The meteor dun it

Interesting tie-in (I swear I didn't know about this in advance): the meteor dun it.

When the Deccan Traps were mooted, their problem wasn't that volcanoes are a killer. Far be it from this blog. It wasn't even that volcanoes can wipe out life on a whole continent. I've always suspected they can; and that Yellowstone may well have held back the development of mammalian life on this here land Parias.

But the dinos weren't stuck on one single continent. They were on MANY continents. Cretaceous Earth was the exact opposite of Pangaea. Why wasn't there a continent of dinos like, as of 10 mya, there existed a marsupial continent (Australia) and an armadillo continent (America)?

This new study solves that. Maybe the Traps did for Decca, floating by itself in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But only Chicxulub, striking at the angle it struck, an alien from another world, had the power to do for us all.

The balance of power

Still on Niles 1986. Let's talk BATTLESYSTEM opportunities.

The drow (#28) and duergar are both based further down, and the gnomes have abandoned the upper deck entirely. The drow and duergar dispute #9, desultorily; both against the jinxkins and pech. The duergar and gnomes (#22) dispute #7/23 more intently. The pech and jinxkins seem more insistent on the upper layers, disputing #12. There are also illithids #11, and more of these plus derro #29. Many races dispute #27 (tho' not jinxkins, gnomes, or illithids).

The player-characters, if down here, could well be dragged into the #12 conflict. This will drive off the jinxkins - who'll have nowhere to go but #9. I could easily see either the drow or the duergar using the jinxkins against the pech; or all sides uniting against them.

Alternatively, suppose the party reunites the drow from #4 with those in #9. That would destabilise the cavern too. If either the pech or the jinxkins get on the wrong side of that, the losers must go to #12.

The pech could also get thrown out of #14 - or, more likely, surface heroes (the PCs) could throw out the kuo-toa, leaving the pech free to help their brethren elsewhere. If either happens, expect the jinxkins to lose #12 not to make headway in #9.

Douglas Niles' Deepearth

I am still going through the Old School D&D stuff around here. Last night, I looked at Douglas Niles' Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, 1986. This is before Forgotten Realms. Certainly before Mines of Bloodstone.

This region is 84 miles across, maybe 60 along. The maps are tilted, to fit onto the page and also to approximate the third dimension. The surface realm is a typically prosperous frontier of a human kingdom. Mountains loom north, volcanic. Maybe there's an ocean behind them. One problem: the surface map contradicts the toplevel Deepearth map inasmuch as there's a surface lake in the latter (#1), not on the former (#2). And the lake is heated by lava from below #18-21.

This Deepearth is on the "Known World" plan, many subterraine races jostled together.

It is all interesting and imaginative, a worthy successor to the D series. I don't know to what extent anyone has run a campaign there. One issue is that there is so much. Also, how can a party of seven people stop an evil on the scale of Aboleth Civilisation. I suppose that's the problem Carl Sargent tried to solve with Night Below - the story that made him catatonic.

If we allow that the Deepearth aboleth are, like Cthulhu, a slumbering beast, we might have a shot at the rest. We'll also ignore area #2's northeast.

First, a constraint on the regional history. Long ago, an earthquake sucked the lands about 20 miles west of the present main city down to layer #10. The inhabitants survived, but are now savage and cannibal. The central edifice of those lands was a temple; that temple survives too, but is now taboo. Also surviving: vaults, armouries, prisons. The present culture is Aztec: the gods are vengeful, population is controlled by sporadic flower-war tournament, the losers are eaten.

There's another group of humans, numbering about 20, in region #5. This is where surface expeditions wash up - from the lake, area 1. I imagine the kuo-toa have been steering unlucky fishermen down here. Driving these assholes further downstream seems a priority for surface heroes. Beyond that: convincing the kuo-toa downriver, #14 to #15, to lay off. It really does seem that Night Below developed from this line of attack. So, maybe the adventure here is the Night Below sequel, where the kuo-toa are rising again. This time we have pech on our side.

If we stick to the west of the map, we get a whole network of caverns. #3 is where cavelings raid humans, and where adventurers win glory and treasures.

Further south, #4 is below the surface city. It has a starving hydra, (occasionally) surface bandits, and fifty equally-hungry outcast drow. The drow are "evil". I deem them more sinned-against than sinning. Maybe trade with the surface could be established, and a deal to offer up bandits to the surface's justice.

Centuries ago, duergar built #6. Contemporary with #10's downfall, the water-table shifted and the duergar left. Not before raising a host of mummies, though. These cataclysms didn't affect the gnomish (#22) irrigation of #9. Also the duergar (#24) maintain their presence up in #9. The duergar don't drop back to #6 to use its forge, implying they're no longer on such terms with their own ancestors. The dead dwarves may or may not be aware of, or care, about the lich down in #26.

Gasping for air

We've all read about how the oxygen crash in the Permian led to the dinosaur resurgence in the Jurassic. Here's the latest. It leaves out some steps but, Twitter.

