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FANTASTIC Exhibit Hall Finds

Written by GeekGirlCon copywriter, Henry Behrens

I doubt I’m alone when I say my first venture into geekdom was through the tried and true passages of fantasy, and that love has continually grown, shuttling me from classic fantasies such as Tolkien and The Last Unicorn all the way to more modern, progressive works like The Raven Cycle and Game of Thrones.

Fantasy—coupled with science and other speculative fiction—is a constant draw for me, so it’s no surprise that the GeekGirlCon ‘15 vendors leaning that way are all absolutely on my “Must Visit” list for the upcoming con. Here’s a preview of some of what you’ll see in the Exhibitor Hall, from steampunk corsets to full-on plate armor to delicate nymph headdresses.

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Every aspiring magic user could use a skull or two, whether it’s a resin cast of a crow, raven or barn owl, or a replica bat skull strung on a long chain. Art Phoenix Studios’ skulls and jewelry add the perfect, fantastical touch to any outfit or decor.

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If soft leather in beautiful styles is more your fancy, Bansai8 Creations should be your first stop. Hand-crafted gear-heavy necklaces, guitar straps, and even sporran bags await you in this fine establishment. Take a load off and invest in these high-quality goods.

Butterfly1  Butterfly2  Butterfly3
Searching for a new look? Butterfly Frillies’ corsets, cinchers, and vests are perfect for almost every occasion. These steampunk, couture goods are hand-made by the designer and have been featured by USA Today, Ladies of Steampunk Magazine, and Dark Beauty Magazine!

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There’s nothing like scalemail to really get the fantasy point across, and Crystal’s Idyll is the ideal place to get your fix. With hand-knitted bases to keep the mail from shifting, these epaulets, dice bags, and gauntlets will help you get into character no matter what the setting.

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Planning on cavorting through some fields and forests in the near future? Idolatre might be what you’re looking for. Whether you’re interested in taking on the spirit of a jackalope, a ram, or even a maenad, these innovative pieces will help you blend into the steampunk or fantasy land while also standing out in style.

Sinister1    Sinister3
If it’s plate you’re looking to adorn yourself with, the lightweight armor made by Sinister Metalworks might suit. The helmets, crowns, and chestplates come in styles as varied as Grecian and Orc, and they even do custom jobs for your unique LARPing needs.

For less hands-on fantasy- and steampunk-inspired work, look toward author Elizabeth Guizzetti, publisher Hydra House, and the webcomic Wayfarers.

Check out these GeekGirlCon exhibitors’ websites and watch the blog for more Exhibitor Hall previews! What are you most excited about buying at GeekGirlCon ‘15 this year?

Henry Behrens
“Rock On!”

Halfblood Chronicles Part II

Written by Adrienne Roehrich, Manager of Editorial Services

Possible spoilers for Elvenbane, Elvenblood, and Elvenborn.

Of course, after finishing Elvenbane (Read my review of Elvenbane here), I dove right into the next novel in the chronicles, Elvenblood.

Image by WN Johnson.

Image by WN Johnson.

As is typical of much of the fantasy genre, one issue with Elvenbane is the lack of diversity in the humans presented. While Mercedes Lackey is known for books with homosexual and bisexual characters all the Elvenblood pairings appear to be heterosexual, and it continues through Elvenborn. Everyone also pairs up with people within their own identity: humans with humans, elves with elves, dragon with dragon, and Wizard with Wizard, with one notable exception. Everyone’s gender identity is that assigned to them at birth. And until Elvenblood, every Elf is fair (and stays that way) and every human is white.

In Elvenbane, we were introduced to a group of traders under the control of the elves that I thought were people of color, but in the end, I was left unsure. In Elvenblood, we are introduced to very dark skinned people. These are free folk, nomads who resisted the yolk of the elves and fled to the south when the Elves came. Elvenblood shows them moving back to the north to find grazing for their herds, searching for precious iron, and possible contact with long-ago allies. Unfortunately, the enigma of these people and their roots breaks me out of the story.

In Elvenbane, the location of Prince Dyran’s estate is given as being on the edge of the Mojave Desert. For those unfamiliar, the Mojave Desert is in the southwest U.S. – on the border between California and Nevada. We are led to believe that the elven estates are massive, taking up huge tracts of land and located very far part. But no mention of them reaching across the ocean is made. So it becomes a little confusing about how the elves have enslaved the human race, but not all the human race, and the elves do have borders to their land, but I also find it hard to believe that the humans on other continents would not intervene for hundreds of years to find out what is going on on another continent.

