Westeros

November is turning into a bit of a boon for fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones, as there’s a number of cool items now available for fans who are interested in continuing to experience the show through various outlets. Most notably, of course, is the fact that the deluxe edition of Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones has been released… and in the US, at least, Amazon.com has an amazing deal—60%

40% off!

And at that price, you’ll get not just Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones (you can read our review of it here), but also scrolled maps based on HBO’s version of the maps of the setting (which are in some ways quite different from The Lands of Ice and Fire), a gold-stamped case… and, perhaps most interestingly of all, a companion book containing season one and season two storyboards by artist Will Simpson, storyboards that promise to reveal scenes that were planned but never filmed, never made it to the screen, or made it to the screen in much-altered form. Truth be told, the price for the set is worth it just for this book alone.

We should have an interview with the writer of Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones, the always welcome Bryan Cogman, to provide his insights into the deluxe collection.

And of course, that’s not all that’s going on this month, even as Game of Thrones is winding down with its last few days in Iceland.

Over at the Making Game of Thrones production blog, an interview has been released with Jonathan Barrass, SFX floor supervisor who works with the Wolf and Dragon units that have been filming in the UK and will soon be filming in Iceland.

Some interesting bits are mentioned along the way regarding season 3 scenes that he’s working on. It’s all mysterious, but some of these are perhaps worth speculating about (beware spoilers from the third novel):

Calendars are a popular item, especially with the holiday season practically around the corner, and for fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones, it only follows suit that the Game of Thrones 2013 Calendar (Order: Amazon US, Amazon UK) would be of interest.

This year’s calendar, produced for by Andrews McMeel Publishing, has already garnered some great reviews over at Amazon, and we can attest to the quality of the paper stock and the printing. Although there is the quirk that the calendar’s images are all drawn from the first season (due to the peculiarities of the production and printing cycle in relation to the time when second season materials was available), it’s all quite strong imagery of a number of the actors and actresses that populate the show, from Emilia Clarke as Daenerys to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jaime Lannister.

One of the interesting things about acclaimed HBO shows such as Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, and Deadwood are the way that actors from one HBO production might appear in another one down the line. Recent examples include Dominic Chianese, who played Junior Soprano, has a small role on Sopranos-alumni Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire or Kim Dickens, Deadwood‘s Joanie Stubbs, as Treme‘s struggling chef Janette Desautel.

So it’s no great surprise that Game of Thrones actors are appearing… although, strangely, they’re not presently appearing on HBO shows, but instead on shows from HBO’s sister-channel, Cinemax. The trend was started by the excellent action-thriller series Strike Back, with no less than three actors—Iain Glen, Liam Cunningham, and recently Charles Dance—appearing on the show.

But now the newest Cinemax action series, Hunted, has its own actors from Game of Thrones making an appearance: Stephen Dillane is a regular, in the role of Rupert Keel… and now Patrick Malahide, who had a brief but memorable appearance in the second season in the role of Lord Balon Greyjoy, is playing a significant role.

With filming in Morocco a wrap, it’s time for the last leg of season 3 filming for HBO’s Game of Thrones. And where else, but not-so-sunny Iceland,

Via RÚV, we learn that filming is set to begin in the area of Kalfaströnd (seen in the image to the right, though rather earlier in the year) in the area of Mývatn. 270 cast and crew members are involved, including approximately 70 local extras. The article also seems to suggest that Dimmuborgir (what a terrific name—makes me think of Tolkien’s Dwimorberg) was being considered as an additional shooting location, although line producer Snorri Þórisson of local production company Pegasus Pictures believes this unlikely due to there being too much vegetation.

Þórisson adds at the end that there’s been talk of the production coming back to Iceland for a prospective fourth season.

Additional photos of the Myvátn region can be found over at Reykjavik Travel.

[Image Source: Klasar at Kálfaströnd / timandkris / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

Just a quick note that the last week or so of our time has been taken up by the extensive work needed to upgrade Westeros.org’s content management system—Expression Engine—from the 1.x we’ve been using since around 2004, to 2.x—and we’ve finally brought up the site live.

Nice. Cyanide has released a brand new DLC for the Game of Thrones RPG (X-Box, PC). Not just featuring new items, weapons, and armor, this DLC actually adds two hours of content to the game in the form of a quest that goes “Beyond the Wall”.

It’s presently available for the X-Box and PCs (I’m guessing this doesn’t mean it’s available on Steam yet). A few screenshots can be found here.

Although the game may not have been an unabashed critical hit, one thing worth noting is that just about everyone who’s ever played it seems very impressed with the story and its ability to capture the tone and themes of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. From the look of these screenshots for the new DLC, it looks like they may be adding a deal more depth to Mors Westford’s already-complicated history. Should be worth checking out.

By way of Tom Akel of MTV Geek, we’ve been pointed to MTV Geek’s latest interview with George R.R. Martin, and it’s an amusing one. Recorded at this year’s past Worldcon, the interviewer asks GRRM to give his views on various proposed match-ups between characters and creatures from A Song of Ice and Fire against characters an creatures from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It’s frivlous amusement, and one does learn a thing or three about some of the characters along the way, such as what level of prowess Martin accords to Jaime Lannister and who counts as a “real wizard”.