First to explain is how anything survived the end of the Permian - at all. That's the era "when pigs ruled the world". I don't think that the complex bird respiratory-system evolved for the crisis. More likely immediate quick-fixes evolved for the problem, like barrel chests on Andean people. Of the whole reptile clade it wasn't just dino ancestors that survived; we're still here. As are crocodiles and lizards. Besides larger lung capacity I imagine iiiit allll gottt sloooowwwerrr.

I think dinosaurs gradually evolved throughout the Triassic, and only at the end beat out the rivals. [UPDATE 9/18: And there was another extinction just 19 My later.] Low metabolisms all 'round, I think, further implies slow evolution. It did take all the Triassic for something to break out the doldrums.

It seems the Triassic was low-oxygen for a long time. It follows that oxygen-hungry flying insects didn't do well, either. Otherwise I'd have expected flowering plants to appear on the scene earlier than they did.

The mammals of the Cretaceous

The late Cretaceous map looks much like our map, but chopped up. In each continent, different mammals evolved. I'd been looking at the Laurasia group this morning, injecting that into a post thought up last night.

As of 100 million years ago, Africa was an island continent and so were both Americas. The Afrotheres include, today, elephants, rhinos, and hippopotamoi. Not us monkeys and lemurs: we postLaurasians rafted from Europe, etched out a fully arboreal and nocturnal niche there, and thence - well into Cenozoic - rafted to America. Africa's Carnivora likely got there from Europe too.

(South) America, for its part, did get placentals... but for whatever reason, they stagnated. Armadillos and sloths. The slow class, quite literally - which is why they're barely even warmblooded. Seriously, you can catch some nasty bacteria from them leprosy not least.

In America, these placentals shared space with marsupials. Their marsupials rafted to Australia, an even MORE isolated and stagnant land. These continents may as well be Hollow World.

Eulipotyphla

HBDchick alerted her twitter followers to the venomous members of the mammalian Insectivora - the Solenodonts. These critters survive in Cuba and Hispaniola. They had relatives in other Caribbean islands, now defunct.

I'd lost track of these little guys since my schooldays but, since then, they've been deemed paraphyletic. That is, "Insectivora" is a description - describing "fuzzy things that eat bugs"; not a classification. What is a classification is the Eulipotyphla, containing solenodonts and shrews. They split 70 mya.

This split happened in what used to be Laurasia, scattered between (eastern) North America, Greenland, and Europe.

That's before Chicxulub. This was the Dark Age in the synapsid-to-Palaeogene timeline, but we're getting a lot better at it. There's a whole clade of "Laurasiatheria" diversifying 91-76 mya, which gave rise to Eulipotyphla in the first place... alongside ungulates, whales, bats, (most) carnivores. Probably because they were all different island-continents, then still close enough to be mutually raftable. Our rodent-primate group developed in Europe. Our males all share the trait that we have a scrotum, so we're likely a sister or, rather, brother to this lot.

There's talk that the ancestor to all mammals might have been venomous; the surviving monotremes are (famously) venomous.

I liked this idea but then I made the mistake of doing some research. Eulipotyphla venom is convergent. That means shrew venom isn't solenodont venom; they evolved differently (paraphylesis again). Very probably the basal Eulipotyphlon wasn't venomous or, why un-evolve it and re-evolve it.

To find if the basal placental was venomous, we need to look elsewhere. The Eulipotyphla are anti-evidence.

CENTAUR 9/3/2021: Heart's in the right place. Dates, on the other hand... 60 Mya? I mean, I know that other (P/E 55 Mya) boundary was a Thing, but . . .

Gliese 887

This just in: Gliese 887 has planets. Only eleven light-years away; 12th closest if we don't count the brown dwarfs. Jeffers et al., "A multiple planet system of super-Earths orbiting the brightest red dwarf star GJ887", DOI 10.1126/science.aaz0795

The star is a red-dwarf and the two planets have years 9.3 and 21.8 days. Close to a 7:3 resonance, 65.4 days v. 65.1 - but not close enough for Jeffers. There's another periodic signal 50.7 days out, but it's less certain. Jeffers' team thinks this star rotates slowly so the periodicities aren't spinning starspots, which in any case are rare on this one. Proxima Centauri this is not.

Jeffers can only give a minimum mass with this method - it's the star weaving back and forth, not visible light from the planets. Earth masses 4.2 ± 0.6 and 7.6 ± 1.2. The inner one is on a circular orbit (unlike Mercury); the outer one might be traveling on an ellipse.

The inner planet is assuredly getting pounded not just by the star's heat but by the tidal forces. I don't know if its rotation is locked with the star, but we do know it's uninhabitable. The outer one is a more difficult call. To me it looks like a super Venus.

You can tell the authors are most excited about that possible 887d. The system is close enough that we could detect the planets directly.

Tsojcanth, Lesser Caverns

I want to improve the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (again). I concentrate here on the "Lesser Caverns", reached from the surface, in canon by a flight of stairs.

Both the upper and lower caverns are boxy affairs which just so happen to fill up a sheet of notebook-standard paper. I find this cheesy. I have to believe that even in 1982, they found it cheesy. I don't much mind this boxiness in the "Greater Caverns" on account (now) a VERY powerful witch and (demonic) allies helped carve those. But for the "Lesser Caverns" in 1982, this was an opportunity that Gygax missed.

