Book and a Movie: Kick in the Pance

 The Benson Murder Case by S.S. Van Dyne, Charles Scribener's Sons, 1926

The Benson Murder Case, Directed by Frank Tuttle, Paramount Pictures, 1930

Provenance: Picked this up at the Page Turner, Kent's expansive used and new bookstore. It particular book also happened to be of the collection of Sacnoth, who had been cleaning out his shelves over time. He in turn had purchased the book in 1996 in Madison, Wisconsin (he tends to annotate all his books). This book was one of my "waiting books" - read when I'm waiting for an appointment, or for friends to show up at a restaurant. As a result, I may get two or five pages in before I have to put it aside. So the "waiting books" will be carried around for a while in a deep-pocketed jacket before finally getting finished.

As for the movie version, Sacnoth and friends watch old movies on Saturdays when we are not playing Call of Cthulhu, and have gone through all four of the William Powell Vance movies. While the book is the first of the Vance Vance novels, the movie version was the third starring William Powell. 

Reviews: As the first Philo Vance novel, and it is interesting in what it shows and what drops away later in the series, as well as changes made for the movies. Philo Vance is one of the elite dilettante school of detectives (Lord Peter Wimsey beats him out, since he first showed up in 1923 and who, like Vance, has a friend in law enforcement that allows him access to ongoing cases. 

In the case of the book, Vance's bud, District Attorney Markham is approached by an old and respected friend to investigate the death of his brother, who was his partner in a stock firm. The brother was found seated in his chair in his living room, dressed in his smoking jacket, shoeless and without his toupee, shot through the head. There was a large amount of evidence cast about, and the DA and police go through several suspects, all of which get proven innocent in turn by Vance.

Vance rejects such trivialities as facts and evidence and concentrates on the psychological nature of the killer - what sort of person would kill Benson in this matter? He claims to know the murderer from the get-go, but dances about, demonstrating to the DA that the latest prime suspect fails the test for some reason or another. In fact, he seems to delight in proving the agents of law enforcement wrong, all the while concern trolling their predicament. He's a bit arrogant about the whole thing.

The Van Dyne who is the narrator claims that position as being Vance's lawyer, and is only telling the tale now because Vance has retired to Europe. In the book, he serves no purpose as a character but to declare Vance as being brilliant and noting the growing frustration of the DA as Vance shows off one blind alley after another. Vance in this initial book comes off as insufferable, such that the DA (and the reader) just wants to shout "give us the answer, already". He actually becomes more likeable in later novels, but still absolutely sure of himself.

The movie, on the other hand, junks about everything except the title, Vance, and some of the supporting cast. Our invisible narrator did not make the transfer. In addition, the movie version riffs off the recent stock market crash. Benson is confronted with a bunch of clients who have lost money and are fed up with his shenanigans. Benson then retires to his country house and is shot. And it turns out Benson lives right next door to his good friend DA Markham, who brings along Vance to investigate. And one of the suspects says that Vance just got lucky in a previous case and challenges him to find the real culprit.

Which of course, he does. But he does it with a bit more grace than his novel incarnation, and more attention to the little facts and clues. He uses less psychobabble in his  explanations (I swear, the last chapter of the book is filled with his explanation of why the killer HAD to be a certain suspect, in part because women are not cool-headed enough to shoot a man accurately in the head). The movie version really hinges of William Powell's performance, who makes Vance actually likable. You can see the bits and bemused  mannerisms that he will bring to the Thin Man movies (and yeah, he's more likeable there than in the original book version as well).

So yeah, the novel is a time capsule - Vance was incredibly popular in his time, and the line "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance" from Ogden Nash (of limerick fame) in 1931 just underscores the both the character's popularity and division he presented to readers. The movie version is traditional for its era as well, but a lot easier to swallow and worth hunting down if you're a fan of old pre-code Hollywood.

So yeah, check out the movie if you have a spare afternoon. The book? Only if you have a deep interest.

More later,

Faceplant

You know, I don't talk a lot about my personal life around here, but this one was an adventure, so I'll share.

Last Saturday, the Lovely Bride and I went to Bainbridge Island, which is across the Sound from Seattle. We were invited to a friend's housewarming party and decided to make a day of it. So after our Saturday morning Tai Chi class we changed out of our uniforms and headed into downtown Seattle to catch the ferry. There was no FIFA soccer game that day, and the Pride parade was going to be Sunday, so it was a pretty straight shot, and after about an hour's wait on the Seattle side, we drove onto the Wenatchee ferry and headed to Bainbridge.

And Bainbridge was pretty classy, though we only saw a small fraction of it this time. We had lunch at poke place in a converted gas station not too far from the ferry docks, and took in the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, a small museum with very nice paper and fabric art.

And then ...

I missed stepping up onto a curb while crossing back to the parked car. I pitched forward, and had my hand in my pocket, fishing out the car keys so I could not catch myself. I went down like a sack of wet cement at the side of the road, my head bouncing off the asphalt and driving the frame of my now-broken glasses into my eyebrow. 

There was blood. A lot of blood. And a lot of concerned, helpful passers-by who helped me to my feet and suggested calling an ambulance. The LB and I got back to the car, and I ruined one of her handkerchiefs mopping up blood while she found the nearest urgent care on her phone. We went there, expecting to get cleaned up and maybe a few stitches for the eyebrow.

Instead ...

Due to my age and the fact that I had a bit of resistance turning my head to the right, they put me into an immobilizing collar and popped me into an ambulance bound for Silverdale, which was the closest ER. That took about twenty minutes, and was the first time I was conscious in an ambulance. Not bad. At the ER, they did a battery of tests on me - an MRI which showed I had no concussion, an x-ray that said I had extreme arthritis in my right hand, and an ultrasound that determined I had no blood clots in my right leg (though I still have a pain in the front quad muscle there, but I had that before I stage-dived on the road). And then they cleared the asphalt fragments out of my wounds, closed the eyebrow gash with some glue, bandaged me up and sent me on my way.

At this point, the shortest route home was south through Tacoma, so we stopped at the Lobster Shop for a pleasant meal (The LB had refitted my glasses together enough that I was presentable, though of course she was driving by that point). And since then, I've been at home, self-medicating on Tylenol and rum & colas and taking my meetings in on slack and zoom.

And that's about it. The only interesting note was that the Lovely B was really impressed with Bainbridge, and liked the idea of "island life", right up to the point that she found out the nearest hospital was a half-hour drive away. That cooled her ardor a bit.  But in the mean time, I'm still working from home and concentrating on healing up.

And that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. 

More later, 

Book: Women in Their 20s

 Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade, Harcourt Books, 2004

Provenance: Unsure, but from the pencil marking on the inside cover, I'd guess Half-Price Books. It looked like an overstock as opposed to a truly used book. 

Review: First off, bad title. The hair style of the title make is only glancingly noted, and references to bootleggers and speakeasies are mostly incidental. It doesn't exactly scream 1920s, but maybe. The secondary title is kinda incomplete as well, since we're going to be talking about four women who write as opposed to everyone else in the field. Only when we get to the third sub-title down do we address who we are talking about - Edna St. Vincent Milay, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Important female writers of the era.

OK, quick summary for those under 100 years old: Edna Ferber was a popular and award-winning novelist who is best remembered for her Broadway adaptations (like Showboat, which you may have seen in high school productions). The other Edna - St. Vincent Milay, known here as Vincent, was a popular poetess. Dorothy Parker made her way on essays, short stories and sniping reviews in the nascent New Yorker. And Zelda labored in the shadow of her husband F. Scott, who wanted to be more successful than he was. 

They were not a group. They were not a movement. They worked in different spheres. They attended some of the same parties, but direct encounters between them were few and unmemorable. They all worked in the hothouse environment of New York City literati in the 20s, a neatly-compacted decade that ran from the creation of Prohibition to the Crash. 

And we have a lot of information about these writers because they were wrote everything down - diaries, notes, letters, and stories on things based on their lives. Moreso, since they ran about with a bunch of other writers, we have all of their notes, diaries, letters, and stories as well. The end result here is a chatty, gossipy, personal, and in places honestly bitchy presentation of the 20s in New York City. And Europe. Because post-war France was a great, cheap place to escape to if you were a member of the Lost Generation and had the petty cash. 

The book itself travels through the decade year by year, and concentrates on the lives and adventures of its subjects. Alcohol and abortions. Insights and illnesses. Trysts and travails. It gives a good scan of their growth and success as writers, but also the pitfalls of their craft - writer's block and problematic relationships and too many house parties and summer homes. 

All of the writers have their own arc and some sense of resolution. Ferber got a Pulitzer and showed you could succeed both commercially and literarily and ended the decade hosting small parties at her penthouse. Milay ascended into poetic godhood, retreated to the country, and pursued a young muse with her husband's permission. Zelda suffered under F. Scott (who comes off as complete asshole here), who only started to support her when she went into physical and mental decline. And Dorothy kept plugging along through boom and bust times, just writing. Of the group she's probably the best-remembered, owing the wit and meme-worthiness of here poems and short works.

The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there. I'm a fan of the 20s, which dovetails neatly with my interest in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. From this volume I've picked up that a trans-Atlantic cruise was not THAT big a thing if you had the money, and at the time, writers were actually being paid more (An easy conversion was to multiply any figures within by ten). There are a lot of bits and bobs here that I may find use for elsewhere, and you might as well. 