We’ve placed this interview, along with many others, over at the So Spake Martin collection. Enjoy, and if you have any quibbles with Martin’s take on the various match-ups, feel free to comment!

You likely already know that we have a Facebook page, but you may have found that notifications of new items there have become rarer… or, worse still, that when you investigate the page directly, you find a lot more content being posted than you’ve seen in your news feed.

The reason for this are certain changes Facebook has made to how updates are sent along to those who like your page. Where before 100% of all updates were shared, now only 10 to 20% of followers see any particular update at any particular time. There is, however, a way around this that Facebook has made available: interests.

To add Westeros to your Interests, and get all updates in your stream, you can either create and populate an interest list as per the linked instructions. A more direct and immediate way to do it, however, is to go to the page in question,  , or alternatively you can visit the page, hover over the liked buttons, and select “Interests..” Name your interest list, add the site, and you’re done—you’ll get all of our updates, at least for as long as Facebook allows interested followers to see them all via this method.

A couple of updates from GRRM at “Not a Blog” point out that Subterranean Press—one of the best genre small presses—has issued a couple of his books in limited editions recently. One of these, of course, is A Dance with Dragons, with art by Marc Fishman. At the time of Martin’s posting, it seems a handful of the numbered books remained ... but that seems to no longer be the case. Linda and I received our copies recently, and they’re as handsome as you can expect; the book has been split in two volumes, which share slipcase, and Fishman’s art is very fine (you can see much of it at Fishman’s Facebook gallery).

Besides that, a few copies remain of the limited edition of Martin’s first novel, Dying of the Light, with art by award-winning artist Tom Kidd. Dying of the Light is an interesting novel in that it’s set in Martin’s first detailed setting, the “Thousand Worlds” science fiction setting, and it contains clear signs of the influence of Jack Vance as well as themes and ideas that would remain central to Martin’s work right through the A Song of Ice and Fire series. There’s even one character who combines elements that would later be seen in the Hound and the Knight of Flowers. It’s a melancholy, romantic work of science fiction, and very much recommened.

First it was Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody making an appearance, and now via EW we have word that Coldplay’s drummer, Will Champion, has a cameo spot as well.

What would that cameo be? Well, James can’t say anything more than he’s a drummer…

Makes me think of a little quote… “The drums were pounding again, pounding and pounding and pounding.”

Had meant to post this one last week, but this, that, and the other (including behind-the-scenes work involving upgrading our CMS to a shiny new edition which is taking a lot of time) delayed it. But, now, here it is, a video that’s something of an addendum of addendum to our last video as I give a rundown of the military strength of the various regions of the Seven Kingdoms, according both to what is explicitly said in the books and what can plausibly be deduced:

Making Game of Thrones has a fun update with a lot of data about things both mundane and bizzare related to the production of Game of Thrones. It’s primarily focused on this season, but some numbers from past seasons do slip in…

Some of the ones we found more interesting were the amount of fur and leather used by the production (over 30,000 square feet!) and the number of frames shot to date (from October 5th, minus whatever was being shot in Croatia at the time ... which amounts to roughly 260 hours of footage, which would have to be sifted through, cut, and edited down to create not quite 10 hours of footage. And that’s with seven weeks of filming left, so one images there’d be even more footage by the time all is said and done.

The technical feat of organizing and doing all that is certainly a good reason why the show has won so many plaudits on the technical side. Can’t quite even imagine the logistics of it all…

For those of you who’d like to more easily browse the A Song of Ice and Fire forum on your mobile iOs device, some good news: Invision has now made their Invision Power Board app entirely free of cost.

It works both for the ASoIaF forum and any other Invision Power Board-based forum (at least those that are upgraded to IPB 3—possibly it’ll work with IPB 2 forums as well), and is quite easy to use.

And if you want something a bit more fully featured, or your mobile device runs Android or Blackberry, there’s Tapatalk. It supports a wide variety of forums, so long as they have the Tapatalk plugin installed (as we do). The app itself costs a small fee, but we have a number of forum members who enjoy it, so it’s worth a try if the IPB app isn’t to your taste or not available for your device.

A smaller role, maybe, but the name always had a ring. Thanks to a fan on Twitter, we’re now aware of the fact that actor Jamie Michie is apparently listed as playing the role of “Steelshanks”—it’s Steelshanks Walton in the books, but likely has been reduced to Steelshanks for the show—in the upcoming season of Game of Thrones. Steelshanks Walton is a no-nonsense man-at-arms in the service of Roose Bolton. Will his role on the show be similar to that in the books? We’ll have to wait and see. One does note that IMDB seems to have had some user putting him into the final four episodes of the season, but that’s another wait-and-see thing, I expect.

Scottish-born, Michie has been in a number of film and television productions in the UK, including Ken Loach’s 2010 film Route Irish.