Apr 09 2024

The Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Guide by James D’Amato

subtitled Advice And Tools To Help You Run Your Best Game Ever!

There is so much useful information packed into this relatively slender volume, not only for anyone aspiring to run role-playing games but also for more experienced Game Masters looking to hone their skills. All the advice here is system agnostic by design, which makes this a really great resource that isn’t limited to just one kind of game. Its 200+ pages also make it very accessible for readers who already have a ton of material to get through with prepping most RPGs and don’t need yet another massive, small-text tome on top of that.

And frankly, most GM’s guides written specifically for one game are kinda terrible. I’ve been running Dungeons & Dragons for years and still haven’t been able to get past the very first chapter of the official Dungeon Master’s Guide, as my eyes keep glazing over from the potent mixture of confusion and boredom it evokes. Plus, it’s fifty bucks! (And don’t get me started on the diminishing quality of Wizards Of The Coast book bindings over the years.)

Fortunately, The Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Guide is a much more budget- and brain-friendly alternative to collecting a whole bunch of different guides that may or may not prove helpful to the vocation of being a versatile and successful GM. The contents of this volume are well-structured, really going over everything GMs need, from prep to actual play. The bulk of the book is organized into two large parts: GMing Basics (mostly philosophy) and Leading The Game (mostly exercises.)

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Apr 07 2024

After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh

The cover of After the Apocalypse looks crinkled and dog-eared, as if the calamities within its pages have begun to seep out into the world beyond. The clock on the book’s cover is set to a few minutes after midnight, a reminder that after the worst has happened, things go on for at least some people. These nine tales are their stories.

After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh

Maureen F. McHugh does not do cozy catastrophes, and some of these stories are hard ones indeed. They’re not splattery, in-your-face, can-you-take-it hard stories; they’re hard like talking to a cheerful Russian grandfather some time after glasnost, when he could speak freely. He mentions how all 100 boys in his school class went off to the war, and three of them came back with serious injuries, they were never quite the same again, but he got lucky and got married and sure they had to scrimp but there was a thaw under Khrushchev and even in the Brezhnev years you knew where you stood, plus there was booze and you didn’t have to work too hard. He dotes on his grandchildren and he’s such good company that it’s only much later you realize the reason he never mentioned any of the other 96 boys from his class is that not a single one of them came back from the war. McHugh’s apocalypses are like that. They’ve happened before the stories start, and she shows people getting on with their lives afterward; sometimes making the best of things, and sometimes even getting ahead, but more often broken by events, even if they pretend to competence.

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Apr 06 2024

What Could Possibly Go Wrong by Jodi Taylor

Tables are turning, and characters are leveling up. In the sixth book of the Chronicles of St Mary’s — a mostly lighthearted and adventurous series about time-traveling historians — Dr Madeleine Maxwell has been promoted to Chief Training Officer. True to form, she’s shaking things up. In this case, she’s speeding up the training of new historians by including time jumps from an early stage, instead of waiting until the end of training when the departure of a historian from the program would cost St Mary’s the loss of a significant investment. Of course that cuts both ways: the trainees will be exposed to the dangers of the past without the full repertoire of skills that they’re expected to gain through training. Max’s solution is to bring along extra supervision from both the security and history departments.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong by Jodi Taylor

And while you can put Max into a position of responsibility, you can’t quite make her responsible. During the first session, one of the trainees asks whether historians make time jumps alone.

“No. We very, very rarely initiate solo jumps,” and remembered not to say that that was usually because we needed someone to bring the body home. Too early in the schedule for historian humour.
I paused but there were no more questions.
“A special note for the ladies. You will be required to learn to ride sidesaddle. See Mr Strong for a schedule.”
I paused, struggled, and then completely failed to resist temptation. You can only channel a certain amount of goodness in one day.
“I recommend old Turk as your horse. I did my own training on him and he knows his business.” Which was perfectly true. It’s just that his business was dumping any rider into the nearest bramble bush and then pushing off, leaving them to do the walk of shame back to St Mary’s. He was lean, mean, and carnivorous. An unfortunate encounter with Mr Markham some years ago had soured his already evil disposition. Markham, on fire at the time and understandably having other things on his mind, had run full tilt into Turk’s bottom, and knocked himself unconscious. (p. 27)

It’s not immediately obvious, but that exchange marks the start of one of the most important aspects of What Could Possibly Go Wrong. History is a serious business; experiencing it live and in person doubly so. Why do the staff of St Mary’s seem sometimes to run the gamut from peculiar to silly, without once stopping in on earnest or sober? Not long before the trainees’ first jump — Max has compressed months of training into just over seven weeks — a very serious question crops up. Some time back, the historians had a mission to St Paul’s during the Blitz, only their enemies were already there and lying in ambush. St Mary’s took casualties, and the whole thing escalated so as to nearly put an end to the Institute. How had the enemies known exactly where and when to be?

