Severina Blue

WG12: Vale of the Mage (1989) is a jarring return to form after the three previous modules. The difference is immediately apparent just in the heft of the book — this is a 64-page booklet, a big full color map and a cover screen. Compare that to the 32 pages and nothing else of the “funny” scenarios.

The first chunk of the book is a sourcebook for the title region, one of the few spots mentioned in World of Greyhawk that was mysterious enough that I recall folks being excited when this showed up on shelves, though some material on the Vale and its inhabitants appeared in Greyhawk Adventures. The titular mage is a somewhat evil but reasonable fellow who is working toward becoming a shade. His best (only?) friend is Tysiln San, the drow woman on the cover. She hails from the Vault of the Drow and it is interesting how different she is both from the original (cartoonish) depiction of Drow and the newer, more elaborately developed Drow of Forgotten Realms. Chaotic Neutral and loyal and loving to the Mage, she seems more of a cultural outlier than Drizzt.

The rest of the book is the scenario, which is basically a hexcrawl through the Vale hunting necromancers who failed in a coup attempt and fled. The idea is to either eliminate them or beat them to the Mage and convince him to deal them justice. This is mostly an excuse to get entangled in emergent adventures in the Vale.

One of my favorite bits is a new monster, the Grist, also called a True Gargoyle, immediately recognizable because they have four arms and permanently attached wings. They feel like a direct refutation the dopey gargoyles of Gargoyle.

May I?

"The Daleks" 10/10 Yep that's them.

"The Dalek Invasion of Earth" 8/10 Just a little marked down because the story isn't about the Invasion per se. That already happened. "The Dalek Occupation of Earth" would be more precise.

"The Chase" 9/10 It is about that but that is also a game show.

"The Daleks' Master Plan" 7/10 They're doing a bunch of stuff in this. The title implies only one plan. Need more clarification.

"Power of the Daleks" 10/10 great double meaning

"The Evil of the Daleks" 7/10 not wrong but also any Dalek story could be called this.

"Day of the Daleks" 5/10 There are at least two different days in play in this story.

"Planet of the Daleks" 3/10 That would be Skaro actually, whereas this takes place on Spiridon

"Death to the Daleks" 6/10 I like the imperative voice here but the story fails to deliver on this intention.

"Genesis of the Daleks" 10/10 That is exactly what happens.

"Destiny of the Daleks" 2/10 bears very little relation to anything going on here. Fundamentally a backward-looking story, and these sleepy ramshackle Daleks don't seem destined for much of anything, frankly.

"Resurrection of the Daleks" 2/10 Really misses the mark. There is a resurrection in this story but it's pretty unambiguously not of the Daleks. "Resurrection of Davros" would be a more accurate title. Or even better "The Resurrection of Davros by the Coward Eric Saward"

"Revelation of the Daleks" 2/10 Once again the verb in the title is fulfilled by Davros, not the Daleks! Sure hope someone got fired for that blunder!

"Remembrance of the Daleks" 4/10 Not much better I'm afraid. It is a nostalgic story so Remembrance is at least vaguely relevant, but it's not really the Daleks either being remembered or doing the remembering.

"Dalek" 10/10. Clean, simple, right on the money. That's a Dalek alright.

"Bad Wolf". 3/10 And we whiff it again. While the phrase "Bad Wolf" is indeed central to the cliffhanger reveal, it's not related to the Daleks, or to anything at all. It's a self-fulfilling tautology. The actual words are irrelevant. Could have been anything.

"The Parting of the Ways" 9/10 now this is more like it. Not only are there multiple partings of ways between multiple characters, every atom in every Dalek parts ways from every other! That's so much parting!

"Doomsday" 6/10 Again points off for vagueness. This could be about anything.

"Daleks in Manhattan" 10/10 There they are!

"Evolution of the Daleks" 8/10 doesn't succeed but that is what they're going for

"The Stolen Earth" 9/10 Yep that happens!

"Journey's End" 4/10 Come on. Literally the only person whose "Journey" Ends is Donna and that of course gets reversed. Vague and inaccurate.

"Victory of the Daleks" 5/10 sure they achieve their stayed goal in this one episode but thats pretty well undermined by the fact that nobody likes these Daleks and they get retconned out of existence within a couple years

"Asylum of the Daleks" 9/10 Straightforward. Only knocking a point off because there doesn't seem to be much mental health care going on here

"Into the Dalek" 10/10 that is what happens!

The Magician's Apprentice 4/10 We're stretching here. Name based on a one-time gag and not related to the Daleks anyway

The Witch's Familiar 6/10 this one is set up better but still isn't about Daleks

"Resolution" 7/10 A New Year's Resolution is made! But it's something the Doctor would have done anyway

"Revolution of the Daleks" 0/10 This is complete nonsense. The Daleks are cops and then the other Daleks come in to be cops to the cop Daleks. Nothing is revolutionary about this. Nothing

"Eve of the Daleks" 9/10 Yeah this one works. It's New Year's Eve and there's Daleks.

He knows.

He has always known.

Actual quote:

"I don't want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor's voice, and I don't want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip's world is diminished. 'Calvin and Hobbes' was designed to be a comic strip and that's all I want it to be. It's the one place where everything works the way I intend it to"

This was in the 1990's, pre-AI, pre- Chris Pratt, pre- Cinematic Universes, and if he was opposed to it then, he sure as hell wouldn't be okay with it now.

^^^ I wonder how much algae will still be there for Trump's July 4th MAGA rally.

The Trump administration is now dumping hydrogen peroxide into the reflecting pool. It's not exactly having the desired effect.

Chris Hayes says the pool is more like "Kermit the Frog green" than American flag blue. He also outlines how corrupt the original Trump pool renovation deal was.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis

Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/

Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.

Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:

https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/

That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.

Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.

ONE WEEK until Broads and Broadswords Vol. III preorders are over! You can place your order by clicking the link in our bio! ⚔️💖

ALSO we have officially sold out of our Volume 2 Bundle!!!!

College of the Augustales, Herculanuem.

X Men Red if the writers weren’t cowards.