In the meantime, I've excavated a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories from the basement library, and intend to curl up with that. 

More later,

Book: Timestop

 The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster), 2024

Provenance: World Con was in Seattle last year, and though I did not attend, I resolved to read the Hugo novel nominees for that year. And I failed, bailing out halfway through one of the Adrian Tchaikovsky novels. But I did get a copy of The Ministry of Time front the local Barnes & Noble, which has, it should be noted, very much improved over the past couple years.

Review: This book was well-lauded before I even reached it. It is a New York Times bestseller, a pick for the Good Morning America Book Club, a monthly pick for Barnes & Noble, a Best Book of the Year for NPR, Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping, and some 25 more outlets. Oh, and Obama liked it as well.

I liked it. It didn't win a Hugo. And yeah, I think I understand why.

So here's the skinny. Our unnamed narrator/protagonist works for government ministry in London, and discovers, after she has been hired, that it has a time machine. Sort of. They have access to a "time door" that they can open into other eras. And not to mess up the timeline, they are taking/kidnapping people from the past near the end of their lives in situations where they would not be missed. One of these is Graham Gore, one of the crewmen on the Franklin Expedition. 

Now, the Franklin Expedition rates up there with Nikola Tesla in the things-nerds-care-about-department. The Franklin Expedition consisted of the ships Terror and Erebus, which were dispatched with two years of supplies to find the Northwest Passage. They didn't find one, but instead got trapped in the ice for a couple years, and its people (including Gore) died either on the ice or trying to escape it. Including Gore. Except Gore got kidnapped and was brought to this near future London where the effects of climate change is already starting to flood the city. 

Our unnamed narrator serves as a "bridge" for Gore, along with some fellow workers for other expats from the past. And "bridge" is a good title for combination minder/agent/guide to the modern world. She and Gore fall in love, discover a conspiracy from their future that intends to capture or destroy the time door, and their allies start dropping like flies. 

So the novel veers from dark workplace comedy into rom-com, then slingshots into a thriller, and finally sticks the landing in a science fictional space. Our narrator is relating what she knows of the story, which is more about the effects of time travel on a relatively small group of people - the bridges, the ex-pats, the management, and the assassins from the future.  Early on, she lays down the absurdity of the situation.

"How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and the end of this account, which is a kind of time travel, and I'm here to tell you: don't worry about it. All you need to know is that in the very near future, the British Government developed a means of time travel but had not experimented with it."

That's a pretty piece of writing, with tenses spilling all over the place. But what its talking about, the nature of the document you're reading does get explained, and it makes sense by the end. At the time, I thought it was going to be a denial of the SF tropes we all know - paradoxes, grandfather clauses, alternate futures. But you're going to run into them, but from the ground-level view. So we embrace the tropes, but not the way you might think.

The book is really good, and deserves to be a Hugo nominee, but I can see how it didn't make the final cut, and much of that is because of the nature of genre. As noted above, the book refuses to "stay in its lane", and while I like that, I understand that it might not resonate elsewhere. But also its part of its own provenance, and how it entered the market. Ministry of Time first showed up in the new fiction release as opposed to the SF areas of bookstores. Most of its high praise comes from traditional/mainstream sources. It was therefore "not of the body" of SF-Dom. Genre can be both a leg up (a "guaranteed" customer base) and a limitation (reaching out beyond that "guaranteed" base). 

Still, Ministry of Time is worth considering on the quality of its writing, and I recommend you check it out. 

More later,

Book: Dreams of a Strange House

 Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2025, original Japanese 2021.

Provenance: Browsers Bookshop in Olympia. A nice, well-staffed bookstore in downtown Olympia. Purchased on a whim, in part because the front cover had a house blueprint on the front with Japanese icons on it.

Review: Long ago, before I became a author, game designer, and general worldbuilder, I was a civil engineer. And as a result, I have always had a fascination with buildings and how they work and grow over time. In particular, I find blueprints and floor plans interesting, in what they say about the house and people who live there.

Strange Houses is set in modern Japan. The narrator, an author of macabre fiction is approached by a friend who is homebuying with his spouse. And they found a excellent modern house, but there was just something off-base about it. And they sent the floor plans to the author, who quickly noticed some things that were off-kilter. He brought in an architect friend and together the two start unspooling a mystery, which quickly turns disturbing and horrific. 

The book produces the house plans, as well as other house plans as the story unfolds, along with family trees and timelines. And these are presented in the running text as well, allowing the reader to discover the evidence as the author does.  Now, I read a lot of old detective novels from the 20s and 30s, and in such venerable tomes by Christie and Van Dine, they provide floor plans as well. In fact, putting a map or house diagram on the back of paperback editions was a thing back there. So that's not much of a surprise, but what the book does is that was they learn more about the house(s) they make changes to the house plans to reveal new ideas. 

So there are clues in the house plans, which is cool, and I noticed most of them before the two investigators spelled them out in text. But, I also noticed stuff that they left uncommented-upon. In the plans, there is one large room on the second floor without any exterior windows. OK, that's odd (though my first thought was to ask if there was a skylight). But (and this is the weirdness they don't address) there also is one toilet on the floor, and you'd have to pass through the windowless room to get there. It is a little strange that the investigators that are looking really, really hard at the house don't call it out. 

I've mentioned this before in my comments on various Call of Cthulhu products, where the maps don't line up with the text, or have their own discrepancies,  like chimneys that are prominent on the first floor and disappear on the upper floors, or locations of kitchens and bathrooms that would be logistical nightmare regarding the pipes. So I'm sensitized to such things, and in this case seeing stuff that the (real) author would prefer me to miss. And if fact, at the time I wrote it off as simply "Well, they lay out houses differently in Japan", but I went to the trouble of looking up Tokyo floor plans (thank you, Internet), and nope, the ones here look like they make no sense.

In any event, the investigators make some immediate assumptions, which turn out to be mostly true, but the logic leaps are a bit much. And then they find a second house, where the family had previously lived, which also had some odd features. And then there's the family house, of more traditional design, which had its own sense of weirdnesses.

And all of this is presented in drawings and conversations between the investigators, and interviews with various people. It is all presented as evidence, in a fairly bloodless fashion (though there is blood in many of the descriptions and conclusions). In this way it feels a lot like Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", where nothing really happens to the narrator as he goes through the files of his deceased uncle and comes to a chilling conclusion. Same here, though there are more questions than answers in the final tally.

The clinical approach of the investigators left me cold, and the fact that things are (maybe) not wrapped up neatly bothered me. The (real) author is a mystery figure whose photograph is a black robe and a white mask (very Studio Ghibli). The books (there are more in this style) are huge in Japan. I want to say that it is the cultural differences that ultimately frustrated me, but I think the translation is on-target.

It is ultimately a case that I bring too much to the book. I know too much about a subject and it brought me in conflict with the reality presented in the novel. And the ultimate loose ends and unreliable testimonies frustrate me, particularly in comparison with the venerable "The Call of Cthulhu". Strange Houses is a short, compact read (given all the house plan illos), but I can't really recommend this even to friends who have spent time in Japan. It was a misfire, though apparently a very successful one.

More later,

Theatre: Life in Wartime

 Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toossi, Directed by Nagmeh Samini, a co-production with Seda Iranian Theatre Company, Arts West, through 5 July.

There's a weirdness in watching a play about Iranian women during wartime at the moment in time where we're at war with Iran (or we're not at war. Or we are and its not a war. Or its a ceasefire but we're still shooting missiles at each other. Or, wait, it is a war after all, depending on what day you're reading this). 

But its a play about war as a backdrop - actually its a play about friendships, and women and how time claims all those forced to live in it. Five close female friends are together on one of their number's wedding day, making final preparations, fretting about beauty, and being intimately raunchy about their vaginas. There's the religious one, the nerdy one, the dumb one, the stylish one, and the exotic (Jewish in a mostly-Muslim state) one. And they preen, hug, insult, and argue their way through the wedding prep. They have a moment. They hug. And then the news comes in that Shah has booked out, and a little later that Iraq has invaded. 

And the world changes around them, and little by little their world collapses on them. The Jewish one disappears and may/may not have fled with her family. The nerdy one goes to school in Indiana and does not return. The religious one dies in a horrifically ironic manner. And with each loss the survivors cling to each other, break up, have more weddings and funerals, argue, drift together, drift apart and bemoan the lack of the others as connective tissue. The revise their feelings and histories in real-time as they pick their way through a now-uncertain world. 

And as a play, it is really, really good. Sanaz Toossi wrote English from a couple seasons back, which was also performed in in this space in conjuration with the Seda Iranian Theatre Company, and with the same director. The dialogue was natural and honest, though with the cross-talk you're often catching up on what they're really talking about. The five actresses (plus a sixth, who is the new one) are excellent in defining their personalities, differences, and unities. Yeah, I can see these five women coming together as force, with their future ahead of them, and what happens next. Think of the Big Chill with a more authoritarian state. 

I liked this so much I didn't lead with talking about where we ate before the show. This time, we returned to Phoenecia, an excellent Lebanese place a block over the the theater. It was a warm Friday here, and so we sat on the small patio and had too many small plates, great entrees (The Lovely Bride brought her seafood back in the doggie bag) and too many drinks (The LB experimented with mocktails, while I had to abandon my last of my second Moscow Mule in order to make the show on time). It was a good start to the evening and very good show.