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Apr 04 2024

Swan Songs by W Maxwell Prince

and seven different artists, one for each story except for the last, which has two.

And, shoot, I didn’t even realize that W Maxwell Prince had written every story in this comics anthology till I started writing this review, which should attest to the quality of his work and his capacity for diversity! I thought his Art Brut Vol 1 was the most brilliant graphic novel of last year (I even nominated it for the Hugos even tho I knew I was fighting my usual losing battle there,) and am so thrilled to be able to dive further into his oeuvre as he sets his gaze on the theme of endings in this excellent mind-bender of a collection.

And here’s the thing: while the first and third stories (and arguably the sixth) are explicitly speculative fiction about the end of the world, the rest sit easily in our real world, where the battles portrayed exist almost solely in the mind. One of the strongest of the stories (and definitely the most upbeat,) The End Of… Anhedonia, follows a young man afflicted with the title malaise as he undergoes trance therapy to find a solution. Climbing into his mind and his memories feels less “genre” than literary, an exercise that more celebrated names in the world of “serious” prose only wish they could carry off with anything approaching Mr Prince’s aplomb. Tho who knows if they would ever be able to work as intimately with an artist as Mr Prince does with Alex Eckman-Lawn, to such glorious effect. This chapter is a scary but ultimately tender look at the freedom that comes with the end of a serious mental affliction, however ominous it may turn out to be.

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Apr 03 2024

Walkin’ The Dog by Chris Lynch

Louis is a good kid, but his life isn’t the typical kind you see portrayed in the media. His dad took early retirement from firefighting in the city to become a fisherman in a much more laidback environment. His mom is a perennial do-gooder who wound up getting significantly hurt while breaking up a fight at the women’s shelter where she volunteers, so is now in in-patient rehab, to the dismay of her kids. Louis’ younger sister Faye is a charming know-it-all who’s taken over running their household in the meantime. And his older brother Ike… well, Ike is the real reason they left their old neighborhood behind. Ike did not have a great high school experience, but hopefully high school will be different for Louis and Faye now that they’ve moved away from the city.

Louis is actually pretty worried about starting high school soon. It doesn’t help that he and Faye have been homeschooled up till now. Mom is super smart and fully capable of tutoring kids — hers or others — to success, but even she knows her limitations.

And it isn’t really the academics that worry Louis. He’s a smart kid after all. But he doesn’t really have any friends outside of Faye, which will do very little to help him make a success of his high school career.

That begins to change when his dad asks him to dogsit Amos, the incredibly stinky dog of one of their incredibly stinky neighbors (an unfortunate occupational hazard of the fishing industry.) If Louis walks Amos while his owner helps Dad out on the boat, then both Singletarys can make some money. Louis agrees despite his mother disapproving of his capitalist tendencies, and soon finds himself at the head of a burgeoning dog walking business.

More importantly — and more interestingly — than collecting clients is Louis’ newfound knack for collecting friends. And not just from the ranks of the people who want him to walk their dogs, or even of the dogs themselves. Aggie comes into his life, as does Cy, and soon Louis starts thinking he might actually have a pack of his own to run with. But with Ike constantly looming in the background, and with his worries about Ma never far from his thoughts, will Louis be able to successfully navigate this pivotal summer before high school, and go in to his new academic experience with confidence?

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Apr 02 2024

Here Comes Charlie Brown! A Peanuts Pop-Up by Charles M. Schulz & Gene Kannenberg Jr.

I didn’t realize when I picked up this title that it isn’t so much book as objet d’art, but oh, what a lovely, accessible objet it is!

At only twelve pages, this solid little tome is a compact work of art, cramming in arguably two short essays on the subject of Charles M Schulz’s inaugural Peanuts comic strip with archival photos and a marvelous feat of paper engineering. Honestly, the entire construction of this book is a delight, from the tri-part cover designed by Chip Kidd to the carefully constructed pop-up adaptation of said first strip that constitutes the bulk of the volume.