First step is to graph it in the abstract:

First off, A is feeding water - and fish - to this whole system. We're told it's flowing at least a mile from the west, where there's a 60' high chimney to the surface. The claim is that it "twists and turns" but it really doesn't, as it only does so for a mile, which is the same as the crow flies. Beyond that, the water fills the passage and it's impassible to man. Likely there are several tributaries feeding water into it.

The first chamber is, also, 60' below the surface entrance. As far as caverns #1-12 go (they are all caverns), all these denizens must share the same route out for basic sustenance - mainly thinking here of #9's trolls and 12's giants. I mean, they could eat fungi, cave-crickets and bats... but. I was thinking that some passages between caverns could be valleys on the surface - like in module B2 - but I decided against that.

I am less concerned with the carnivores on the other side of big lake 13-14. The lacedons in #20 assuredly swim up the river as they must. As for that gorgimera in 16-18, I expect he does much of his hunting in that big lake west and 400' down from D.

Anyway, the "Lesser Caverns" can be de-boxied whilst keeping the basic plan intact. Otherwise my main change would be to expand the central lake.

The pech of Tsojcanth

In Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth's upper layer #6's pech are here from elsewhere. I mean, obviously; they sure weren't there in 1975...

In published S4 the pech are digging their way - somewhere. The map says, down; the text and the illo say up, so majority rules. We're not told if these pech're from this system's lower-reaches or from some other network or even another country. We do know as a rule they're not much for surface-travel.

So: they're from below. My choice is the lake west of D.

The pech are the only race capable of using that boat moored at #13 - if we transplant 13 to the ledge between 10 and 11. It's usk-wood, so came from the surface originally. But why wouldn't the pech appreciate the gift that the river gave them.

As for why the pech're prepared to fight the renegade #3 golem (for a fee) but not the other beasties here: one guess, is it was their golem to begin with. Such would be helpful in keeping the giants away whilst the diggers work. It is unlikely to have come up from the lake, so maybe the pech dealt with their fellow Earth-lings, the #18 dao. But you know how those deals go.

Okmok

Confirmed, now, is an eruption in Alaska 43 BC. This confirms a climate downturn in the north around that time.

The media is matching this to the death-throes of the Roman Republic, basically the second season of HBO's Rome. Frankly I'm not seeing it. Bad news in Europe does not always equate to bad news in Egypt, which is fed by Ethiopian mountains far to the south. If anything the Ptolemies should have come out stronger for this. Unless Nubia was gettin' frisky which we know it wasn't.

I'd look elsewhere for my Hot Takes Of Interest. Was there harsh weather in Armenia in the mid 40s BC? in Parthia? Best of all - in the early Han state?

Another Neander

Chagyrskaya, a mere 106 km from Denisova, has yielded another Neander genome. A full one, like Altai and Vindija.

Altai and Vindija are different: Vindija is close to the Neanders who mixed with us, and Altai was an entire dead-end. This one is a Vindija-like.

I expect they are ALL dead-ends, that the main mixing with our ancestors occurred in the Near East. Mostly what this does is fine-tune the Neander genome basal to Vindija and to our ancestors. For those interested, it also shows how Neanders spread through Eurasia - very small bands. No match for us, and not really a match for each other.

They know what they are doing

US infections are still trundling along, whilst other countries have controlled it. I don't think it's stupidity; nobody is so retarded as to deny masks work. It's malice.

Trump's base believes that this disease strikes mainly nonwhites and people in urban areas. People on the Left - and since I'm naming and shaming politicians I'll call 'em out, Whitmer and Cuomo - think it hits fat old sticks-in-the-mud (mostly white).

As to what we do about a population of malicious infection-vectors, I'll leave to other bloggers.

Nobody rides for free

Saraceni brings a 1988 Tuva 600 BC burial, of a horse-nomad adolescent. At the time, the body was presumed male. However, the ancient Greeks reported that "Scythians" - their catch-all for all the nomads north of the Cimmerians - put their premarried girls on horses as well.

Since then we've had European evidence (Devitsa, Pokrovka) for female warrior burials in Scythian contexts. (The Germans enlisted women in infantry, but the Greeks didn't meet these.) John Man and Adrienne Mayor wrote the most-popular summaries lately although I think Man's book was more focused on the Scythian culture overall.

The Tuva girl, it happens, had a wart on her face at the moment she died. If Herodotus is to be believed, and he often is, a Scythian woman had to kill three enemies before she could marry. Knowing men I am certain this rule was waived for the pretty ones - those girls would go out in a team with men in it, and the men would cover up for her failed shots. I'm sure the liars were adequately compensated.

This one, not so pretty, actually had to get out there and fight. May Kök Teŋri be merciful.

Non-Septuagintal Greek in the NT

The New Testament, written in koine, somewhat famously used a translation of the Old Testament rather than free-form quotations. This isn't always the Old Greek: Paul, for one, used the Masoretic Jeremiah 10:1-16. I'd thought at least the Christian Torah was "Septuagintal". Vridar says no, from Max Wilcox, "Upon The Tree" (1977), doi 10.2307/3265329.