More later, 

Scams

 We are awash in scams these days. Mysterious Docusign demands. Emails claiming to be from the Geek Squad or PayPal announcing that someone purchased a iPad in your name. Other emails that claim to be from the Lovely Bride, saying "Here are the pictures you wanted!" with emojis and an unknown link (and the sender has a Bulgarian email address).

In addition to the cybercrime, we recently had some physical burglary activity in the neighborhood, in an empty house across the street. Some folk in a white truck boosted a construction trailer from a site in the valley (They have videos of the theft), stashed it there overnight while they emptied the trailer of equipment, and for good measure, broke into a shed on the property and took some other, older tools. I saw the truck at the time but did not think twice, because the previous owners had a white truck and had been emptying the house, but since finding out about the break-in I've been keeping an eye out ever since (and chatting with the original owners whenever they WERE on the property).

That's all background for the new scam we encountered. The Lovely Bride got a phone call on her phone, asking for me, under my rarely-used first name (which I only use for official documents). The caller claimed to be Sgt. Jason Cooke of the King County Sheriff's office, and would I call back. She called back and after a rather suspicious phone tree, got ahold of that officer, who wanted me to call him back as soon as possible. The Lovely Bride had some very pointed questions and he was not forthcoming as to reasons.

And there were a buncha flags here, so the Lovely Bride called a friend of ours who IS a King County Sheriff, and he determined that no, there was no one on the force by that name. And he called the number in question and they hung up on him. Twice. So, yeah, it sounded extremely some scam we had not heard about yet. 

In any event, just in case it was legit, I did call the number back, got the sketchy phone tree (which identified itself as being the King's County Sheriff), went through another secretary and got ahold of Sgt. Cooke. And he said I had a federal affidavit in my name and I should have gotten a letter. I informed him I had received no such letter and pointed out that I had a colleague who was a REAL Sergeant in the King County Sheriffs, and that he would be interested in talking to him. And Sgt. Cooke explained that they were in different divisions and shifts, which sounded just barely credible to be true.

And we chatted some more and he asked if I would come downtown to provide a signature. Again, weird but just borderline credible. He gave me an address and an office number, and the address was the King County Courthouse (I checked while I talked to him). So took a long lunch and drove downtown, trying to go over in my mind any sin, crime, or misdemeanor which would require a federal affidavit and a visit to the police (and why King County was dealing with federal affidavits was yet another red flag, but there were more red flags here than May Day during the Khrushchev era). Oh, and I could come down anytime during the day - he'd be in (Ding! another red flag).

So I went downtown, paid too much for parking, and went through the metal detectors at the courthouse, and found the office, right there on the first floor by the entrance. Couldn't miss it. And rang the bell. No one answered, but one of the people on the front desk came by with lunch. And I explained the situation, and that person explained that no, there was no Sgt. Cooke there and yes, it probably was a scam. 

So I went to Pike Place Market, bought some Earl Grey tea from Market Spice and a loaf of sourdough from Three Sisters, and some hum bao from Meesum Pastries for lunch, so the trip wasn't a total loss. 

But I have to admit that Sgt. Cooke and company really committed to the bit. The fake phone tree, the waiting music, the conversation all sounded reasonable at first blush if you didn't have any interaction with the King County Sheriff's Office. And he was extremely calm and well-mannered when confronted with the fact that no one seemed to know him. Didn't spook him for a moment, and he gave himself a good escape from the conversation. 

AND after this is all said an done, I did an internet search on Sgt. Jason Cooke. And it looks like he's a very busy officer, with reports coming on all over the country of this scam, where the bogus officer named Jason Cooke calls up and says there is an arrest warrant out for you but you can avoid it by sending him a gift card. 

The only question in this case is ... why? I mean, it was a pretty elaborate setup, and nothing was ultimately asked of me other than to come downtown for a fictitious appointment. I wondered if the thieves wanted me out of the house when they came back to the empty property across the street. That sounds really Nero Wolfe, but when I returned, the shed door was open again, which I didn't notice it at the time when I left. I called the former property owners (they're local), and they found out that the NEW property owners had stopped by and left doors open. So, nope, no prob.

But still -  I'm a little nervous about the whole thing, and keeping my eyes even further open, but frustrated that this sort of thing is ongoing.

More later, 

Recent Arrivals: The North Texas Report

 What, already?

Yes, I promised to go onto a game-buying fast until I bull through some of the games I have already purchased. But a large box arrived from the folks at the North Texas RPG Con down in Irving, Texas. Each year, they present the Three Castles Award. Candidates are submitted and reviewed by a committee of several wise, sage, heads. For the past few years, my colleague Steve Winter and I have been among those wise, sage heads. We read, we review, and we vote. At this point I don't know who the winner is, but if you disagree with my comments, you can yell at Steve, since he'll be down at the convention.

There are also a couple things that have come over the transom, and one that was purchased from my local shop, but first off, let's look at the nominees for the Three Castles.

Denizens of the Blood Sands, a Science Fiction Bestiary by Zac Goins, RPG Ramblings, 56-Page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is a nifty little monster manual in full-color, designed for Old School Essentials version of D&D, and packs a lot of potential for "sword-and-planet" style settings like Dark Sun or Empire of the Petal Throne, as well as post-apocalyptic settings like Gamma World (in all its variable rule sets). There are desert dwellers and host of lost technologies rolling around here, along with mutations in the desert (This year's crop of candidates has a LOT of mutations in it, for some reason). I found it charming. 

Dark Visions, ALSO by Zac Goins, RPG Ramblings, 86-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is a third-party expansion for Shadowdark. Our Monday-night RPG gang is playing Shadowdark right now and having a good old time with it. And Arcane Library, the publisher of Shadowdark, has been very accommodating in letting others use their system and trade dress (the way it looks). The Shadowdark layout is normally clean and clear, and ditto here. This volume primarily builds off the idea of cults, both to the major gods of SD, but adding seven "lesser" gods who are the centers of cult worship. Cults look like they are smaller, more zealous, and more violent than your standard-issue religions. Three new classes are introduced (one cultist, two anti-cultist), along with new spells and two adventures (a third is mentioned, but available separately). Some of the mishaps for cult-spells are career-ending (1d4 limbs melt off the bone, for example), so caution is advised.

Meet Yer Maker by Eddie Bartlett, The Long Con Press, 32-page squarebound, 2024, Three Castles Award Candidate. Early in the age of RPGs (1987), TSR published Treasure Hunt, an adventure for 0-level adventurers (the adventure you have before you decide to be an adventurer). This type of adventure as been embraced in recent years as a "gauntlet" or "funnel", where you throw potential PCs without much differentiating abilities into the maw of danger and those that survive get to go on to 1st level. Sort of expanding the character-creation minigame into a full-fledged game. Anyway, this one kicks off with a Old Western start and goes elsewhere from there, and its very difficult to say you're avoiding spoilers without sending up a flare that spoilers exist. So I'll stop there.

Forgotten Tomb of Acererak by Troy Alleman and William Henry Dvorak, Cannibaal Publishing, 72-page squarebound, 2024, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is distributed through the DM's Guild, which allows access to D&D trademarks in exchange for a healthy cut of the take. In this case, the author is presents an entry-level adventure in Greyhawk featuring the legacy of the S1 - Tomb of Horrors bad guy, the lich Acererak. This particular tomb was Acererak's starter home, which they started digging, discovered something nasty, and hied off to quieter corners of Oerth. You mission (as an entry-level individual) is to locate the tomb and find out what scared Acererak off. And its a solid adventure, very much in the old school Greyhawkian style, and brings in cavefolk and the Flan goddess of nature, Beory. The presentation is solid and clean, and gives you a excellent jumping off point for adventures. If you use the DM's Guild (this writer does not), this is the sort of thing that's really worth checking out. 

Nebulith by Zak S. with Alex Hopson. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 298-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a weird Jekyll/Hyde nature, in that it can produce extremely high-quality, RPG-dense material as well as cringy edgelord stuff.  An example of the former from Last year it was A True Relation of the Great Virginia Diastrum. This year it is Nebulith, a beefy Asian (Okinawan) adventure setting that feeds into the weirdness that LotFP does so well. The Nebulith is a volcano magically halted mid-eruption, so it is a huge frozen stone cloud hanging over the island of Awa Nikko, and serves as the "dungeon" for this setting. The setting is rich in lore, changing the euro-centric LotFP rules to adapt to samurai, ninja, and martial arts. This is the first Asian-themed product I've read that beats out the venerable Oriental Adventures from TSR. I love the art, I love the lore, I love the game design. My big challenge is that the graphic design is pretty but often involves hand-drawn lettering and 8-point type, which is hard on these ancient eyes. Worth reading, even if the reading is slow.

