Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
His readings of Flannery O'Connor's books are specifically called out in his Wikipedia entry. Guess he's done some 400+ audio books
What are you reading in 2024?
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Bronson Pinchot narrates a ton of audiobooks. He's shockingly good at them.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
“Try to imagine for a moment that Batman were real. A powerfully built man in cape, tights, and mask walks among us in broad daylight, recognized everywhere by his adoring fans. Anywhere else, this is a situation out of a comic book. In Mexico, however, they ask for his autograph, then pay money at the local arena or movie theater to watch him do his thing, be it real or imaginary.”
I don't play Hero System, but they put out some great supplements (same for GURPS). I tore through Lucha Libre Hero in the last week. It's a great supplement...as a brief overview and introduction to the genre for those unfamiliar, but it felt like a bit of a let down compared to some of the other Hero genre books. Especially Pulp Hero. I'd say that book is the definitive guide to pulp in RPGs. Lucha Libre Hero might be the definitive by default as it might be the only RPG book on the genre. There are RPGs and RPG books about wrestling, sure, and a few of them touch on lucha libre, but this is the only dedicated lucha libre book I know of for RPGs.
To be clear, the book is not so much about lucha libre as a sport and playing in the milieu, it's about the amazing luchador films that mostly came out in the 60s and 70s. Imagine super low-budget superhero movies with masked luchadores as street-level do-gooders. There's no/not much flying around on wires or trips to Asgard (that I know of), rather think of Luke Cage...in Mexico...with a luchador mask...using wrestling moves...fighting against witches, robots, alien invasions, cults, evil luchadores, mutants, mobsters, and mad scientists. It is so much fun.
The book's written well, the authors clearly love the genre, they provide some great pointers to bring the genre to life at the table, and give further resources on the genre. The source material section in the back might be worth the cover price alone. A three-page chronological list of what looks like every single lucha movie at the time or writing. The authors' top picks for what to watch. A bibliography that will point you directly to The Mexican Masked Wrestler And Monster Filmography by Robert Cotter, which is a fantastic resource unto itself. The Cotter book gives brief descriptions of most lucha films including plot details that make most readers' heads spin. It's an absolute gold mine for insane plot ideas. And of course Lucha Libre Hero provides a massive glossary, including both for general wrestling terms and lucha specific terms.
But, it's a Hero book and has a trimmed down set of the full game rules, along with all the mechanics heavy widgets you need to build characters, etc. So a lot of the page count is eaten up by mechanics you won't need unless you're playing Hero. And the book's only 266 pages. If you like Hero, like luchador movies, or just like epically weird stuff, Lucha Libre Hero is worth picking up.
—Robert Cotter, The Mexican Masked Wrestler And Monster Filmography
I don't play Hero System, but they put out some great supplements (same for GURPS). I tore through Lucha Libre Hero in the last week. It's a great supplement...as a brief overview and introduction to the genre for those unfamiliar, but it felt like a bit of a let down compared to some of the other Hero genre books. Especially Pulp Hero. I'd say that book is the definitive guide to pulp in RPGs. Lucha Libre Hero might be the definitive by default as it might be the only RPG book on the genre. There are RPGs and RPG books about wrestling, sure, and a few of them touch on lucha libre, but this is the only dedicated lucha libre book I know of for RPGs.
To be clear, the book is not so much about lucha libre as a sport and playing in the milieu, it's about the amazing luchador films that mostly came out in the 60s and 70s. Imagine super low-budget superhero movies with masked luchadores as street-level do-gooders. There's no/not much flying around on wires or trips to Asgard (that I know of), rather think of Luke Cage...in Mexico...with a luchador mask...using wrestling moves...fighting against witches, robots, alien invasions, cults, evil luchadores, mutants, mobsters, and mad scientists. It is so much fun.
The book's written well, the authors clearly love the genre, they provide some great pointers to bring the genre to life at the table, and give further resources on the genre. The source material section in the back might be worth the cover price alone. A three-page chronological list of what looks like every single lucha movie at the time or writing. The authors' top picks for what to watch. A bibliography that will point you directly to The Mexican Masked Wrestler And Monster Filmography by Robert Cotter, which is a fantastic resource unto itself. The Cotter book gives brief descriptions of most lucha films including plot details that make most readers' heads spin. It's an absolute gold mine for insane plot ideas. And of course Lucha Libre Hero provides a massive glossary, including both for general wrestling terms and lucha specific terms.
But, it's a Hero book and has a trimmed down set of the full game rules, along with all the mechanics heavy widgets you need to build characters, etc. So a lot of the page count is eaten up by mechanics you won't need unless you're playing Hero. And the book's only 266 pages. If you like Hero, like luchador movies, or just like epically weird stuff, Lucha Libre Hero is worth picking up.
Last edited:
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
Can't vouch for the game from experience, but itch.io has Crime-Fighting Luchadores, and they just had a supplement kickstarted late last year. Adventure in the works too by the sound of things.
Oh, and someone made a Pathfinder 1e luchador class writeup eight years ago, which is on DTRPG if you search for luchador there.
Last edited:
Again, been a while, because life has persisted in being weird, but the last three books: There Will Be Stars by Billy Coffey: Groundhog Day crossed with Jacob's Ladder in the mountains of western Virginia with an ending that's almost as big a cop-out as What Dreams May Come, attempts at making the novel a story about faith and redemption only make it worse; The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, an unnecessarily complicated novel about a Borgesian infinite library that happens to contain the novel, and people seeking to preserve it either by walling it off or by flooding it, also has elements of Barker in it as well as a queer romance that spends most of its time being very much subtext; On Earth as It Is on Television by Emily Jane, a kinda witty title attached to four hundred pages of deeply annoying characters and a message about friendship and love at the end.