Wilcox (and Vridar) talks about Deuteronomy 21:22-3. In the present canon and in the LXX, a wrongdoer can be punished after death, by (what we'd call) gibbeting. This was done (in Greek) on xylon, the sort of wood Abraham used for sacrifice. Saint Paul argued in Galatians from a reading that the punishment was done by the wood, of which crucifixion is one method. The Syriac Peshitta agrees with Paul; as a Christian text (I'd say "pace Vridar" but - hang on), this is usually assumed an intrusion from Paul.

Wilcox reaches to the Dead Sea Scrolls, finding there evidence that in the first century AD, contemporary Jews did understand Deuteronomy as being crucifictive.

Wilcox finds this Targum, or even original Hebrew, behind certain of the creeds and speeches in Luke's Acts. Normally Luke quotes LXX, in fact aping its "And It Came To Pass" style. Not here though.

I'd bring here the episode of Alexander Jannai crucifying Pharisees. In this case, the Peshitta is here reliant on some Targum - originally Jewish (so Vridar's right!). An antirabbinic Targum. That offers one reason the Masoretic text didn't keep it.

As for which reading was original: preceding Jannai, was the long book of Reigns, including an account of King David gibbeting his enemies. As a "deuteronomic history", Reigns had its protagonist performing deuteronomic hudud. The canon is, thereby, witnessed in pre-Maccabean times. And it was preserved through Maccabean times: the Dead Sea Genesis itself was Masoretic (although whether the chief baker was hanged is not preserved in its 40:22). Qumran preserved the Temple Scroll and Jubilees, but not this chapter in the Deuteronomy which they used.

The Great Cookout

Arizona State reports the Great Dying coincides with a 252 Mya coal-burn in Siberia. The PDF is free to access: Lindy T. Elkins-Tanton, S.E. Grasby, B.A. Black, R.V. Veselovskiy, O.H. Ardakani and F. Goodarzi.

What killed the planet was a rise in the equatorial ocean temperatures to 40 C, "104 F" for Americans. 96% of ocean species died, including the trilobite. This event coincides with a supervolcano in the Siberian Traps up in Tunguska. But why would a volcano warm the planet? Aerosols are supposed to chill it, nu?

The paper tells us what other researchers have noticed, but which data hadn't got to the rest of us: by 252 Mya this planet - and Tunguska in particular - had already laid down its most iconic fossil-fuel deposits. That's what "the Permian Basin" even means to Texans, not to mention the "Carbon-iferous" before that. Tunguska had a massive coal field right where the magma-chamber was forming.

Elkins-Tanton's team finds proof that this magma did, indeed, ignite this the greatest coal-and-oil field the planet ever had or ever will have. More, burning cinders rained down far from Tunguska, ending up in what's now Canada (admittedly they are closer than they look on a map, it's Arctic today).

Life on Earth was already teetering from the Emeishan Traps' mass-extinction 259 Mya. I wonder if the Emeishan flow had ignited coals of its own.

UPDATE 11/4: Kunio Kaiho, Md. Aftabuzzaman, David S. Jones, and Li Tian.

Before the Gaels came to Eire

Neolithic Ireland is in. 3200 BC, which predates the Bell Beakers. These guys think they were a bit inbred.

The Newgrange community had displaced a unique Mesolithic isolate population although some of them did breed a bit together, rather like Neanders bred with us lot a bit. After that, their leaders bred with themselves. Seriously, we're talking brother-sister here.

This matchup never ends well in the wild, so the researchers assume they were Divine Kings like the Pharaohs.

Aryan origins

Now I'm back to blogging, and have filled in five of the ten days that were, let's get caught up:

Eurogenes today is looking at Aryan origins. As you may have gather'd I am fine extending "Aryan" all over the R1a family (again: I am not Aryan); but I can certainly understand why some aren't so blasé, especially in India. Davidski here concentrates on the classic Indo-Iranian subset - which, perhaps, we might call the split of the first Aryans from the R1a family.

Davidski looks at Fatyanovo-Balanovo (early sample I0432) and Unetice (sole sample S11953). The two sites shared almost the same material culture - meaning, the same language. Genetically they are both R1a. But S11953 in Slovakia is Balto-Slavic. I0432 is Iranian with a lot of European hunter-gatherer. I0432 likely had moved northeastward. Given the location I'd mark them as a Scythian offshoot like the Ossetes.

The F-B culture, starting 2500 BC, would coalesce northeast into the old Caspian headwaters, called the "Abashevo". I take it that the old Hungarians and Bulgars pushed them out.

Both, to me, look like outliers. S11953's descendents likely spoke some "South West Prussian" language long lost to us. Likewise, I doubt whatever Abashevo and even I0432 were speaking left any real issue. What these do give us, is a snapshot of peoples who started out closer together. Somewhere in the western Ukraine, later swamped by their Slavic cousins.

Muqatil's sermon

I'd like to go more deeply into Muqatil's Quran. As Nicolai Sinai writes about that tafsir, the German savant does us all the service of translating the whole of sura 84's exegesis into English.

