won't have time to finish panting all those 3D-printed buildings...