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Pandora's Star and Neutronium Alchemist series are amazing, and Great North Road is one of my Hamilton favorites. His earlier Greg Mandel books is also very good reading. Fallen Star on the other hand is one of the few very mediocre PFH books. I simply found it boring and unengaging.

Well, it also put petrol on the everburning pile that is geek genre definition wars, which obviously is what we enjoy on our spare time. 1000 post threads about wether a book is 2nd gen cyberpunk or proto-transhumanism is part of our culture, darnit! ;-)

I was referring to publishers hard locking books in rigid genres.

I don't agree with you, and thankfully we are allowed to have different opinions and perspectives :-)

That genres are arbitrary and defined from many different perspectives - not the least marketing, profit and consumerism - is true. I still mean that using general analytic methods for defining good litterature shoots beside the target when judging wether a genre book is good from a genre...

It may well be that Dune lives up to objective and traditional literature analysis standards of being a good book. Genre literature however doesn't necessarily need to live up to those criteria to be seen as a good book within the framework of the genre. Sci fi in general is about raising the...

This is really an impossible question, with the plethora of subgenres and great books. But if I have to pick one, I must say Neuromancer, just because of how it made my head explode in my early teens. Neal Stephenson is still my number one author though.

I have lots of grog nagging about settings etc, but that is more a Wizards than a system problem. But I have one major overarching problem with 5e. D&D is a combat focused system, and still the combat is incredibly dull. Monsters are boring bags of hit points, there is very little meaningful...

Well, the talk says that D&D is epic adventures in fantastic worlds, while the walk is that the game system still is made for killing perma-evil orcs in non-sensemaking dungeons.

Ok, so I'm a sci fi dude at heart, and I still think the absolute majority of fantasy I've (tried to) read are formulaic, overlong snoozefests. But that also mean that I've only read a fraction of fantasy literature compared to broad sci fi and other genres and classics, and there actually are...

Found Jack Vance’s Durdane trilogy while idling through some book cases in the attic. I’ve just finished rereading the short books, and remembered why I love Vance style so much. Good stuff!

As a forever GM with a long time perma-table of players, I try to nuance stuff depending on system and campaign framing, but generally move in the R spectrum with fade to black sex. In our current Savage Pathfinder Absalom campaign with morally dark-grey PCs, the players push stuff over the X...

It's interesting that I started with The Fantasy Trip, Runequest and Traveller, and didn't encounter D&D and level-up-style gaming until later. We played Traveller for a long time, having fun with adventures in space, with no levels in sight. Like many, I had a hiatus for career and family, and...

I'm an old guy who mostly play traditional systems with built in advancement, like D&D, PF, BRP and my favorite Savage Worlds. And then it's easy, just pace the progression to what fits the campaign. For games with no or diffuse advancement, like Traveller, I find it a bit more tricky with...

Starfinders mechanics is not for me, while Pathfinder 2e is an amazing system. So a PF2 compatible SF2 could be amazing. I will definitely follow the development.

I love the Infinity engine games, even though Icewind Dale 2 is tedious. As to BG3, characters and story may feel like a tabletop rpg and D&Dish, but the playstyle and mechanics is still very much a Divinity game. So I will pass on that one.

It's kind of weird that they start with framing BG3 as a bigger and better DOS2, since that has been and is an anti-selling point for me - I don't want a D&D rpg that don't follow D&D rules and that plays way too much like DOS2. But I'm sure it will sell a gazillion more copies at release, and...

I have a very soft spot for old space opera with wavy-haired pipe smoking heroes looking like Gregory Peck, sassy damsels in distress, and thinly disguised commie tentacled aliens of pure evil. And the Lensman series is at the peak of that sub-genre. A must read for any sci-fi fan imho, even if...

Just so you know, there are other large rpg forums with major sections for non-d20 games. And it's possible to use and frequent more than one forum. That way one can get a wider perspective on the different games that are played.

We used Owlbear Rodeo for D&D and CoC, very good for what it does. But with Savage Worlds/Savage Pathfinder as our current goto system, we went to Foundry hosted on the Forge and couldn't be happier, it works incredibly well. Now, as a very non-techy perma-GM I took a planned four month period...