The Music of Ericha Zann by James Edward Raggi IV, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 32-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is the flip-side of LotFP - transgressive, hard-edged, and uncompromisingly bizarre. This sort of thing is much more of a descendent of such ancient and now-mostly-forgotten tomes as Arduin Grimoire, where you turn things up to 11 and don't think about what tomorrow would bring. Anyway, it's a rethinking of the Bard class, not as the high-charisma, social creatures they've evolved into in D&D, but rather as a controllers of cataclysmic cacophony and madness. Their songs rend the world. rip the dimensions, and tear the flesh, and have the potential to destroy your campaign in a single roll. The art shows bards wrecking havoc with alpine horns and triangles, and yes, that is a maiden with a trombone on the cover. And it definitely shows the personal opinions of the designer right on the surface. Music has a lot of interesting ideas within the slim volume, but I would not allow it near my table. 

And for other recent arrivals:

All the Cardinal's Men by M. Bill Heron, Nightfall Games, 128-page hardbound digest, 2025, Kickstarter.  This is a sequel to the excellent Call of Cthulhu adventure Musketeers vs. Cthulhu from a few years' back, the story continues with the Courts of Chaos seeking rule France from behind the scenes. In this case, you get to play members of the Cardinal's Guard, who are the opponents (perhaps "frenemies" is a better term) of the Musketeers in the original Dumas books. Your mission - rescue king and cardinal from the clutches of Chaos and save France! 

DIE the Roleplaying Game Quickstart Edition by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, Image/Rowan, Rook, and Decard,52-page saddle-stitched softbound, 2025, Midgard Comics. A while back, I read the first issue of the comic book (also by Gillen and Hans), and was not charged up enough about it to continue. The idea (and this may be familiar) was of a group of gamers who suddenly find themselves in the fantasy campaign they played as kids. So in the game you're playing a real-world persona who finds himself in a fantasy world. Sort of like the D&D Cartoon where the Dungeon Master is a bigger jerk. The quickstart itself feels influenced by Powered by the Apocalypse, and lays out the characters, the basics of combat, and a short scenario. I gotta say, it doesn't move me towards picking up the full game, but it was good checking it out.

The Howl of the Chimera by Albert Estrada Zambrano, Shadowland Games, Boxed  Game Set with 212-page hardbound volume plus handouts, 2025, Kickstarter. The content of this one is really tough to talk about without providing clues and spoilers. Action takes place in a country estate where ... well, spoilers. There's a lot going on here, and a lot of background information. The set is a deluxe box containing huge hardbound book in addition to a collection of handouts (which is good, since handouts tend to go to the four winds in my office. Its a lot of material for a scenario they say should run only 4 hours or so, but it is very well presented.

And the winner of the Three Castles Award is: Nebulith, which does not surprise me. It got the most points (yes, out judging had numerous subcategories which had point totals) by a larger-than-usual margin. It is worth hunting down, particularly if you are interested in Asian-themed RPGs.

More later, 

Book: Sunny Daze

 Sunward by William Alexander, Saga Press (Simon & Schuster), 2025

Provenance: I sat with the author on a panel at NorWesCon, and was impressed with what he had to say. His book was a nominee for the Phillip K, Dick award, awarded at that convention. So after the panel I went down and purchased a copy from a booth that was selling all the PKD nominees. So this is the writer's version of a three-cushion bank shot as far as selling your book.

Review: Tova Lir is a courier, running private messages and packages through the solar system. As a side gig, she adopts baby bots - AIs which need a physical housing for the first year or so to establish a sense of self. She's independent (one of her moms runs the moon), and not an achiever. She and her latest baby bot encounters another courier's ship, the courier within it dead. The bot is badly damaged. And now she's a target of assassins as she attempts to get her adopted 'bot repaired at the same time as robots as suspected of being responsible for a terrorist action on the moon. Yes, its a lot for a relatively slender book, but it moves along at a brisk clip.

One thing I like about the book is the "whys" - the worldbuilding that is underneath it. Newly-fashioned bots are housed in physical bodies because their intellects can be swept away by the huge amount of data out there (the allegory is to swimming too far out from shore). Couriers are used because all information over the net is public. Civilization is outside Earth because earth's climate is one of continual storms due to climate change. And a cult of humans sends their dead into the sun in great graveyard armadas. It is a weird future, but a well-reasoned one.

It surprises me is that, while SF has a huge number of subgenres, there is nothing for this type of adventure - the Earth off-limits for some reason, and humanity survives in space. John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist wars, Charles Stross's Accelerando with its Vile Offspring. All of them moved the center of humanity out, not to stars, but to the further planets. I don't know what to call it - Post-Terran SF? Solarpunk? Human Diaspora? Somebody probably has a better name. 

Alexander's language is clear and straight-forward in this weird world. The author comes out of writing books for young people, and it shows in his plotting and presentation. Tova Lit is an engaging, motivated hero who is putting the band back together (in the form of her former adopted 'bots) to save one of their own. 

It's a good story, and no, it didn't win the PKD Award. Still worth checking out.

More later,

Recent Arrivals: Conventional Wisdom

I'm not a gaming addict! I'm an enthusiast!

 So, in the past few months I've attended not one but two conventions. That's a rarity because I don't like to travel. But I only really had to travel for one of them.

Gary Con in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is a celebration of the life and works of Gary Gygax, and is situated in the Grand Geneva Lodge on the outskirts of town (formerly the Playboy Resort). It's a great, small, old-school convention, and gives me a chance to see old friends who live in the area and/or attended. I really like it.

NorWesCon in Seatac, by the airport, just across the valley from Grubb Street, is a premiere SF convention. I don't fit as neatly into the SF community as I do into the gaming universe, but if they invite me (and provide parking) I'm happy to show up. Really good panels, good company, and good discussions.

Anyway, as a result of all this, I have another huge honking load of games that I've acquired. Some are convention purchases. Some are things that I've not found elsewhere. Some are gifts. Some are fulfillments of Kickstarters. I'm going to TRY to be brief on this, skimming over them, but here goes (spoilers: I fail in this in a major fashion, do buckle up). Here goes:

Black Flies by Jordan Dube, Goosepoop Games, 52-page saddle stitched booklet, 2026, Kickstarter. So the spouse of a co-worker worked on this one, so when it popped up, I took a chance on it. It is a non-standard format (opens vertically as opposed to horizontally, like a small calendar) and a non-standard game format in that it lacks a "GM" in the traditional sense (it does have a "Facilitator" in that someone has to know the rules). You're a group of cultists working together to immanentize the eschaton (fulfill the bidding of an Elder God) while having your own goals enhanced without letting the other players catching on. I've been in meetings like this.

Elemental Storm Free Adventure by Michael Putlack et al, Roll For Combat, 12-page digest-sized saddle stitched, 2026, Gary Con (Shadowdark booth). The folks at Shadowdark have been OGLing their game in such a fashion that other groups have been making their own materials for the game. This one is from Roll for Combat, which has been doing monster books for Pathfinder and D&D, and has a Kickstarter out with three volumes of critters. This particular pamphlet has a handful of critters from the book and a short adventure. 

Secret of the Skullhead Key by Jon Hage, Sleeping Giant Games, 56-page digest-sized softbound, 2025, Gary Con. Sleeping Giant's Woven Worlds products were wonderfully-presented products, and this is no different. It's a shortish 5E adventure where the heroes search for the aforementioned Skullhead Key. And of course others are looking for it as well. Closes up the adventure by saying it can be used as a prequel to their Hamil's House of Oddities, so think of this as a prequel. There are a couple games I call out for their elegant simplicity in their layout, and this is one of them.

Down Among The Dead by Luke Stratton, Limithron, 146-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Gary Con, and Leviathan, Christian Eichhorn, 46-page digest-sized saddle stitched, 2025 Gary Con (Limithron booth). Of the Mork Borg family of games (pronounce Murk Bori, but no one does in North America), Pirate Borg is a favorite. While both the original and this volume are descendants of the original Mork Borg, they lean more towards the informational as opposed to the artistic. It has a lot of the same graphic characteristics as MB (variety of fonts, different page layouts and colors), but does not go overboard. Anyway, Down Among the Dead delves further to the eldritch horror side of the high seas in a William Hope Hodgson way, with Deep Ones, vampire-crewed ships, and Davy Jones Locker (For what happens after you drown). Leviathan treads some of that same territory from a different designer, in a hexcrawl oozing with mythos and the rise of the Kraken God. This one will require a more patient reading, since it embraces the chaotic art graphic nature of Mork Borg (yeah, I'm going to sound like an grognard here, but black on yellow type is a pain for these old eyes). 

Cosmic Dark by Graham Walmsley, Thieves of Time, 192-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter. Weird horror in space. This was a whim purchase, and it looks real interesting. It forgoes the traditional character creation mini-game, in which  you have to figure out who you are, what your ethos is, and and what trinket you have before moving into the first room of the dungeon. Instead, it throws us In media res, dropping down on an asteroid in a shuttle. What are your skills? Where are you from? What is your relationship to the other character? We're going to fill in over the course of the first adventure as we go along. It's an interesting approach to starting a game. The adventure itself is weird (strange stuff) and SF (other planets) and horror (think Alien exploring the ship before the xenomorph gets loose). Looks very intriguing. 

Dungeon World by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel, Burning Wheel, 408-page digest-sized softbound, 20212, NorWesCon (Around the Table booth). So at NorWesCon I sat on a panel on Indie versus Trad games, and it was very good and gave me a lot to think about. And one of the games that came up was Dungeon World, which I then purchased from Around the Table (a Lynnwood shop) in the dealer's area. This one of the early Powered by the Apocalypse games, and it's about time I did a dig into it. The book itself is larger than most of the more recent PbtA games, but that makes sense given the larger scope it seems to entail (lotta spells and creatures).