I find hard to label Muqatil's work as a "commentary" as such, although explanation of the text does happen in it. Muqatil is more interested in sermonising for his theology from the text. He always has the greatest respect for that basis; when, say, sura 67 gets grossly anthromorphic about God, he'll be anthropomorphic too. Also, Muqatil doesn't much cite his predecessors, except God Himself. Traits like this rendered later exegetes suspicious of his work.

Men like Tabari found contemporaries who were better at marking back their own sources. This was often because these first "exegetes" were not even focused on tafsir: often they were jurisprudents, citing past lawyers, where Muqatil was drawing from storytellers or from a pious crib-sheet or simply from his own speculations. And why shouldn't Muqatil? Hadith wasn't his goal.

Muqatil did have a following. His student al-Hudayl bin Habib transmitted his master's opus faithfully, being careful to say "I didn't hear this Muqâtilan" or "X told me from Y that..." where he needed to supplement it. Samarqandi's tafsir used Muqatil heavily. It may be that it survived precisely because it didn't bog the reader in isnads and controversies: it just entertains and edifies.

In al-Hudayl's transmission, Muqatil endorses the canonical Qur'an with no variance in the order or chapters, nor in its text. I do however wonder if that was the order his master intended. The tafsir's expansion of sura 84 draws from other suwar, especially sura 69; and Muqatil presents it all as a response to the unbelievers' comments in Q. 56:47. The Ibn Mas'ud sequence of suwar was also available in his time - it is very nearly available in ours, as witness Codex Mashhad. The Muslims also report an "Ibn 'Abbas" transmission of the Quran, that which organised the suwar in order of their occasions-of-revelation. I can't help but wonder if Muqatil, writing sermons rather than a true tafsir, arranged it similarly. Precisely because he was not claiming to edit the word of his Lord.

It would then be up to succeeding generations to sort Muqatil "properly" - just like the Codex Mashhad. Where Muqatil's base Quran differed textually from the emerging consensus, al-Hudayl would "fix" it. Muqatil was, as noted, becoming difficult to defend in the mosque (although the Muslims wanted to keep reading it). Rather like later Shiism, this tafsir couldn't challenge the Sunni text.

Muqatil's thesaurus

Nicolai Sinai writes about Muqatil's tafsir. Muqatil bin Sulayman was an early Sunni exegete under the first 'Abbasids. He held to the faith-foremost standpoint, arguing for that in his expansion on sura 84.

Muqatil (famously) didn't tell us where he got his own information from. He did have predecessors.

Sinai notes that where Muqatil glosses the text, rather than re-present it (for a sermon or a story), these glosses hold to a pattern. Sinai believes that these come from a dictionary. Some instances, perhaps, explain the Quran's Hijazi dialect to the classical Arabophones - those in Iraq. Mostly I detect an ideologic project: like, where our man turns "idhn" (will) to "amr" (command). Muqatil's God is perfect, so doesn't second-guess Himself.

Jingle Bells

Reindeer domestication has been pulled back. We'd associated the reindeer with the Saami in northern Fennoscandia, in the middle-ages. Now they're finding it among their (very!) distant cousins, the Samoyed-speaking Nenets. Year Zero AD.

This suggests the reindeer was the killer-app in the icier and flatter parts of northern Eurasia, where horses and oxen don't tread. This is what enabled the northernmost "Uralic" peoples to dominate the Fur Road north of the Mongols et al.. Of course they had no cities to raid up there so the various steppe raiders didn't bother.

The dog-sled is another possibility but you have to share meat with ol' Rover, where Rudolph just lives off the land.

Neutronic lifetime

As with the Hubble constant, we're still bickering over the lifetime of a neutron. A free or weakly-bound neutron will decay into a proton, in the "beta" process, thus losing mass. Neutrons, as neutral particles, get measured when bound in a nucleus - where they (usually) don't decay. Not so easy to weigh them, or even detect them, when they are flying around. So how long does it take them to beta-decay into protons, i.e. ionic hydrogen?

Durham University may have a solution: measure the outflow from Mercury and Venus. There's a solar wind, from them. The best Venus and Mercury mission so far was MESSENGER 2007-8. MESSENGER wasn't equipped for this particular experiment, but its old data do prove the viability of such an experiment.

They recommend another inner-planet expedition to sort that out. Although - I do wonder, why not Earth. Magnetic field interference?

WONDER NO MORE 10/17/21: Measuring from the Moon.

Milenia

The Hollow World can also be mined for ideas, for prison-planes elsewhere.

I deem the Milenian Empire - really a Republic - superfluous to requirements. Did it need the protection? Did it need the imprisonment?

I propose Milenia is unjustly cooped up. Although the Empire doesn't fit in Mystara's internal gaol, it may certainly be fit for some other planet's (or plane's).

The PCs discover the injustice done to Milenia and help them break out of it. I suggest that the Christian myth works for this.

BACKDATE 6/20

The Hollow World

The Hollow World setting became part of Known World / Mentzer-BXCMI canon in 1990. It is now a definitive feature of what became the Mystara setting. It was designed as a zoo and/or prison, for select nations of Mystara's past (excepting Blackmoor).

