What are you reading in 2025?

[overgeeked]

About halfway done with No-Prep Gamemaster 2E. I liked 1E with a few caveats so wanted to take 2E for a spin. Some of the problems with 1E were fixed, some not. What’s expanded from 1E is mostly good. I like and agree with most of his advice so would recommend the book. The major flaw is despite repeatedly talking about how important player agency is he also suggests the atrocious for player agency quantum ogre as a solution for making sure prep doesn’t go to waste. Ugh.

Finished this last night. A peppering of decent advice through the second half of the book. Worth the read to reinforce what others have said better. Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying and Return of the Lazy DM have far more detail and far more actionable material that covers the same ground. The closest thing to “unique” advice is read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies and TV shows to fill your head with cool scenes and situations you can steal. And that’s advice as old as the hobby.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Thanks to recommendations here I've now finished Fever Beach, Carl Hiaasen's latest, and it is pretty good, and very up to date (it came out in May and is set in 2026, leading up to the midterms). He's as funny and acerbic as ever, and it's even fairly upbeat at the end.

(Twilly Spree is a slightly annoying overly effective protagonist and in that he's a worthy successor to Clinton Tyree, who at least was never the protagonist, more that GMPC who comes and saves the PCs when they get in over their heads.)

Yeah, I am over Skink at this point. He was a cool weird character the first few times, but overstayed his welcome long before he showed up in one of the YA novels.

 

[jian]

Finished Halting State by Charles Stross, which is basically a cyberpunk thriller written in 2008 and set in a a decade or two in the future (maybe 2028) when Scotland has left the UK and joined the EU.

It’s a very mixed bag, very fun and thought provoking as I generally find Stross’ writing to be. I think he set himself a very difficult task - predicting what the near future would be like as realistically as he could manage while telling the great story he wants to tell. Not surprisingly, not all of it has come true - we don’t all wear AR glasses rather than using smartphones and of course Scotland is not independent - but it’s not entirely dated. A lot of what he writes could still come true or probably is true, such as core router vulnerability (which I really don’t know enough about to say).

 

[WayneLigon]

The Devil In The Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson (Tom Hawkins #1)

Historical mystery by the same person who did The Raven Scholar; her first novel. 1727 and George I has just died, and ne'er-do-well Tom Hawkins has landed himself in London's infamous debtor's prison, The Marshalsea. Things are bad - all prisons are run for profit; the King owns the prison and hands off the running of it to his buddies or political friends to milk it for whatever they can.

Tom is lucky - he's a gentleman, so he's on the Master's Side. But the minute his small cache of coin is gone, he'll be chunked over to the Common Side, where they usually pull someone dead out of the press of bodies every morning. But there has been a horrific murder and the ghost of a dead man wanders the prison yard by night. Tom sees one very thin chance to get out of his present circumstances: solve the murder and maybe, just maybe, the prison governor might free him.

Great book and I'll be going on to the others.

The Sword Defiant (Lands of the Firstborn, 1) by Gareth Hanrahan

Very D&D-esque, at least on the surface. The Nine Heroes defeated Lord Bone and saved the lands of men, dwarves, and elves. But they did that 15 years ago. They were barely more than children then, but now age and responsibility is creeping up on them )save for our elven princess who is literally immortal).

Aelfric was The Fighter, the lunkhead who followed orders and killed everything they pointed him at. Everything. After their paladin leader killed Lord Bone, he took up the dark lord's demon-sword, Spellbreaker, for safe keeping. The sword is intelligent and eager to betray Alf at the first turn, but it makes him virtually immune to spells and can cleave through armor like wet tissue. Alf has been at loose ends for years now, most of his purpose having evaporated with their victory.

But now Jan the Pious, their party's cleric, brings a warning and a prophecy - something dark is rising in the north but she cannot see what. Alf has to rejoin with his scattered friends only to find that you can't go home again. Things are dark, complicated, and horrible.

I liked it a lot, enough to go to the next book in the series. There's some very good characterization here, good plotting, and a slew of characters to interact with.

The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy) Book 1 of 2: The Jackpot Trilogy by William Gibson

I loved The Peripheral on Amazon Prime. I didn't know it was made from a book until after it was over and then I find that it was cancelled, because of course it was. So I thought I'd read the books. Started the first book today, got about 20 pages in and then wanted to look up something about the series - to find out that the third book isn't out yet, despite the first one being released in 2014. Book two was five years later.

Not going down that route again, so it's Goodwill for the book.

 

[prabe]

The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy) Book 1 of 2: The Jackpot Trilogy by William Gibson

I loved The Peripheral on Amazon Prime. I didn't know it was made from a book until after it was over and then I find that it was cancelled, because of course it was. So I thought I'd read the books. Started the first book today, got about 20 pages in and then wanted to look up something about the series - to find out that the third book isn't out yet, despite the first one being released in 2014. Book two was five years later.

Not going down that route again, so it's Goodwill for the book.

For whatever it's worth, I read Agency and it worked well as a standalone, not knowing it was part of a triology. The Pattern Recognition trilogy, similarly, work as individual books, if I remember correctly (it's been a few years).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Uh, I just started the Difference Engine and it's super-boring. Does it pick up or am I right in wanting to nope out? So far, it's mostly how it's terrible to be a prostitute in an alternate history London that has mechanical computing happening in the setting background.

 

[cbwjm]

Uh, I just started the Difference Engine and it's super-boring. Does it pick up or am I right in wanting to nope out? So far, it's mostly how it's terrible to be a prostitute in an alternate history London that has mechanical computing happening in the setting background.

I've never read it, but my general thought is that if a book is boring, I stop reading it rather than holding out on it picking up.

 

[TiQuinn]

I've never read it, but my general thought is that if a book is boring, I stop reading it rather than holding out on it picking up.

I’ve stopped books 2/3rds of the way in before because I’ve realized they weren’t going to get better.

 

[gnarlygninja]

I stopped reading A Resistance of Witches about halfway through last night for that exact reason. I wasn't enjoying it so I paused to think about why it wasn't working. The intrigue's too shallow/obvious for it to work as a spy novel, the action scenes aren't very gripping and it doesn't really ever get into the horrors of war part enough to work as a war novel, and the magic wasn't particularly interesting either. I figured none of that would change so why bother reading on?

This'll give me time to work on this pile of Carl Hiaasen books I got off ebay a while ago and then forgot about.

 

[overgeeked]

Uh, I just started the Difference Engine and it's super-boring. Does it pick up or am I right in wanting to nope out? So far, it's mostly how it's terrible to be a prostitute in an alternate history London that has mechanical computing happening in the setting background.

I stopped that one, too. Probably earlier than you are in the book.