Tower of Gygax by Diverse Hands, 44-page saddle-stitched book, Gary Con, 2026. Every year at Gary Con, Curtis Cable, Josh Popp, and their posse run a continual game at the end of one of the hallways at the Grand Geneva. Eight players at a time, rotating DMs pulled from experienced game masters and recruited old guys (that's where I come in), a grab-bag full of encounters. And they collect those encounters into a booklet for the DMs to work off of. It's a nice little collection. 

Bayt Al Azif issues 4, 5, and 6, Edited by Jared Smith, 103- to 124 page squarebound magazines, 2022-2025, Amazon. I picked up 1, 2, and 3 a while back. Time passes, and I noticed that three more issues have come out. And these are nice, thick magazines that have articles on mythos subjects (like a tour of the mythos solar system), interviews, histories of the various Cthulhoid publishers, adventures (Pirates, Madrid in the 2nd of May uprising (1808)) and a lot of updates of what the various publishers have been working on since the last issue, which is good for making folk aware of what's out there. The site for the magazine is here.

Madness at Geneva Lake by Luke Gygax and Alyssa Faden, Gygax Ink,68-page squarebound, 2025, Gary Con (Gary Con Merch). Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is a perfect place for Call of Cthulhu and other eldritch horrors. We have sanitariums, old buildings, lake monsters, a nearby observatory, rich people's mansions, sunken steam ships, a statue of a comic-page character near a gazebo, and a former quirky RPG company. I used the town as inspiration for my game of Brindlewood Bay. Gygax and Faden use the sanitariums and the fate of the Lucius Newberry (a steamship that was raised from its watery grave by TSR, but that's another tale). Looking forward to running this one. 

Full Speed Ahead by Larry Larkin, 228 page hardbound, 2020, Lake Geneva Museum. And tied into the previous entry, I picked up a book on all the big lake ships that Lake Geneva hosted over the years. The Lake Geneva Museum is based in the old electric plant at the outlet of the lake into the White River. The museum has a nice display for TSR covering its early history, and a large area of all things Lake Geneva. This sort of local history has a lot of promise for adventures. Oh, right, the book! I love this volume, which goes into detail of the various steamships that made Lake Geneva their home (including the Lucius Newberry) along with profuse illustrations and photos. It would be great source material for a Call of Cthulhu game. Oh, wait, someone has already done that. 

Mystified! by Fleur and Chelsea Sciortino, The Wanderer's Tome, 152-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter. This is an expansion for Flabbergasted, one of those favorite games that I may never truly play - a Wodehousian romp of societal foibles and slamming doors. Mystified! takes it in the direction of the cozy mystery, with some more applicable character classes for the genre, as well as a small town and a foreign port of entry. I really like the presentation and art on this, and want to take the mechanics itself out for a spin. 

The Faerie Ring: Along the Twisting Way Campaign Guide, Scott Gable et al, Zombie Sky Press, 334-Hardbound, 2018, NorWesCon (gift of the publisher) Many years ago I wrote a forward for this book, and while I did get a pdf copy, I never got the print copy. Ran into Scott Gable at NorWesCon and he gave me a hard copy. It has taken D&D along time to get around to the Fey Folk - we had a scattering of monsters in 1st edition, then packed them off to Arvandor in the 2nd, Then made Faerie a parallel material plane in 3rd before finally settling on the Feywild as a separate entity in 4th. In this volume we see the Preternatural Planes as a large, encompassing plane with a wide variety of creatures and lords, which are detailed within. The designer mentioned getting back into game design, and, given the strengths of this product, I hope he does. 

Wildspace Magazine Issue 5: It Came from Beyond the Moons, edited by David Shepheard, The Piazza, 80-page saddle stitched magazine, 2026, Gary Con (gift of the publisher). One of things that amazes and delights me are that games and settings I wrote half a billion years ago still have enthusiastic fans who are creating new material. Case in point: Wildspace Magazine for Spelljammer, which has had a lifespan far beyond its life as an official setting. And their creators always manage to get a copy of the latest into my hands at Gary Con (Thanks, folks!). This thick, glossy magazine  has new ships, new crystal spheres, new ways to handle situations in space, and (to my surprise) has an article by DRAGON magazine editor Roger E. Moore on dealing with Fireworlds in a universe of combustible phlogiston. Ah, this is great. 

Coriolis: The Great Dark by Kosta Kostulas, Nils Karlen, and Martin Grip, Free League, 308-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter fulfilled at Gary Con, 2025. So I kickstarted this, but I must have missed a memo somewhere, because I never got a copy when it fulfilled. Fortunately, when I was at Gary Con, Free League had a booth and handed over a copy of this and Flowers of Algorab, and ticked my name of the the "too be delivered" list. And let me be clear - Free League produces some of the most beautiful RPG volumes today. And this one, a descendent of an earlier Coriolis product from 200 in-game years before, has more than just a touch of Spelljammer to it, based on a central hub (Ship City instead of the Rock of Bral) and tasks the players with exploring out a hostile and unknown universe. Like I said, beautiful appearance, exciting universe. 

Coriolis: The Flowers of Algorab by Kosta Kostulas, Nils Karlen, and Martin Grip, Boxed setting: 192-page squarebound book,  40-page saddle stitched booklet, Counter shield, 9 map sheets of various types, Counter sheet, 12 dice, card deck, 2025 This is a boxed set adventure for the Coriolis game, sending the explorers out into the wild. The set include cards and customized dice, though regular dice can be used, a thick adventure book, and a summary book for the players. OK, let's see what's in there. 

Mythic Carpathia by Johan Egerkrans and diverse writers, Free League 136-page hardbound, map, Gary Con (Free League Booth), 2025 I mentioned that  Free League makes some beautiful books, right? This is one of them. The initial Vaasen was made for a Scandinavian setting, but this volume sends us across Europe to the Carpathian mountains of Central Europe. So we're talking about vampirs, golems, and Baba Yaga in a campaign based out of  Prague. It looks beautiful and fitting to the era it takes place. My only gripe is that I need a pronunciation guide to wrap my lips around some of the monster names. 

The Sutra of the Pale Leaves: Carcosa Manifest, by Demon Lang, Andrew Logan Montgomery, Jason Sheets, and Yukihiro Terada, Chaosium,192-page hardbound, 2025. This is the second of two-volume set dealing with the King in Yellow invading 1980s Japan. This summarizes the Cthulhu rules in Japan in the earlier book, then launches into 4 additional adventures that can either be run separately or as part of a larger campaign. I don't know if I going to run this one, but it looks nicely meaty (and I have a couple colleagues who spent time in Japan teaching English, so I'd be interested in seeing how their experiences line up).

The Kingdom of Keshanar: Sourcebook for the World of Orthane, Volume 1: Keshanar by David Hadden, Orthane Productions, 512-page hardbound, 2026. This is a heavyweight. I Kickstarted it but got a signed copy early at Gary Con since they had a booth there. This and the Coriolis put my luggage at a scale-tipping 49 lbs. This is a massive tome showcases the Mythical Cairo equivalent with pyramids, sphinx monuments, and floating monoliths. The setting is heavily dominated by its meddling gods, such that NPCs are identified by which god they venerate. It's a major, epic work, and may be ultimate statement on an ancient Egyptian campaign.

Tour De Lovecraft: The Destinations by Kenneth Hite, Atomic Overmind Press, 318-page hardbound, 2021. I purchased this at a booth at NorWesCon that was selling t-shirts and Cthulhian hot sauce. I had picked up the first volume (The Stories) years ago, and what sure that I still had it on my shelves at home. Of course, I no longer had it, so I resolved to pick up another copy the next day, only to discover that it had sold out. Anyway, the book is a incredibly nice journey through the Lovecraftian atlas. Lovecraft has the rep for being a friendless, lonely recluse, but actually he was fairly well-traveled, kept a lively correspondence with other writers, and had an interest in such alien landscapes as Antarctica, the Dreamlands, Ancient Egypt, and Vermont. Hite lines up Lovecraft's journeys with his publication timeline to show how his interests evolved over time. Eminently browsable. Now I have to track down the first volume.

Dice: Fanged Smileys, Gary Con, Black Oak Workshop, Gift of Lester Smith, and Official Gary Con Dice, Gary Con Merch Booth. As a guest, I got a couple tokens to spend at the Gary Con Merch Booth. But no change would be given, so after purchasing the Cthulhu adventure above, I picked up a set of logo dice with the change. The fanged smiley is a trademark of designer Lester Smith, and being Lester, of course, he included a minigame with the dice. Cool beans. 

TSR Alumni Souvenir, put together by Tim (Ollie) Calhoun, Gary Con. One of the highpoints of Gary Con is the TSR Alumni gathering, which is [redacted time] at [redacted location]. A lot of the old TSRites who live in the area show up, including ones that are not attending the convention itself. It's a great chance to connect and reflect with people I worked with 30+ years ago. Ollie had in the past had drink tokens made with poker chips, and not everyone used theirs in order to keep them as souvenirs. So he had a souvenir version made with leftovers from the previous year. Which in my case now rests over my desk, next to my Wizkids Galactus that I worked on and my "Another One of Jim Ward's Many Victims" button. Thanks, Ollie.  

