[AndreaDraco83]

Before delving into the beautiful Chapter Four, these are my thoughts about Chapter Three and, particularly, about the Hunting Club!

The Wolf's Club

As you may know, Jane Jensen's upcoming adventure, Gray Matter, will feature an ensemble cast of characters collectively known as The Lamb's Club. In the blog entry introducing this club, Jane wrote:

Mysteries often have great ensemble casts. Think of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” and “Murder on the Orient Express”. Or, you know, Love Boat. I modeled my cast in “Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned” on this template. You have an isolated location, a fixed group of diverse people, and a reason to suspect each one of them. That’s inherently creepy.

The same concept can be easily adapted to Die Koniglich-Bayrische Hofiagdloge, and the club members are, in my opinion, the best supporting characters of the entire game. I'll take a look at each and everyone of them, posting my thoughts and impressions as I originally envisioned them during my first playthrough.

Hermann Von Aigner: owner of a large and successful butchering plant and a brewery, Von Aigner always struck me as the least likeable of the club's members. Slimy and shady, his behaviour always seemed to me like highly suspicious, especially when it comes to his reaction to Grossberg's name. More importantly, the fact that he usually hangs around Hennemann made me think of Von Aigner as a parvenu, a social-climber desperately trying to elevate himself out of his class (middle or grande bourgeoisie) and into an upper echelon of society.

Friedrich Von Glower: the Baron is my favorite amongst the club members. Better still, he's my favorite character of the game and, probably, of the entire Gabriel Knight series. He had me when he first appears and approaches Gabriel saying: "Gabriel. Like the angel" with his soft, charming voice. Handsome and alluring, Von Glower is a real gift of a character. When he explains the club's philosophy to Gabriel (more on this in the next paragraph), he's so passionate and enthralling that I, as a player, immediately felt a huge respect for the character, an almost reverential deference. Everything in his composure, in his attitude, in his polite manners speak of true nobility, of a long-forgotten noblesse oblige that was, in centuries past, the true mark of European aristocracy.

Frank Hennemann: when I think of Henneman, I always feel sad for him. I found him likeable from the very beginning, because - with his jovial attitudine and his love for beer, his seemingly inexhaustible good humor and his reddened complexion - he always seemed to me like an innocuous person, a true lamb ended up in an hunting club full of competitive people almost by a total fluke. He's good-natured and simple, and seems to care for little other than his beers and his lavish appetite. And isn't this harmless appearance what makes him a perfect suspect? During my first playthrough, I kept thinking: "He must hide something. Something big" and the fact that I couldn't figure out what his secret was, it's what Jane rightfully calls inherently creepy.

Stephan Klingmann: OK, let's get it out. I hate Herr Doktor. I always found him an unbearable, snobbish know-it-all with ridiculous pretensions and a pathetic walk-on member of the club, who was trying way too hard to emulate his betters, Von Glower in primis. When we see him during the end of Chapter Three, tossed around and about the club by the other members, quickly ditched in favor of more prominent members, Klingmann always seemed to me like the proverbial fish out of the water -- and I didn't feel the slightest pity for him.

Otto Preiss: my favorite after Baron Von Glower. Preiss is wonderful. What's not to like about him? He's excessive and sleazy, voracious and arrogant, suave and manipulating, mellifluous and wicked. His hedonistic approach to life is predatory and dangerous, his manners and apparels fancy and dainty -- and he has stunningly mesmerizing eyes! Jokes aside, I'd really like to know more about Preiss and I would have adored to see him in court, because he must be a real shark of a lawyer, a feared opponent for every prosecutor, and the questionable moral compass that must make him a legal eagle is what makes him another great suspect.

Garr Von Zell: while he's usually, at least amongst the Gabriel Knight community, the least favorite character of almost everyone, I like Von Zell. His fall from (Von Glower's) grace is a tragic one and I always found both evident and heart-wrenching his desperation and his hatred of Gabriel, who suddenly arrived at a club and took Von Glower's attention away from him, the former enfant prodige, the former favorite son, so to speak. I may be biased, but it always seemed clear that Von Zell was in love with Von Glower and that he couldn't come to term with Von Glower sudden indifference toward him.

Philosophy: Apollonian and Dionysian

This philosophical dichotomy has been brought to widespread acclaim by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in his work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872), whose first draft, interesting enough, he gifted to Cosima Wagner in 1870. In Greek mythology, Apollo is originally the patron numen of arts - especially poetry, music and dancing - and, as such, he was recognized as the head of the Muses. His first attributes, in fact, were the lire and the kithara, later joined by the bow and arrow, to symbolize not his hunting prowess, but his hard-and-fast justice, since he was his arrows to bring blights upon the lands whose people bothered the Olympian gods (i.e. Troy). In the late Hellenist period, he supplanted Helios as the god of Sun and, broadly speaking, of light. By extension of this metaphor, perhaps, he was also indentified as the patron numen of prophecy (hence the ritualistic tripod often associated with him), and defender of the Pythia of Delphi. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the god of ecstasy and pleasure. Often called "the god that comes", Dionysus or Bacchus (as he was known by the Romans) is also the deity of theatre and fiction. Most importantly, when he's called Eleuthérios, he's worshipped for the gift of ritual madness by which he frees his adepts from the strict boundaries of society. In Nietzsche's use of their dichotomy, the contrast between Apollo and Dionysus "symbolizes principles of wholeness versus individualism, light versus darkness, or civilization versus primal nature." The wikipedia page I linked has a nice comparative sheet of the attributes traditionally identified with the two deities, and even a quick look will tell you in which pole the Die Koniglich-Bayrische Hofiagdloge's philosophy falls.

After Chapter Six, I'll resume this dichotomy and talk about Camille Paglia's later take on the subject and about the inner struggle between these two extremes in many characters, especially Gabriel.

Occult Lore: On Vârcolaci

They have different origins; some say that they are the souls of unbaptised children, or of children of unmarried parents, cursed by God and turned into vârcolaci. [...] They attack the heavenly bodies, they bite the moon, so that she appears covered with blood, or till none of her is left. [...] When the spirit of the vârcolac wants to eat the moon, the man to whome the spirit belong begins to nod, falls into a deep sleep as if he had not slept for weeks, and remains as if dead. If he is roused or moved the sleep becomes eternal, for, when the spirit returns from its journey, it cannot find the mouth our of which it came, and so cannot go in.

I. Otescu, Beliefs of the Roumanian Peasant concerning the Sky and the Stars, translated by Agnes Murgoci in The Vampire in Roumania, in The Vampire: A Casebook, edited by Alan Dundes, The University of Winsconsin Press 1998, p. 24.

Note: vârcolaci are often considered the bridge between vampires and werewolves, and A. Murgoci writes: "It is curious that the word vârcolac, or vrykolaka, which is the general name for a vampire in Macedonia and Greece, is only exceptionally used to mean a vampire in Roumania, and usually means an animal which eats the moon. Vârcolac means werewolf, and in Roumania it is the wolf or animal signficance which predominates[/i]" (A. Murgoci, ivi, p. 25)

Chapter Three in the Novel

Gabriel hesitated. He ought to say no. He was on a case, after all, and he should review his tapes tonight, burn some little gray cells. Beside which, he really couldn't afford to get too personal with any of these men, not until the case was over. But the idea of going back to the cold, tragic heart of the Huber farm could not hold a candle to the warmth and luxury of Von Glower's living room, a cooked meal, even the effortless charm of the man himself.

Jane Jensen, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, Roc 1998, pp. 134

Stay tuned for Chapter Four!