The Hollow World is - arguably - a natural outgrowth of the Known World ethos. The nations in Isle of Dread were artifically juxtaposed amongst one another, sharing only that they be generally mediaeval-themed. If this world was going to house nonmediaeval cultures, it would have to do so on some other continent. And if those cultures weren't to get overrun - or to overrun others - they were going to need to be suppressed by Divine fiat. By the Immortals, in the BXMCI rules.

Personally, I was never sold on the Known World's cheek-by-jowl approach to cultural diversity. The Hollow World at least recognises that problem and does something to solve it. But here we have the problem that nothing the party does, matters.

BACKDATE 6/20

Fixing The Hollow World

I propose, to fix the Hollow World in Mystara, we don't need much. We just withdraw the Immortals' protection. At that point the prison-plane's bolthole is open, releasing Atzanteotl's hordes of Azcans and Schattenalfen into the Shadowlands on up.

PCs get involved where they're to protect some of the more pacifist / fatalist races. Mostly elven, although there's also an Egyptian-themed nation down here.

BACKDATE 6/20

The first Cubans

The Caribbean isn't well understood in archaeology - so the geneticists are having a go at it. Although their stock picture of modern AfroCubanas is wrong and lazy.

The researchers, less lazy, tell us that the indigenous population wasn't just that 800 BC movement from South America. There was also a North American presence, in the western Caribbean starting from 1200 BC in the remains. That would be Cuba and Jamaica, maybe Haiti. In fact there were two intrusions from El Norte. They shared no admixture with the south - the protoCaribs and Arawaks - as can be expected of a severe language-barrier. I suppose that, at first, an agreement was accepted on who got which islands.

The researchers are not telling us which North Americans. There's a wide empty Gulf, full of tropical storms, so our choices are the Florida and Yucatan peninsulae. I'd expect more Olmeclike remains if there was any back-and-forth with Yucatan. So I have to assume, Florida. Florida does have that leading edge of Key West islands, to train boaters. Although, they hadn't ever got to the Bahamas, because the Lucayan found there were just 12th-century Arawak.

The Banewarrens in post-production

Fix it in post, as MacRettin put it in Monty Python - unofficial motto of app-support everywhere. Now Ptolus is going to 5e, let's peek at this part of it.

We're looking at (now) 8000 years of a dungeon full of magic treasures. Several parties - Ghul, dwarves, dark-elves, Pactlords - have lived around it over the span. The doors in and out the outer 'Warrens are passable by wish; people find that out by legend lore. We need to explain how come nobody's yet looted what the party finds. Technically - what the Pactlords find, who've burrowed into the outermost vault first and kicked off the adventure.

How about we propose that some DID get here first. Start with the fifth chapter: outer vault, but not outermost.

One retcon, which isn't even a retcon really, allows that some of the undead in here like #5.17, got in here when still alive through their own curiosity and cupidity - by wish - and then couldn't get out in time. They will have brought their own magic items, likely already evil. And #5's got a warden: Geristranomos in #5.16, albeit crippled. When Geristranomos was whole, it could have stuffed any minor new weapons into #.11; and some of the worst, as new banes, in their own niches. And it could reset traps. We just have to retcon when Geristranomos gets crippled, that is later. For chapter five, this explains why the traps all still work. It allows some turnover through the millennia: some few got out with ancient banes, and others left new banes - which process helps memory of the 'Warrens in the outside.

Ghul will have been the greatest of the Banerobbers. It wasn't in his interest to erase the outermost wards; where he'd figured out how to bypass them, he now had his very own premade treasure-vault. Once he'd taken what he wanted, he simply left behind whatever wasn't worth his bother to keep on his person or to hand off to his boys. Hence the osyluth pods, the vampiric mist et al.. Ghul did have to play cat-and-mouse with the lawful warden. Geristranomos likely was crippled after all that, in an accident. Maybe when Ghul finally bit it.

We must then rule that Ghul couldn't enter the inner vaults even by wish. So Ghul didn't own Danar's key.

As for why #3's outermost stuff is wide open, with no wards: by the above, this was Ghul's way in. The banes here are those which Ghul and his henchmen put in, themselves - and finally, whatever his conquerors put in. Here we explain Tavan Zith being "only" maybe 800 years old instead of 8000. In the process of running down Ghul, the heroes of eld also did some research into Danar's ancient binding-spells (aided, ironically, by Ghul's own research in this field). The heroes didn't finish #3.6/.9 because they couldn't finish.

I could see the dwarves etching a few ad-hoc 'warrens into the Spire over the Dalenguard centuries, up to 400ish IA. These won't have the best wards.

Moving to chapter 8, #8.12 presents a backdoor into the inner 'Warrens. ... from some other plane, at random. This was Sokalahn's doing, trying to get in here by brute magical force. He "failed", as the text points out. So how did the ogre and two orcs in #.32 ever get in? The answer I can come up with is: they didn't, and this description is wrong. Bad Monte, bad!