 

I struggled with the geography of this series through the entirety of it. I believe the forest on the edge of Lord Cheynar’s estate are those of the Pacific Northwest that qualify as temperate rainforests due to all the rain described in the books. The lack of description of bodies of water makes this a little hard to swallow, but is the best I can determine.

In Elvenbane, it is mentioned that the elves wiped out all remnants of human civilization so it is impossible to know when the elves came through from their world to this one. It could have been Biblical times, medieval times, or current times. However, the division of racial diversity implies a time when we believed races were more divided geographically. That time precedes white men settling North America, so having exclusively white slaves near the the Mojave Desert seems unlikely.

The people of color also fall into the typical fantasy treatment of being tribesmen. I looked for a critique of the treatment of people of color in the Halfblood chronicles, but I found none. If someone knows of one, please comment. Or, if someone would like to write one, I’ll send you the three books in exchange for your guest post (following our guidelines) here on GeekGirlCon. (Email adrienne at geekgirlcon dot com.)

Book 2, Elvenblood, was a little slower to get through and took nearly a month. Actually, it took me several weeks to read the first 100 pages and then I raced through the remaining 250. The book is shorter than Elvenbane at about 350 pages compared to 566. Elvenblood is also challenging because it starts out with a new set of characters. By the end of Elvenbane, we have a reasonably sized cast of characters, and one dives into Elvenblood to read more about them. However, we re-meet Sheyrena, her mother, and Myre, and are introduced to Sheyrena’s brother Lorryn. It takes 61 pages in the mass market paperback pass before we even get back to Lashana. I have a 60-page rule: if a book is not sufficiently engaging in the first 60 pages, I don’t force myself to finish it. Sadly, Elevenblood barely makes it through my rule. The story presented in those first 60 pages does not fully engage me, but your mileage may vary. In Elvenbane, the plight of Wizards and humans is sufficiently focused that starting out book 2 with the story of a fullblood Elf, her mother and father, and her halfblood brother, along with the distasteful Myre, is rather off-putting. And I didn’t find the story being presented as attention-grabbing as the beginning of Elvenbane. I persisted because I had enjoyed Elvenbane so much and Elvenblood was beginning to show its potential.

Like Elvenblood, Elvenborn deviates from our main cast of characters at the beginning, introducing us to another elven family – one that has human servants and not slaves (but I’m really not sure how much different this is because it isn’t well described.) We stay with this family for 145 pages of the 382-page hardcover edition of the third book in the series..

While Elvenblood had a brother and sister who shared the limelight, Elvenborn disappoints because it has a male main character. Why did Elvenborn have a male main character after effectively using female main characters previously in the series? These authors both had often written female main characters in other series, so this switch feels wrong to me.

In Elvenbane, the characters get fairly well developed. The characters introduced in Elvenblood are not as well developed and those who continue on from Elvenbane do not get much more development. In Elvenborn, the main character, Kyrtian, gets a lot of character development. However, Lorryn, one of the main characters from Elvenbane, almost gets typical female treatment, seemingly having been introduced only to become the romantic interest for Shana, the original lead. I don’t actually have a problem with this, although I prefer to have good character development for as many characters as possible in books I read.

Like Elvenbane, in Elvenblood the quest and character development are the majority of the story. The conflict comes late in the novel and is short; the denouement basically leaving you hanging and ready for the next novel. Elvenborn differs only in that the main conflict is resolved with little conflict, but rather with political maneuvering fairly early in the book. This smoothly transitions the book to what appears to be the focus for the next books in the chronicles.

I like all the mystery and potential theories this could go to. This is why a fourth book was so eagerly awaited and fans of the series were hoping for it. We have the inevitable human slave rebellion on earth, the enigma of the magic-sucking constructs that kill, the fleeing Elves that didn’t make it (I have a theory about the Elves and those contraptions that is not the conclusion drawn by the story’s occupants), Triana’s potential storyline, and the thing that came through the Portal from Evelon and took her. Is that thing what the Elvenlords of Evelon became after all this time? Is it something new? And, of course, the opening of the Portal from either side means there could be a war between Earth and Evelon later on in the chronicles.

Despite the issues I’ve described in these two reviews, I am again excited for any follow-up chronicles in this series.

 

Eric Mack
“Rock On!”

Board Game Review: Small World

I was recently introduced to a new board game that I’d never heard of before. It was quite entertaining, enough to drive me to share my experience with everyone else! With the typical (and reasonable) constraints of allowing for 2-5 players ages 8 and above, Small World is a game that will keep you captivated and on the edge of your seat for about an hour with the continuous shift in activity. It’s a game of rise and decline, conquest and defeat, and excitement for all of the players!