Gary Con XVIII notebook and pen: Because you can always use another lined notebook. 

OK, that's it. I've spent too long going through this, and may have finally hit gaming tsundoku. I have enough books and games to spend several months just going through them and absorbing their rules, examining their potentials and maybe even running a few of them. So I don't need any more games at the mome...

Hang on, there's another delivery at the door. More later,

Theatre: Family Drama

 Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Directed by Timothy McCuen Piggee, Seattle Rep through May 10.

This one was a very split decision. The Lovely Bride really liked it. Me? Not so much. So let's discuss.

Here's what happens on the stage. Three grown children return to the ancestral manse, an Arkansas plantation that had been in the family for generations. The father, a respected judge, returned there twenty years ago with the goal of turning it into a B&B, but that never happened, and it turned into a hoarders paradise of his old stuff. Dad died, and all the kids return to the house with their families. And among the hoard they discover their father left a secret legacy - a photo album of graphic lynchings of African-Americans. 

This sort of discovery is a challenge to a family, and none of the three kids are particularly capable of handling it. Eldest son Bo (Tim Gouran), has been living in New York forever with his wife and two kids. Toni (Jen Taylor), the only daughter, was left with raising the youngest, Frank (Billy Finn), and caretaking dad in his decline - she's now divorced, unemployed, and on the outs with her teenage son. Frank fell into addiction and fled the region after a terrible crime, and has not been heard from in a decade. At the outset of the play, Frank breaks into the house with his fiancé, a young new-agey Portlandite named River (Sophie Kelly-Hedrick). Both sons have come home for their own reasons - Bo wants to settle the family fortune and move on. Frank has been twelve-stepping his recovery and seeks forgiveness from those he offended. 

But Toni is at the heart of all this - abandoned, divorced and unemployed, she's badly broken, and as a result lashes out at everyone and everything, hurting others before she can get hurt. Getting in the first punch. Relationships are to be confrontations, words are to be weaponized, and old wounds need to bleed anew. She's a very nasty piece of work, but the play gets deeply into why she's that way. Bo and Frank, regardless of their intentions, are little better. They are all, in the words of Bo's increasingly frantic wife, Rachel (Angela DiMarco), "assholes".

And, spoilers? None of them are going to get what they want. Things start bad and get worse. No redemption is offered, no lessons are learned.

This is the sort of play that I should like. All of the actors are local and have shown up in other shows. They're good. It's a full three-act play. It had a good-sized cast. The direction takes full advantage of the expansive, multi-level stage. It won awards from the learned critics. But here's the thing:

The characters are not particularly sympathetic - Toni is all thorns and elbows from the get-go, arguing about small matters (like who gets to sleep where) and throwing conversational bombs as she escalates. She starts at 11 and just goes upwards from there.  The LB has known a lot of women like Toni, and strongly engaged with the character. I was more put off. The squabbling is continual, and as a result I was spending several hours watching a dysfunctional family face a crisis and failing utterly. I can understand where all the characters are coming from, and in fact each one gets an extensive monolog where they are trying to tie their personal situation into larger issues. But I don't feel much empathy with them, nor do I take any enjoyment from their travails and failures. 

There are humous bits here to try to take the edge off. The LB laughed at a number of spots, but I found the humor to mostly cringe-worthy. Embarrassment humor is tough to pull off, and all the characters are guilty, but no one so much to have failed so badly. It feels like Tennessee Williams with cell phones, Edward Albee with the Internet, Eugene O'Neil on E-bay. Modernized but with the same core conflicts and no good way out. And I don't think it pulls it off, sadly.

The stage is impressive, piling the house with junk and old art staring down from the walls. Yet again, the denouement of the play is pure stagecraft, and feels overdone and excessive, dwarfing the human heartbreak that has come before. But on the positive side, the house feels like the remains of a life, a legacy that no one presents seems to know what to do with.

And with that half-hearted praise, this takes us to the end of the Rep's season. The Play that Goes Wrong and Come From Away were good touring companies with excellent production. Here There are Blueberries was the best and scariest of the season. Fancy Dancer and Mary Jane and The Heart Sellers were all smaller and all good for what they were saying. So I'm going to call it a good season and good collection of plays. Onwards and upwards. 

And for me? More later.

Play: Final Frontiers

 Walden by Amy Berryman, Directed by Mathew Wright

When the Lovely Bride and I attend theater at Arts West in West Seattle, we often have dinner at our favorite expensive sushi place, Mashiko. As such we've become semi-regulars, and the staff recognizes us, so much so that they know not to put a cucumber slice in the LB's waterglass. 

And I was talking to one of the staff yesterday, and he asked if we were doing a play that evening. 

"Yes," I replied.

"What's it called?" he asked.

"Walden," I responded.

"It's about Thoreau? he asked.

"I don't know," I admitted, "I go into these things blind."

I was a little embarrassed to admit that I don't usually "prep" for a play, but I'm glad I responded truthfully. Because saying "It's about astronaut sisters in an apocalyptic future" might be both a bit off-putting and misleading.

But that's what it is about. And about family, the past, choices, and the future. 

OK, here's the deal. We're in the not-too-distant-future, and the world is in the grips of an unevenly-distributed apocalypse. News reports tell of mega-tsunamis, climate collapse, millions dead and more turned into refugees. Stella (Porcha Shaw) and Cassie (Marena Kleinpeter) are astronaut/scientists. Stella washed out of the program after some brilliant initial designs. Cassie has spent the past year on the Moon, and is now heading to Mars. After she left the program, Stella retreated inland to a small self-supporting community of EAs (Earth Advocates) who reject the modern technology that is killing the planet. She fell in love with Bryan (Josh Kenji Langager), an EA going through his own pain. And, after some time of silence between the sisters, Cassie comes to visit. 

And that's where we start. Shaw's Stella is both wounded and majestic. Kleinpeter's Cassie is nervous and rational by turns. Their characters are both seeking to understand where their lives are going and what remains of their familial bond. Their past haunts them and the uncertain future yawns before them. And Langager's Bryan is goofy, good-natured, and kindhearted, trying to help but not knowing how. His character is a little bit of brilliant, in that he opposes the technology that Cassie and Stella have embodied, but does so in a positive way. This play could have been polemic, instead it is deeply personal. It's a really good play, backed by excellent performances.

And let me give a shout-out to the set design as well, as the play is set on the deck outside Bryan and Stella's scratch-built cabin, surrounded by plants, backed by stars. Very much an Edenic home. The sound design, with news reports of the collapse outside (never specific, always generalized) contrasts with this peace perfectly.

Science fiction on the stage is tough, because SF is a genre of big ideas and big actions, while the theater always seeks to exceed the edges of the stage. Yet by distilling this down to the personal level, Walden makes it all come alive. And yeah, Thoreau pops up a couple times, both from the sisters' father quoting it, the name of one of Stella's projects, and the very idea of "Living deliberately". This is one that's worth seeing.

And of course, the evening that we saw it was the evening that the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission splashed down off the coast of San Diego. So there's a bit of historical irony in the evening as well.

More later, 

Recent Additions: A Winter's Tale (Part II)

 All right, then. 

Last time in this space I went on way too long about the games that have accumulated here at Grubb Street over the winter months. The good news is that it gave me a chance to actually pick through the mechanics and learn a bit of the lore (which is something I enjoy doing, whether I play the game itself or not). The bad news is that I ended up getting in way too deep and these writeups got just a bit massive. 

And I'm still not done. So, as they say, FURTHERMORE...

Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game by Shanna Germain et al, Deep Nerd Media/Monte Cook Games, 424-page hardbound, Deluxe Edition, 2023; Dig Your Own Grave By Shanna Germain, 128-page Hardbound, 2025, All Your Gods are Dead by Shanna Germain et. al. 128-page hardbound, 2025, Backerkit.

So there's a delivery story here as well. I funded the original Old Gods Kickstarter way back when, and while I got the pdfs, never got the Deluxe hardbound U ordered. I sent a note to a friend and former colleague (have you noticed I have a lot of them laying about) who works at Monte Cook Games, and they were gracious enough me a regular copy (Thank you for that). Because I liked the game I more recently funded the two support products they brought out (shown here). And they sent out the two new products, along with the deluxe version of the RPG book I originally ordered. Apparently, I missed a memo on funding for delivery, so the Deluxe edition remained in the queue until I sprung for delivery of the new books. So that worked out. 

In any event, here's why I like the setting: I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, which made me "Appalachia-adjacent". I spent my summers in college working on a surveying team out in the countryside. I don't consider myself truly Appalachian heritage, but I am as reliable a commentator as, say, the current Vice President, and in many cases a better one.

 In any event, I stand by my early statements on the Old Gods, based on a horror podcast seeped deeply into the hills and hollows of Appalachia, but could expand as far as the bayous of e Sinners and similar films. The game uses MC Game's Cypher System, but takes it into a darker domain. The Deluxe edition is a glossy, classy, version of the original, with gold leaf edges and really nice dust cover, but it is what lies within that makes it special, capturing the folk tales and horrors of the time and place.