The pop-up parts do a terrific job of making an already artistically clever comic feel even more kinetic, as Charlie Brown “walks” through the first two frames, accompanied by the commentary of two other children in his neighborhood. Well, the commentary of one other child, technically. The other bears silent, if not tacit, witness to one of the most understatedly complex ways to introduce the main character of a 1950s cartoon.

In addition to taking the liberty of reimagining these images in 3D, academic and artist Gene Kannenberg Jr has also colorized them, using era-appropriate commercial techniques that cannot help but evoke the stellar Pop Art work of Roy Lichtenstein. I’m definitely not the first person to look at the use of the Ben Day process in fine art and feel the same kind of satisfaction as I do with pointillism: having it applied here only emphasizes the nature of this book as a tidy little art piece.

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Apr 01 2024

The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz

The Issa Valley would not do well in an elevator pitch. Nor could it be easily described as “Book A meets Book B,” much less “Movie C meets Movie D.” The first sentence — “I should begin with the Land of Lakes, the place where Thomas lived.” — is not a grabber. (The first-person narrator never returns.) The first chapter is given over to landscape descriptions, with diversions into how practically every item in a home in the Issa Valley was made within the household, and into the reasons for the relative prosperity of of the villages along the river’s course. Thomas, having been named in the initial sentence, does not reappear in the first chapter. Or indeed the second, which opens with the notion that “The Issa Valley has the distinction of being inhabited by an unusually large number of devils” (p. 6) and continues with speculation on what they might be up to, and saying what the local farmers sometimes do to propitiate them.

The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz’s book blithely breaks practically all of the norms of contemporary publishing. The point of view wanders a bit. The three-act structure is nowhere to be seen. There is barely a plot. There is not, properly speaking, a climax, nor is there a denouement, and there is definitely not a happily-ever-after. I cannot imagine that any part of it was workshopped, sent to beta readers, or circulated in any way to a marketing department or a sales team. The Issa Valley is where hype goes to die.

And yet it is a lovely, affecting book. First published in Polish in 1955, translated into English in 1978, the novel is neither old-fashioned nor a period piece; it passed directly into a kind of timelessness, in which the eternal human stories of birth and death, growing up and growing old, merge with the specifics of a particular corner of Lithuania in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Viewed from one angle, The Issa Valley has no stakes at all. The German invasion during the First World War consists of a couple of mounted soldiers who are given some milk and then ride on. The Soviet-Polish war passes not far away, but does not intrude on the closed world of the valley. There are no overarching threats, only the conflicts that the people themselves bring. But just like that, the stakes are life and death, honor and dishonor, the land passed down through generations, holdings divided among squabbling heirs or managed poorly. There are descendants of great lords whose daily life is barely distinguishable from their peasant neighbors, except that neither side ever, ever, ever forgets who is part of the nobility and who is not.

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Mar 31 2024

Die Farbe der Rache by Cornelia Funke

“And they all lived happily ever after.” That wasn’t quite the ending of Cornelia Funke’s epic Tintenherz (Inkheart) trilogy — some 2000 pages of action in and between the author’s world and the world within the books, complete with characters who can cross the borders and others who can write the stories from within — but readers could be forgiven for thinking it was. Enemies had been defeated, at great cost, but peace descended upon the lands that mattered, and the protagonists had most of their hearts’ desires.

Die Farbe der Rache by Cornelia Funke

But “ever after” is a mighty long time and although Orpheus, the most persistent antagonist from the trilogy had been vanquished, the last chapter of Tintentod (Inkdeath) only said that he had fled to the mountains far to the north where “he had hopefully frozen to death.” (Tintentod, p. 737) At the start of The Color of Revenge (as the English translation will be titled when it is published later in 2024), Funke shows her large cast of protagonists enjoying life in the peaceful city of Ombra. Mo and Resa, Staubfinger (Dustfinger, the English version of his name, is somehow unsatisfying) and Roxanne are content in domestic tranquility with the partners they had been separated from for so many years of the trilogy’s stories. The biggest event is that Meggie, now-adult daughter of Mo and Resa, is about to undertake a longer journey with her beloved Doria. The parents fret about sending the young people out into the wider world for months at a time, just as they recognize that holding them back would be ungenerous and probably impossible. What is parenting about, if not raising people who will in turn strike out into the world on their own?