You’re about to be reminded that “It’s a small world after all.” No, I’m not talking about the incessant little robots of Magic Kingdom that sang and danced around your boat as your naive mind wondered what this chorale had to do with Disney World in the first place. Not to mention, Earth has about 510 million kilometers of surface area, which in no way could be considered small! In this case, however, we’re talking about the fictional world (Small World) occupied by Elves, Giants, Orcs, and Sorcerers, and despite the clicheness, it is indeed a small world. It is made up of small chunks of land—certainly not enough to accommodate for the 14 Fantasy Races that intend to conquer and thrive there. Because they can’t all inhabit the land at once, your goal is to build an empire of your race and eventually dominate all of Small World in only 10 short turns!

The Cover of Small World

You will be allowed to select the race you wish to play, paired up with a random Special Power that gives your race a unique benefit. You then use your Race Tokens to take over various regions of the map—in turn, forcing other races away. You must try to cover as much of the land as possible, for each region occupied at the end of your turn allows for the acquirement of Victory Coins, the system of points used to determine the winner at the end of the game. It’s not as easy as it sounds—conquering a region takes two Race Tokens, of which your supply is limited. If a region is already occupied by another race, it takes an additional Race Token for every enemy token already present in the region, and an additional Race Token for each obstacle on the region. This makes it difficult to conquer regions occupied by many Race Tokens and obstacles, so it is important to build a large and powerful army of your race if you wish to take over a large amount of land.

The game board: The land of Small World and its various regions.

Equally important as conquering land is defending it, for other players will be trying to take over your regions as you do to theirs. Sometimes your Active race (more on “active” races below) ends up being spread so thin that it is unable to recover, and the best option is to adopt a new race and begin a new conquest. In doing this, you must first send your original race into Decline. This means that their special powers are eliminated, they are reduced to only one Race Token per region, and the tokens are flipped over to reveal the greyed-out “In Decline” side. Those left on the board will still gain you Victory Coins during scoring, but they are not Active and will typically die out quickly. It is always an emotional time when it becomes necessary to force your own Declined race off of the map to make room for your newly expanding Active race. After 10 turns of continuous rise and fall of supremacy, each player will total his Victory Coins to discover the ultimate winner—the dominator of Small World!

The main reason I like this game so much is that the Fantasy Races / Special Powers combinations are always so unique. They are randomized before the game, and each one is completely original and creative, allowing you to get sucked into the fictional atmosphere. The first time I played, I started out with the Ratmen race and the special power of Spiritry. My Ratmen had no benefit going for them other than their sheer number, and their Spirit ability allowed them to stay on the board after Decline no matter how many races I had on the board. At first I didn’t realize how useful this would be, but it ended up causing my many Ratmen to inhabit a majority of the board to start, and they remained scattered about for almost the entire game—a victory point gold mine! The combinations are different each time, be it Stout Orcs, Commando Elves, or even Flying Skeletons, so the game is always kept fresh and lively.

Some of the Special Power/Fantasy Race combination signature banners

Even though this game has a lot of rules and situations to consider, it is very simple once you get the hang of it. The time goes by quicker than you would expect as you mourn and celebrate the losses and successes of your races and attempt to hinder the other players’ expansions while augmenting your own. You learn quickly that it is most certainly a small world. The one catch is that no matter how many times you play the game, you will always have stuck in your head the little “Small World” Disney tune that has haunted your mind since you were a child. Say what you will, but that song is awfully catchy!

Intrigued by Jaden’s review and want to try conquer a Small World yourself? Check it out at your local game store, one of our community business partners, (get a discount by becoming an individual sponsor) or other online retailers.

You can also watch a lively game of Small World hosted by Wil Wheaton for Geek & Sundry’s Tabletop show.

Shiboo_Krismer
“Rock On!”

Geek About Town: Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival

From the desktop of Adrienne, GeekGirlCon Copywriter:

EMP Museum and SIFF hosted the 7th annual Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival (SFFSFF) on February 4th. SFFSFF accepts and solicits film submissions from around the globe. Since 2005, the SFFSFF has showcased a wide variety of films and filmmakers that range from the humorous to the awe-inspiring. And there were quite a few female directors this year. You can see the director bios on the EMP Museum’s website.