Then there's the Banemight, if a party member uses it, turning her "evil". That's ... not enough. The key is, what sort of evil. I say that the Banemight makes the caster an immediate servant of the Banemight. She's now morally like a banebrute, or like the dragon Darkstar in her own plane - or like Navanna back at the Vladaam compound. The 'Warrens are her home now; the banes left in it, her property. She might still help the PCs - for the short term - if they are protecting (say) the black grail from the Pactlords. No way is she letting Lothian's crew make off with the sword of lies though. And I'm not sure she'd let the party remove the sealing rod or the staff of shards, either.

We do have to ponder the disjunction in #9.25 - and then the whole of chapter 10. I concede the whole point of this adventure is that even Danar couldn't (or wouldn't) punt banes into some other plane, nor allow someone else to do it for him. As Malkith, I am less sure. Perhaps planar travel became Malkith's sole privilege on Praemal. In which case: here's the way off this rock.

When the Elder Evil is too elder

Aristotle teaches that any good story ends in catharsis: the final confrontation of the protagonist with El Guapo - which might well be the protagonist's personal El Guapo. In the fantasy genre, which is escapist, this is externalised. Stephen Donaldson's Illearth trilogy is a meta-commentary on that.

Either way, Beowulf's dragon ends Beowulf's arc. In fantasy the whole setting is structured around that Elder Evil. Westeros offers nothing beyond its song of ice and fire. That leads to problems where the setting involves men like us: we are new to civilisation. So our Elder Evil can't be too old, either.

George Martin from the outset knew this. He figured it this way: if the evil which hated us from the ancient time is to be confronted, it must be confronted on the terms of ancient technology. On terms of fire, and of the stone of fire which is obsidian.

I've been looking into Monte Cook's The Banewarrens lately. We have an advantage here in that we can actually watch it taking shape in the author's mind. The adventure came out of that genre where the tomb-robber disturbs something he shouldn't. This had already been roleplayed, from the first decade of D&D - famously in Gygax's work: Tomb of Horrors and Lost Temple of Tharizdun. Cook here took his cue from Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane and then The Power That Preserves, that the world's "banes" were collected in one spot.

In The Banewarrens, their collection and interment happened in somewhat-recent memory. We know because the first bane released - so among the last interred - is a mortal, or an elf anyway, born maybe a thousand years back and locked into the outer 'Warrens not long after. So constrained, many of the banes in there are well-within the memory of those taking notes: the local Church remembers a Sword Of Truth, and its enemies want the Black Grail. Also the recent-ish timespan provides some rationale as to why nobody has yet burrowed in there to extract some banes for himself. Cook's backstory on Malkith, explaining how the banes got in there in the first place, is a tragedy of human good-intentions on par with the King Priest of Istar; which Hickman had accommodated into a recent past, so why not Cook for the Banewarrens.

But then this author got hubristic himself.

The city Ptolus exists only because of those 'Warrens, which are visible from miles away in the massive Spire which the Earth herself raised up in self-protexion. The banes in it may well be the worst evils, and the most amount of evils, on this planet "Praemal". Cook sketched all Praemal around the (Donaldson) theme that the banes had to be sealed away, because the forces of good could not easily push them out of the plane entirely. Like Donaldson's Land, Praemal was a prison-planet.

When Ptolus got its full gazetteer, readers learnt that the Spire wasn't under a thousand years old. It was over eight thousand years old. To offer some perspective: our Iron Age is 3000 years behind us; our literate age 5000 years, probably about the same for the wheel and bronze. 6000 BC is barely Chalcolithic. Of course that Sword Of Truth is steel, along with many many banes in there.

Cook kludged this with a civilisational-reset, in Goth Gulgamel. Its builder the "half-god" Ghul was a bane-worshipper. His rampage starts - in the new calendar - in the 440s BE by which we're now 721 IA. He's killed 55 BE. Four centuries under Sauron, Cook figured, should be enough to pound back any civilisation. Goth Gulgamel not only helps the designer to push back the Iron Age on this world, but he's the setting's own Worf: where one's unable to replicate Malkith's career, he builds up Malkith's reputation.

But in answering these questions, Cook opened up more questions. Where Banewarrens could explain how various actors remember banes and lost treasures from a milennium ago, Ptolus makes less easy to explain seven more of these. The best minds of sixteenth-century AD Europe remembered little of eighth BC Babylon or Egypt, and next to nothing before that.

Spells like comprehend languages, legend lore, and commune or maybe even akashics dragged in from Arcana Unearthed might help here. Still. Once you're resorted to magic, you've kludged.

Southern Iberia

A new Surprising Result is out, about the Moorish south of Spain and Portugal. The greater Algarve was Mousterian culture (Neander) until it went Aurignacian (later Magdalenian, finally WHG). Aurignacian is elsewhere deemed later.

We do (now) have a constraint (sort of), in the 70-40kBC southern backmigration, which carried no Neander in the DNA. Southern Iberia lies in Western Europe's way. This hints that no Basal Eurasians - the foothold of African man in Eurasia - could venture past the Pyrenees. So Iberia remained stoutly Neander as Africans colonised other parts of Eurasia. Well into the 40s kBC, all agree.

In southern Iberia, we now are told, the switch was 42 kBC. This "surprised" the team because everyone (who looked here) thought the Neanders lasted longer in Iberia, too.

