[Review] Rêve the Dream Ouroboros (Long)

[Francois Levy]

Malcontent Games server temporarily down

Regrettably we found out this morning that our co-locator had their Internet connection summarily canceled by WorldCom. We were given no notice of this, and are scrambling to have our site (http://www.malcontentgames.com) back up as quickly as possible. In the meantime, please bear with us. We hope to have our site back up as quickly as possible, hopefully within a day or two. Please look for us again around January 29th or 30th. If our resurrection date slips beyond that, we?ll be posting here and at other reviews of Rêve.

We regret any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

 

[Gez]

The English title was a bit too arcane, so I searched for what "ouroboros" mean, and it's not inappropriate, actually...

http://abacus.best.vwh.net/oro/ouroboros2.html

 

[Francois Levy]

right. the ouroboros is a wyrm (dragon, whatever) biting its tail. it is commonly cited from ancient Greece onward as a symbol of immortality. the characters of Rêve are in a sense immortal, and furthermore they are so by virtue of being dreamed by dragons.

the ouroboros is also an apt metaphor for the game itself--or most RPGs for that matter--as our games are open-ended.

also, in Norse mythology the midgaard serpent (a kind of ouroboros) is the "middle earth" serpent--and an apt symbol for the Dreaming that Rêve characters inhabit.

and finally and personally, E.R. Edison is one of my favorite fantasy authors--not a direct link to Rêve de Dragon, but they both inhabit similar universes.

esoteric? perhaps. but not without its own poetry.

 

[Sammael99]

For what it's worth, my homebrew translation was called "A Dragon's Dream". It had three good selling points in my book :

* It was a more or less literal translation of the French title,

* It was reminiscent of "A Midsummer Night's Dream",

* The initials spelled ADD

 

[Francois Levy]

Malcontent Games server is BACK UP

Regrettably we found out January 28th that our co-locator had their Internet connection summarily canceled by WorldCom. We were given no notice of this, and scrambled to have our site (http://www.malcontentgames.com) back up as quickly as possible.

The good news is we're back up! Thanks to heroic efforts by our internet service provider, Maiatech (http://www.maiatech.com), the Malcontent Games web site (http://www.malcontentgames.com) is up and running. It may take a few more hours for our new DNS to propagate, so not everyone may immediately have access to us. We apologize again to all the visitors who tried our site in the past two days and could not find us. We hope you come by again now that we are back up and able to take orders once again for Rêve: the Dream Ouroboros.


__________________
François Lévy
publisher and translator
Malcontent Games
mailto:francois@malcontentgames.com

http://www.malcontentgames.com

Malcontent Games
the home of Rêve: the Dream Ouroboros
an oneiric RPG by Denis Gerfaud

 

[mmadsen]

and finally and personally, E.R. Edison is one of my favorite fantasy authors--not a direct link to Rêve de Dragon, but they both inhabit similar universes.

I'd just like to second this recommendation of E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. (Available from Amazon UK.) From the book description:

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was published, reviewers saw that there was only one book with which it could legitimately be compared: E.R. Eddison’s classic fantasy adventure The Worm Ouroboros.

 

[Francois Levy]

Eddison

And as good as The Worm Ouroboros is, IMHO his incomplete Zimiamvian trilogy (Mistress of Mistresses , A Fish Dinner in Memison, The Mezentian Gate) is even better. OOP, but well worth finding and reading:

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/5582/eddison.html

 

[mmadsen]

Mistress of Mistresses

And as good as The Worm Ouroboros is, IMHO his incomplete Zimiamvian trilogy (Mistress of Mistresses , A Fish Dinner in Memison, The Mezentian Gate) is even better. OOP, but well worth finding and reading:

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/5582/eddison.html

Mistress of Mistresses is also available from Amazon UK. If you don't mind paying a little more for shipping, there are some great books available from Gollancz in their Fantasy Masterworks series.