The 2012 SFFSFF showed 21 short films from the United States, Spain, Bangladesh, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia that included a mix of animation, special effects, and live-action films. SFFSFF is a juried festival, and this year’s winners were:

Grand Prize: The Hunter and the Swam Discuss Their Meeting, Emily Carmichael, USA
Second Prize: Time Freak, Andrew Bowler, USA
Third Prize: Terminus, Trevor Cawood, Canada
Audience Favorite: Time Freak, Andrew Bowler, USA
Douglas Trumbull Award for Best Special Effects: Terminus, Trevor Cawood, Canada

I won’t spoil any of the films in this post. But, I’ll give you some of my impressions and some links to find out more below.

The Audience Favorite winner, Time Freak, is also nominated for an Oscar this year. It is funny look at the discovery of time travel and the little things you can accomplish with it. For any Seinfeld fans, it is as if George Costanza figured out time travel.

The Grand Prize Winner, The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting, also takes a humorous approach to its fantasy theme. This film presents us with very, very awkward dinner conversation. Who knew fantasy couples had these types of moments?

Terminus won for best special effects and placed third in festival. In this film, a man is stalked by a concrete megalith to an unfortunate end. The film has a very 1970s feel adding a stark atmosphere to the short. The megalith is a mix of effects including motion capture and prosthetics and creates an eerily realistic creature.

All the films were really strong, as usual. A few of my personal favorites were Decapoda Shock by Javier Chillon (Spain), Carta a Julia by David González Rúdiez (Spain), The Captivus by Casey Tebo (USA), and Madame Perrault’s Bluebeard by A.J. Bond (Canada). My picks are all over the place as far as themes and tastes.

Decapoda Shock is about a man who returns to earth from a space mission half-man and half-crab. When the hombre-cangrejo discovers that his fate was part of a sinister plot, he seeks revenge. Mayhem ensures as he seeks to foil the plot of those that caused his transformation and stole his family. Chillon taps into revenge flicks, spaghetti westerns, and exploitation films with some screaming guitar to make a very memorable short.

Carta a Julia is a humorous look at an older couple who trade the hustle and bustle of city life for the serene Spanish countryside. As the narrator writers a letter to Julia, she recounts Paco’s encounters with some aliens that he says want to destroy the Earth. Rúdiez gives the audience an alternate look at impending alien invasion, one without panic and massive explosions.

The Captivus is about two men working in isolation for six years on a rescue spaceship with only each other for company. For one of them, the mission is over and he is scheduled to return to civilization. It may not be a welcome change. Tebo uses audio effects on the character voices to demonstrate they are speaking in binary. This proved to be a cool effect that worked well pull you into the environment.

When Madame Perrault discovers the manuscript of Bluebeard in her husband’s desk, she is transported into a fantasy world where she experiences the fates of all those missing wives, perhaps revealing her own doubts about her own marital safety. Madame Perrault’s Bluebeard is visually rich and wonderfully dark as created by cinematographer Amy Belling and director A.J. Bond.

Complete SFFSFF 2012 List

First Screening:

Time Freak, Andrew Bowler (USA)
Decapoda Shock, Javier Chillon (Spain)
Chorebot, Gary Omelchuck (USA)
Attack of the Killer Mutant Chicken, (Murgi Keno Mutant), Nayeen Mahbub (Bangladesh)
Dolls Factory, (Fábrica de Muñecas), Ainhoa Menédez (Spain)
Matter Fisher, David Prosser (UK)
The Comet Chronicles, Wade Chitwood (USA)
Terminus, Trevor Cawood (Canada)
Oliver Bump’s Birthday, Jordan Canning (Canada)
Dead Happy, Nicky Lianos (UK)
Mahahula the Giant Rodent of Happiness, Nomint Motion Design (UK)

Second Screening:

The Dungeon Master, Rider & Shiloh Strong (USA)
Birdboy, Pedro Rivero & Alberto Vasquez (Spain)
The Epiphany, SJ Chiro (USA)
The Captivus, Casey Tebo (USA)
Crystal Jam, Leonie Savvides (Australia)
Protoparticulas, Chema Garcia Ibarra (Spain)
The Sierra Project, Gabriel de Urioste (USA)
Carta a Julia, David González Rúdiez (Spain)
Madame Perrault’s Bluebeard, A.J. Bond (Canada)
The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting, Emily Carmichael (USA)

With each year, SFFSFF gains in popularity. The show sells out. Sometimes there are encore showings. And the films get better and better. Keep your eyes out for 2013! You won’t want to miss it.


Adrienne Fox
Copywriter
copywriter@geekgirlcon.com

Shiboo_Krismer
“Rock On!”

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