I'll admit, I hadn't thought to think about Southern Iberia. If I had, I'd have assumed that it's part of the wider Maghreb. North Africa did host Neanders in it. But not, I think, since the Eemian.

I would not, then, expect a Neander presence in southern Iberia to last. The northern Pyrenees, which today hosts the Euskara, would be my choice for a refugium of relict populations. It's that anyone ever assumed that Neanders could hold the south that surprises me.

If It Happens Now, It Happened Then - again. People only get surprised when they get their data wrong.

As a side effect, we do get a constraint on the backmigrational route: by way of the King's Road to Egypt, and of Yemen. The Iberian route was closed.

Grey's Landing

Yellowstone's eruption-history is being extrapolated. So far the winner (by 30%) is Grey's Landing: 8.7 million years ago.

That's good news for North Americans. It means the monster is sliding off into dotage.

It's hard to imagine how life should survive on the Mississippi Basin of this continent if this thing was blasting off every 500000 years, as it was.

Backmigration

GNXP summarises it.

Out Of Africa came back when the steppes up north got too cold and crowded. There was one big move south over the Glacial Maximum, the true winter of our Eurasian subspecies. (Can't say Wagons South, we didn't have the wheel yet.) That one is easy to spot in the modern African genome, being more recent, and bearing Neander DNA.

This one is from much, much earlier than that. "40 and 70 thousand years ago" they say. This constraint is pathetic (pre or post Sundaland?) but it is too late for Toba; time enough had elapsed for the Eurasians to drift from the African baseline. These Eurasians didn't bring Neander DNA.

That, saith Razib, is the profile of the Basal Eurasian, a ghost population hitherto spotted in its contribution to the non-Neander parts of the modern Eurasian (and American).

The periodic table for physicists

Mendeleev's periodic table is for chemists. It's chemists who care that (say) strontium behaves like calcium - and you'll care too if we end up nuking one another. The boxy schoolroom chart still rules, although they're still puttering about how best to present it. Personally I like the spirals.

The Turtle is passing along a table for physicists. This is grouped not by the periodicity of the electron-shell, but by that of the Magic Number which makes an isotope stable. It's something of a return to Mendeleev's original vision of atomic-weight.

As noted if there's a transuranic Magic Number I expect it be held together by an exotic particle, Lambda-Zero being my choice.

How they changed Jeremiah's words

Sarit Anava and crew went looking at the 4QJer MSS, which has Implications on how we reconstruct Jeremiah. 4QJer^b called 4Q71 here, and 4QJer^d=4Q72a, are like the Greek version. Those came from a sheep. Another one 4Q72b came from a cow and therefore is not for the same scroll as a.

More: if 4Q72b and 4Q70 came from a cow, these came from the cattle part of Judaea - nowhere near Qumran. The cow part of Judaea, then, is the part which enforced the longer Jeremiah which Jews and Protestants insist today.

4Q70 even shows how the enforcers worked: "Jeremiah 7:30–8:3" was, there, added in the margin. How very Mount-Athos Levi.

As an aside, we may be done with the buy-bull era. From now on a forger needs find uninscribed vellum from first-century AD Palestine itself. Or at least from the wider Levant. GLWT.

Neutron stars with quarks at the centre

The Finns are still looking at neutron-stars. They are evaluating whether those dense stars' cores are neutrons also, or if they are Quark Soup. They say that neutron cores are hard to explain, so hard that quarks would be easier.

INTERJECT 7/27/22: One difficulty in explaining quarks is that, if the mass of the star is (or gets) too high, a dense core would just go blackhole.

The press-release don't say how it relates to the Argonne experiments, which - I'd thought - did away with the need for the soup.

LOW MASS 10/24/22 This might be a quark star.

Baal against Mawt

OEC points to Al-Jallad. 2015. Echoes of the Baal Cycle in a Safaito-Hismaic Inscription.

For this preArabic poem, there are two seasons, analogous to day and night. There are days and nights of Mawt, and days and nights of Baal. Mawt's season is the hot, dry "summer"; Baal owns the cool, fertile "winter". For OEC, on behalf of old Macedon, Crete and points south are Down Under.

Gnostics aside, Cretans and Arabs never believed they live in the underworld. It hadn't occurred to them that Europe be their underworld either. Every Mediterranean religion agreed that the underworld is a magmachamber (which it geologically is). Rather, once a year the underworld comes to Crete and southern Syria.

This was normative thought in south Syria and lowland western Arabia, before Judaism and outside (say) Egyptian influence. I am inclined to declare it protoSemitic.

Of interest is that this myth is so well-documented at Ugarit. I imagine that a bit northerly for a cycle like this. Although if Minoan Crete went along with it, it might hold for (say) Cyprus and points east. An import from their southeast?

As for the Quran: the poem grants to these two gods their respective season, but leaves alone why. This thought opened up space for an impartial Judge between them. Q. 25:61-2 states that Allâh made the day and night alternate; 23:80 then grants that alternation to Him, and associates that with life and death. Elsewhere Q. 3:190, 10:6, 45:5 establish the alternation as a sign for a sensible people.