Anyway, the expansions. Dig Your Own Grave is pretty much a player's handbook expansion for the game, and adds a lot of stuff players can use more descriptors and foci, some of which lean more to the dark side of the Force. More equipment and options. And an Endless-Quest style background creator to give your character a bit more to worry about.  All Your Gods Are Dead is geared more towards the game master - new optional rules, creatures, artifacts and DM Advice. If you've got the original game, these are great additions to you toolbox.

The Lady Pirates Tarot created by Mustapha, Illustrated by Santiago, Baroque Publishing, Boxed tarot deck and booklet, 2025, Kickstarter. 

This is half a review in that it is half a delivery. Baroque Publishing does tarot decks of a variety of types, and in this case, a collection of female pirates, lusciously illustrated by the artist Santiago. There was supposed to be an RPG with the set, and they're still working on it, but delivered the cards early.

I've used Tarot before in games, and even created a version for the Realms, called the Talis deck (Yes, picked up by Dragonlance - go have fun with it, folks). I tend to use the Tarot personally as a device for reflection as opposed to a prophetic tool. It has helped me concentrate on what's really bothering me and provide some potential direction. And that's more useful that any mystical imbued powers.

The Lady Pirates Tarot is very Waite Ryder, the best-known of the modern tarot decks, strained through the filter of female pirates, real and fictional. Anne Bonny is here in the Major Arcana, along with Grace O'Malley and the wife of Zheng (Zheng Yi Shao), all portrayed in the golden age of piracy, regardless of when they really sailed the seas. The art is top-notch and well-rendered, and creates a interesting melding o the kinda-Medieval Waite-Rider with a piratical bent.

So, it looks good, and while I don't collect Tarot deck, I'm glad I picked this one up. I still want to see the RPG half of this.

Ticket to Ride: Sails and Rails by Alan R. Moon, Days of Wonder, board game, 2019, Christmas Gift. (not shown in the photo - the tabletop was too crowded)

 So there's a challenge with boardgame expansions in that you can eventually get to a tipping point, where expansions to the ruleset overwhelm the base game. This is particularly true of popular games with a strong core mechanic. An example of this is the classic original Cosmic Encounter, which had a really good initial game, expanded it with more alien powers and abilities, and then, well, jumped the shark with things like Moons (the humming moon in particular required all players to hum when it wasn't their turn). The Formula De racing game, on the other hand, expanded nicely not by changing core rules or adding new mechanics, but by adding more tracks to the base game.

Ticket to Ride has done both over its lifespan, adding new boards to build your rails across and adding new rules in its expansions, and it is getting close to that tipping point. In the case of Sails and Rails, it includes a two-sided board for playing the game on a map of the world (cool) and also playing on a more focused board of the Great Lakes (also cool). It expands the game by adding boat counters as well a rail cars, which increases the number of cards, pieces, and decisions that must be made. The end result is that you have four hands to manage - one for rails, one for sails, one for unfilled destinations, and one for finished destinations. And for anyone who has been drawing every turn trying to get the cards they need to finish a particular line, it is literally a handful.

But that's not the piece that can push Ticket to Ride over. In addition, they've added a new mechanic in ports, which have a complicated build cost (two matching color cards of train cars and two matching colors for ships, for four total), restrictions (can only be built on ports that you have a existing line into) and victory benefits (point bennies for each destination line you have going through that particular port. We've played two games, and each time, we needed to explain the rule several times to the table, and still folk were confused. 

Ticket To Ride at this point is a franchise, such that it is getting its own feature film on Netflix (I have no idea how that's going to work). And its gaming reach has moved in radical directions as well. And I will still play this, but the original still beckons to me with its familiarity and the fact that everyone in my gaming group knows the rules. 

Archeterica: The Invitation by Anton Relict, Illustrator Oleksiy Shcherbak, Imago Cult, Boxed set containing 52-page hardbound, 3 16-page saddle-stitched scenario books, Character sheets, scenario handouts, combat map, sheet of wooden standup counters, two six-sided dice in silk bag, 2025, Kickstarter. 

Woo. This entry from Ukraine has a pretty darn amazing presentation - very high quality materials including heavy paper stock, wooden-counters, and a nigh-indestructible box. It refers to itself as a "Game of Genteel Conspiracy" set in a Napoleanesque-era flat world with multiple occultish factions all contending for control. 

The game uses a lot of non-traditional mechanics. You don't have stats in the traditional D&D sense, but rather a collection of background, narrative attributes, talents and burdens, all of which are skewed more to storytelling as opposed to numerical mechanics. Combat is mostly contained to shooting and fencing, and the mechanics are more numerical, and need a lot more attention from this writer than I've been able to bring to bear. Tasks are achieved through a roll of 2d6, but the potential exists to flip the die to their opposite numbers. Damage is more condition-based than a listing of hit points. It is complicated set of mechanics, but not necessarily a complex one. 

Starter Sets are tough, and there are often choices to be made what you leave out and how you maintain the flavor of the game with those parts missing. Archeteria has a lot to it for a starter set, which is good because there is no full rulebook out yet. Their next release has been announced for a Kickstarter with more adventures - there are three currently in the Starter Box to get you started. A lot of the world is unexplained in the box, but they do have a website with a bit more lore. I had to do more than a bit of digging to figure out who these mysterious Outsiders were, for example (no, I'm not telling). 

I really like this type of game, and applaud the fact that they are taking a lot of different approaches to world and mechanics. I would have to clear my decks a LOT to come to grips with everything that is happening here, but applaud the imagination and production values of this, and yeah, want to see more, like a full-fledge ruleset. 

In Liberty's Shadow, for Rivers of London, based on the Novels by Ben Aaronovitch, by Helena Nash, Lynne Hardy, Adam Gauntlett et al, Chaosium, 206-page hardbound, 2024, Gabi's Olympic Cards and Comics.

So every couple months I take a mental health day from work and head (usually with Stan! Brown or Steve Winter) to Lacey Washington, near Olympia, to a Card, Game, and Comic store run by a former WotC person, Gabi. It is in a largish warehouse and has a ton of stuff, and I usually come away with a few new or old volumes. One of those volumes was an expansion for Rivers of London, based on the novels of the same name by Ben Aaronovitch.

 Anyway, I talked about the Rivers of London RPG here, which uses a version of Call of Cthulhu rules adapted to the world of the novels. This edition jumps the pond and deals with RoL adventures in the New World, which is significantly different in that the river spirits are weaker (because of colonialism), and the number of cryptids higher. The US's approach to magic in this world lacks the cohesive overview of the Folly as a unified force of investigation, and as a result the land is awash in various cryptid-hunting factions from a basement at the FBI to competing magical schools and a smattering of independent Scoobies. Sort of the opposite of what you see in Delta Green, where it feels like EVERYONE in the government has their noodly appendages engaged with the Mythos to some degree.

The book itself talks about changes between the two venues, but is dominated by two adventures, one set in Montana and one starting in Montana and moving to LA. It's modern-day (well, 2016 or so), but I kept setting it back about a hundred years, in part because it uses a Call of Cthulhu system, and in part because the cover itself shows what looks like a possessed cable car in San Francisco (yeah, there are still cable cars in Frisco, but I always push them back a buncha decades to a more classic era). Anyway, it is an interesting different flavor to the world, and if you're looking for an expansion area for the game (which I have not run yet), go take a look.

Thousand Suns by James Maliszewski and Richard Iorio II, Rogue Games, 274-page digest-sized softbound, 2008, Gabi's Olympic Cards and Comics 

The other great thing about Gabi's is it depth as far as RPGs. I can find things there that I cannot find elsewhere, from the major hitters down to the indies. It has an excellent backstock of older games. It's great for filling out spots in my collection or finding something new. Or in this case, old. 

James Maliszewski runs the blog Grognardia, which remains one of the best ongoing blogs on game design and pulp fiction that I regularly tag into. Thousand Suns was an early design of his, and he's currently in the process of revising and expanding it. This is the foundation document that he's working off of.

Thousand Suns is very much tied to its roots in "imperial interstellar" SF in the form of Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, and the first of the Dune novels. It shows direct descent in its game mechanics from Traveller, though it has its improvements modifications. It uses a 2d12 system of resolution 2d12 (roll low), plus, it has a non-fatal character generation system that allows you to set the level of expertise of your playgroup and Action Points (karma) as a way of jimmying the die rolls. . The books is very texturally dense, and tries to cover all the potentials of the genre - skills, psionics, starships, and a wide variety of technology. 

As far as specifics to a campaign, this volume concentrates on being generic enough within its genre to allow you run a number of different campaign types, from rebellion against an evil empire, exploration to brave new worlds, or Patrick O'Brien in space militarism, James is currently revising the game and its core setting, and has a Substack updating his progress and is running a Patreon as well. What he's doing is very interesting, and I look forward to the new edition. Go tune in.

And that finishes up the long collection over the winter here at Grubb Street. So I'm good, right? Well, not so fast. Because while writing this up, I went to two recent conventions (Gary Con in Lake Geneva and NorWesCon here in the Seattle area) and picked up STILL MORE games (and had a few new Kickstarters resolve as well. So I have to catch up on those (though I resolve to read less of them and make all these entries shorter - we'll see how THAT works out).

