Search results

I know the name, but nothing about it.

The setting being saved can be a neighborhood, a town, a county, a river valley, etc, of course.

I will have more to say about this book later, but the end of chapter 54 and alll of chapter 55 of Christopher Ruocchio’s The Demon In White achieves Tolkien’s eucatastrophe in a way I haven’t encountered in a good while. As Tolkien defines it in “On Fairy-Stories”, the eucatastrophe is the...

Gaming inherited arguments from wargaming, science fiction fandom, and constructed language fandom, among others. Oh, and reenactment fandom. And… As Clive Barker said at the opening of Weaveworld:

Those both sound very promising. If someone builds this out, I’ll kitbash it into QuestWorlds or Fate or something. :)

A blend of history and myth for the ambience of the setting, protagonists and antagonists driven by epic passions that may or may not be in any way moral, magic as dangerous, tempting, and inevitably personally costly, a high baseline of general weirdness independent of any grand cosmology or...

I periodically do a rant about how arranging stories in order of internal chronology leads to greatly distorting impressions, and it’s seldom truer than with swords & sorcery. The first time readers met Conan, he was an experienced king. The second time readers read a novel’s worth of Elric, he...

Agreed. If I had the energy, which I don’t, I’d do a Storyteller’s Vault thing on permanent advancement happening only with character age. Typical xp would get you short-term advantages that fade as the crisis of the moment settles. The second half of the project would be a lot of advice on...

I continue to use the library, and many folks on Booktube set up a variety of exceptions: series in progress, books by people you know, and the like. If I had a Worldcon membership this year, I’d make one for the Hugo nominees.

For no particular reason, I decided to start one of Booktube’s 100-book challenges this month. This is about what the name suggests: read a hundred books you own before buying new ones. I picked up a few things on Audible’s sale this month and then started the clock. Dead Silence, by S.A...

Well, thanks nothing to be ashamed of, we all have quirks and fetishes. :) Seriously, though, fundamentally I agree. I recognize many points and zones of contact, but for me RPGs are innately a unique impure hybrid of inspirations that became (is continuing to become) its own thing as much as...

Lately, I’m inclined to say, linked short stories offer a handy format. For those unfamiliar, Nathan Ballingrud’s book Wounds is a particularly fine example, with six stories that turn out to share important things along the way.

I’ll read it, if you do.

The next Dryco book, Terraplane, has the post-Soviet Union with a lot of Big Boy merchandizing. That is, Stalin as a ubiquitous mascot. Also, how about the stuff in Dryden’s safe? Womack really, really knows his esoterica.

I’m another who likes it when it matters in play, but otherwise generally doesn’t care. This is in part a getting-older thing: I’ve now read many cosmologies and contributed to making some, and I have been there and done that. It’s possible to surprise and delight me still, either with a fresh...

The message that people who are willing to cooperate at the hard work of understanding a situation and working out how to respond to it can do better than violence is always timely.

Choose better conversations? :)

i plan to do the same too, and will work out how much I skip as I go along.

Thanks. :)

I’d reject the dichotomy, having learned a little bit about the conservation and restoration of art and architecture. Pool and also having lived in Portland, OR, and seen the evolution of the work to protect and then restore the main library to modern safety standards. There’s basically never...