Soon, though, there are signs that the collection of heroes will have much more to worry about. The most worrying is the report that Eisenglanz, the glassman who served Orpheus faithfully for many years, has been seen in Ombra. Perhaps his master did not freeze in the far north after all. The second chapter switches locations and reveals that Orpheus has landed in a northern city, is eking out a living as a tutor to the children of the city’s wealthiest citizens, and is nursing his grievances. But he has gained access to dire magical assistance, and very quickly his plan to put almost all of the heroes out of action succeeds.

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Mar 30 2024

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Legends & Lattes showed the end of the adventuring career of Viv, an orc barbarian who decided she had had enough of treasure hunts and dungeon crawls. Bookshops & Bonedust shows how her first adventure very nearly became her last, and how the times in between quests can be every bit as important as the fights that make up most epic tales.

Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Viv is new with the mercenary troops called Rackam’s Ravens, and she is feeling her strength in battle against the undead raised by Varine the Pale. “Old warhorses, the lot of them. Old and slow. They’d tried to keep the new blood in the back, but that wasn’t what she was built for.” (pp. 1–2) Her kill count was nearing twenty, and she was far out in front of the main Raven line. “And then her leg lit up with a cold fire that turned hot in half a second. She staggered and pivoted on the other foot just as a pike’s rusty head withdrew from a long wound in her thigh. … Then the blood came. A lot of it.” (p. 2) Fortunately, some of her fellow Ravens caught up with her before the wights make Bookshops & Bonedust an extremely short book.

Doubly fortunately for Viv, Rackam has an enlightened view about the fighting talent that he hires. Though the unit will continue north to pursue Varine the necromancer, they will pay for Viv’s needs while she recovers in a nearby seaside town, and if she’s healed up enough when they pass that way again, they will take her back on. Viv starts to object, and Rackam cuts her off.

“It’s done, kid. You survived a stupid mistake today. If you want to make another so soon after, well…” His gaze was hard. “Want me to tell you the odds I give on that?”
But Viv wasn’t a stupid orc, so she shut the hells up.

And so she washes up in Murk, jewel of the western coast, as an innkeeper tells her when she regains consciousness and mobility a couple of days later. But is she washed up after just one outing? Baldree does a terrific job of showing a younger Viv, someone who knows her strength and thinks that limitations happen to other people. The near-fatal wound in the prologue is just the beginning of Viv learning, really learning, that she can’t do it all, and that other people can be more than they seem. And learning to extend her view of what qualifies as people, too.

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Mar 29 2024

The Joy and Light Bus Company by Alexander McCall Smith

Good characters keep revealing more of themselves over time. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni has been around the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for quite a long while, first as the owner of the garage next to the agency, and then as husband to Precious Ramotswe, father to their adopted children. He is a steady, low-key man, slightly old-fashioned in his preferences, especially when it comes to automobiles, but willing to follow good sense and adapt. He is a whiz with mechanical items, and better than one might think with people, especially in his management of the two long-time apprentices in the garage. A few volumes back, he had a bout of depression, and since then Mma Ramotswe has kept an eye out for its potential return. A few days after he went to a course organized by the local Chamber of Commerce — titled Where Is Your Business Going? — she is worried that he might be having another episode. He does not seem himself. She brings up Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s changes in a conversation with Mma Potokwani, the formidable matron of a local farm for orphans.

The Joy and Light Bus Company by Alexander McCall Smith

“Well, he seemed to be in a very quiet mood last night. And again this morning, when I made him his breakfast, he ate it without saying anything very much. He usually talks to me in the kitchen while I am making breakfast for everybody. He talks to the children. He talks back at the radio. But no, he said nothing, and just looked out of the window, as if he was thinking about something,” [said Mma Ramotswe].
“Sometimes they do that,” said Mma Potokwani. “Sometimes men think.”
“I know that,” agreed Mma Ramotswe. “There are many men who think, Mma.”
Mma Potokwani looked thoughtful — as if she were weighing the truth or falsity of what had just been said. (p. 44)

They consider the matter a while longer, and eventually Mma Potokwani tactfully broaches the question of whether Mr J.L.B. might have met someone while on the course. It seems unlikely, but Mma Ramotswe has been a private detective long enough to at least contemplate the idea. They dismiss the possibility, but Mma Potokwani suggests that something else may have happened. “He might have been somehow persuaded that he is a failure. Or he might have met all sorts of big, successful people there and drawn the conclusion that his own business was never going anywhere. He might well have been upset by that.” (p. 45)

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