I've clearly been in a bit of a slump, book-choice-wise, lately. Maybe I need different reading glasses ...
I've clearly been in a bit of a slump, book-choice-wise, lately. Maybe I need different reading glasses ...
Clint_L
Hero
I just read Monument Men, a history of the scholars tasked with tracking down and recovering art stolen by the Nazis even while WW2 was still happening. It was pretty excellent, if you're a history buff.
I'm also currently reading Chain Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. If you've read Bitch Planet, it has a very similar premise: a dystopian near-future where prison inmates are used for gladiatorial combat. It's also an allegory for the current American prison-industrial system. Really well written, with strongly developed, flawed characters confronting a dehumanizing system. A page-turner and a thinker at the same time. Strongly recommend.
Last week I finally read the Miss Peregrine trilogy. I liked the first book best, and appreciated the fusion of Victorian grotesque with more standard YA tropes, but by the end it was falling back on protagonists and antagonists doing inexplicable things to make the plot go, and deus ex machina resolutions to sticky situations, so...eh. I was glad to be finished as it had lost its charm by book 3.
I'm also currently reading Chain Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. If you've read Bitch Planet, it has a very similar premise: a dystopian near-future where prison inmates are used for gladiatorial combat. It's also an allegory for the current American prison-industrial system. Really well written, with strongly developed, flawed characters confronting a dehumanizing system. A page-turner and a thinker at the same time. Strongly recommend.
Last week I finally read the Miss Peregrine trilogy. I liked the first book best, and appreciated the fusion of Victorian grotesque with more standard YA tropes, but by the end it was falling back on protagonists and antagonists doing inexplicable things to make the plot go, and deus ex machina resolutions to sticky situations, so...eh. I was glad to be finished as it had lost its charm by book 3.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Finished ERB's Llana of Gathol. Thought it a ton of fun. Not sure if I'll read the final book in the series, considering half of it was written by ERB's son and the other half is an unfinished story by ERB. I realized that I've been idly reading the Barsoom series for about 20 years. It feels weird to be at the end of that journey.
Now I'm giving William Morris another try with The Wood Beyond the World. The last attempt I made on Morris' writing, it was a DNF.
Now I'm giving William Morris another try with The Wood Beyond the World. The last attempt I made on Morris' writing, it was a DNF.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
It's very skippable, honestly. Llana will leave a much better taste in your mouth if you want to remember the series fondly.
Just like reading that last Tarzan book was for me - or the last Wolfe, the final Dumarest of Terra, or...well, lots of things, really. Gets more common as we get older and start outliving our authors, too. The fact that I've read my last new David Drake story is still pretty jarring.
Old Fezziwig
Well, that was a real trip for biscuits.
I finished Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution this afternoon. I found the prose charming and couldn't put it down. Robin Swift is a clever echo of the Dickensian orphan heroes, dialed up to eleven. He's clever and likable while being monstrously selfish and self-righteous. Unlike Pip or David Copperfield, I'm not entirely sure that he's grown by the end of the novel, and his certainty in the correctness of his actions at the end is unpleasant.
But I also found it to be enormously frustrating. Kuang's treatment of her conclusions is kind of facile, and I had a sense that she was kind of begging the question a bit. I agree with her premises, but found the conclusions jarring. She mirrors the isolation of the Babblers in her presentation of the setting to the audience (we're as removed from the outside world as they are), which is clever structurally but undermines the climax of the novel and some of the conclusions the characters come to. I'm assuming that this is in part because she's concerned with being too didactic or polemical or engaging in misery porn, but the book ends up feeling didactic and polemical because it mostly ends up just telling the audience that things are fubar. I don't think that's wrong, but it didn't work for me. My other quibble was that, for a novel set in 1830s England, there was a weird sense of modernity to the prose. One character refers to a "narco-military state" and another carries a "messenger bag," which both felt like very contemporary phrases.
Finally, I also felt like it was derivative — we've seen these sorts of stories before recently (there are echoes of Harry Potter, The Magicians, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) and cynical — the violence of the conclusion is presented as inevitable. Which may be true, but is also very depressing. So many modern books and films suggest that there's no problem too large to be solved with sufficient explosives.
But I also found it to be enormously frustrating. Kuang's treatment of her conclusions is kind of facile, and I had a sense that she was kind of begging the question a bit. I agree with her premises, but found the conclusions jarring. She mirrors the isolation of the Babblers in her presentation of the setting to the audience (we're as removed from the outside world as they are), which is clever structurally but undermines the climax of the novel and some of the conclusions the characters come to. I'm assuming that this is in part because she's concerned with being too didactic or polemical or engaging in misery porn, but the book ends up feeling didactic and polemical because it mostly ends up just telling the audience that things are fubar. I don't think that's wrong, but it didn't work for me. My other quibble was that, for a novel set in 1830s England, there was a weird sense of modernity to the prose. One character refers to a "narco-military state" and another carries a "messenger bag," which both felt like very contemporary phrases.
Finally, I also felt like it was derivative — we've seen these sorts of stories before recently (there are echoes of Harry Potter, The Magicians, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) and cynical — the violence of the conclusion is presented as inevitable. Which may be true, but is also very depressing. So many modern books and films suggest that there's no problem too large to be solved with sufficient explosives.
Similar Threads