So as a result, More Later,

Recent Additions: A Winter's Tale (Part 1)

This particular edition is long. As in broke into two parts long. Over the winter months, games continued to arrive at Grubb Street. This particular batch has a couple stories attached to the entire delivery process. So you get to hear about them as well as the games themselves. I make no apologies (Well, I do, but not to yinz folk).

Further, because I've had these in-house for so long, I've read a bit more than I normally do for initial impressions, so I have more to say about the guts of the product. I have, as they say, opinions.

As a result of all this, the writeup on this got a bit ... long. I have a lot to say about the new arrivals. AND often something about how I buy and receive games. So this time I'm breaking it into two versions. So buckle up. Here's Part 1.

Blue Planet: Recontact by Jeff Barger and Greg Benage, Biohazard Games and Gallant Knight Games Slipcase with two hardbound books; a 328-page Player's Guide and a 358-page Moderator's Guide, 2024, Kickstarter. 

So there's a story here (hey, I warned you). I kickstarted the game and kept up irregularly with their updates over their campaign. One of their updates in early December said that their US deliveries had been complete. I realized I hadn't gotten a copy yet. I checked through the links provided and they said yes, they had shipped it, and yes, UPS had delivered it and yes, here's a picture of it my porch stoop. But I don't remember picking it up and opening it. I assumed porch pirates, and contacted Gallant Knight at the address provided, and they kindly said they'd send me a replacement in January, after they had wrapped up all their deliveries. Which was nice.

Except ...

I HAD received my copy of the game. I got it with some presents I had ordered online for the Lovely Bride for Christmas and without thinking had put it into the closet to be wrapped. Upon discovering that I did have a copy, and it was NOT porch pirates, I contacted Gallant Knight again and told them I was an idiot. And they said, "Don't worry, that stuff happens to us too." But the whole way they handled it was professional, friendly, and, well, nice. Good going, Gallant Knight

Anyway, I LOVED the original Blue Planet from 1997, so I was really looking forward to this one. The original was a testament to hard-SF world-building. Here's the deal - Earth finds a wormhole at the edge of the solar system. It leads to another solar system, which has a habitable world, Poseidon, which is mostly water with a scattering of archipelagos. Settlers are sent out. As they set up shop, the Earth governments collapse under environmental disasters and Poseidon is cut off. Finally, Earth recovers enough to establish recontact. And a slew of new settlers, corporations, and political factions arrive, which puts more stress on the already established human settlers as well as the native life, including what may be intelligent life. 

The new version? All that and more. It is a deep dive (that's a pun there) on the world, its natural history, and the various factors. This is mostly about the world-building - the game rules don't show up until page 265 of the Player's Book. The mechanics are straightforward and have a whiff of old school Traveller to them, but the world-building is the star here. It is a really good setting if you hanker for that hard SF style. 

Flott's Miscellany Volume Three by Thaddeus Flott, Imaginary Alchemist,  by Andrew Devenney, Alisha Forest, Rich Forest, and Bill Spytma, 36-page Pamphlet, Superhero Necromancer, Kickstarter, with fulfillment on Backerkit, 2025. 

These have been a series of pamphlet-sized zines dealing with another world under water. In this case, the Rainy City: a ramshackle town that is the last relatively dry spot in the world. It has its own share of refugees, natives, and weirdness.

And it deals with a miscellany of things, which can be neatly looted for other campaigns - beneficial aid societies, gargoyle lore, and the closest thing to an adventure area that I've seen. It is rules-agnostic, which adds to its portability, but, like Blue Planet, it is about the world-building, though on a much reduced scale. It would frankly make a nice home base in a Ravenlofty Domain of Dread.

Downside? The cost of shipping was an additional one-third of the original cost. Yeah, that's turned into a debit on Kickstarters, in particular for 'zines. And after a few of these, it's probably time to gather everything together under one cove, make an editing/development passe and OGL it for the latest edition of your favorite RPG edition - I'd favor a D5.5/Blades teamup.

Forgotten Realms Heroes of Faerun by Jason Tondro et al, Wizards of the Coast, 192-page hardback, 2025, and Forgotten Realms Adventures in Faerun by Jason Tondro et al, Wizards of the Coast, 192-page hardback, 2025, Alt-Cover editions, both purchased from Midgard Comics, Games & More

I picked up the alt-cover versions at my local comic shop, which also hosts RPG and MTG nights. And  what attracted me to it was the dynamic style of the covers, which were very different from either the traditional 5/5.5E covers, or the previous art-style covers. I think their art-deco design is cool, though I wouldn't want it on every book they release.

And I should note that I paid for these books, as opposed to getting them from WotC. That's cool, too, and they did give me and Ed Greenwood a thank-you in the credits. But just so you know, I'm predisposed to them, but owe them nothing as far as a review. Oh, and they made serious mention of Alias of Westgate, a character my wife and I created for the novel Azure Bonds (still available in your finer used bookstores).

Anyway, one of the graces and the challenges of the Realms has always been that it is so big and rich. Over the years, there have been a lot of game books, novels, computer games and comics set here, and the task of dealing with it may be daunting for a player or DM. We built a lot of it in 1st and 2nd edition, worked over a bunch of it in 3rd and 4th. In 5th edition, WotC swung the other direction, and kept it mostly confined to the Sword Coast, ignoring the rest, which also frustrated people. This version neatly splits the difference. It talks about the major areas in the Player's Expansion (Heroes of Faerun), and then drills down into a handful of locations in the DM's Expansion (Adventures in Faerun) with different flavors of fantasy. Which is a nice way of providing a lot of options to the player without hitting them with a firehose. It also shows off the Realms as hosting different flavors of fantasy - The Dalelands is your standard setup, Icewind Dale leans towards survival horror (man against nature), Calimshan graces the entire Arabian Nights fantasy, the Moonshaes are celtic and fae, and Baldur's Gate is urban fantasy. All in all, a great tour of the kinds of campaigns you may want to run.

Even with picking a few places in the Realms, there is a lot here. Heroes of the Realms covers how all the races/species fit into the Realms (including the ones that showed up most recently). There are a buncha subclasses. backgrounds, and feats. A good chunk on gods (and there are still a lot of them). Stuff to buy, magic, and factions. Opens a lot of doors and options for the players. The Adventures in the Realms book drills deeper into the subsettings I mentioned above, but also sets up particular settings and frameworks for running adventures there. Plus an overarching meta-adventure, more monsters and magic items unique to the Realms. And advice on how to run the Realms. 

And it is really good. One thing I disagree with is their portrayal of the Realms as a higher-level campaign, and its recommendation you start at 3rd-level. I think the Realms is a suitable setting for low-level campaigns that let you grow into your character, and deal with low-level threats, but that's just me.. 

Riverbank, by Kij Johnson, Open Design/Kobold Press, 192-page hardbound, 2025, Backerkit.

The term "cozy" as a genre first showed up for me in mystery novels. The British countryside. The sleepy little town nestled in the farmland. The occasional murder, but it is always a polite murder, lacking a lot of the unnecessary bloodshed. There's still conflict, but it much more mannered. Agatha Christie gets the nod as the mistress of the Cozy, but it has spread far and wide, and jumped the genres into things like role-playing games. 

Riverbank is very much a delightfully cozy RPG (Full disclosure, the designer is a friend and former colleague, the editor is a friend and former colleague, and the publisher is a friend and former colleague - just so you know). All the characters are Animals with a capital A, which sets them apart from the ordinary animals. They wear clothes. They drive vehicles. They pay visits to friends and take tea. They are very British in their outlook, and summon up visions of Winne-the-Pooh, Master Toad, Peter Rabbit, Frodo and Bertie Wooster.  They live alongside humanity, and are treated much better than other members of the Empire were in the early 20th Cent. 

There is conflict and challenge here, but without combat. You may not have gotten an invite or have to chase down a rare toy or have to suffer the visitation of a horrid relation. The key here is to keep a balanced demeanor, measured by a scale similar to Pendragon. Slip too far in one direction and artistry takes over, and you ignore all else to write an opera. Slip too far in the other and you have the urge to shed you civilized weskit and slacks and make a nest or dig a burrow. There's a variety of Animals to choose from, but all Animals are equal, at least in size, and very hobbitish in their demeanor. Yeah, the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Rings is appropriate here as well, where the lads are crossing the Shire and worried about nothing more than Farmer Maggot's dogs. 

The game itself has a couple card decks to handle Betweentimes (actions between adventures) and Hapazardry (random encounters) as well as specialty dice, but neither are required to play the game (they have tables within). And the pieces of these are drifting in piecemeal for fulfillment, such that the card decks showed up after I took the above photo but before I finished this lengthy epistle. 

But all in all, it's a nifty hardback, and my only real regret is that I sprung for the deluxe edition, with its stamped gold foil cover, instead of the regular version, as the art by Kathleen Jennings (who is not at this time a friend or former colleague) is spot-on in capturing the spirit of the game. And a very cozy spirit it is. 

Dragonlance Legends by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Random House, 1114-page Hardback, contributors copy from the Author. 

This is a collection of the second Dragonlance Trilogy - Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, and Test of the Twins, the twins in question being Caramon and Raistlin. This second trilogy followed hot on the heels of the original Dragonlance Adventures trilogy, and broke away from the map-based flow of the original three and charted its own course. There were no game tie-ins at this point, and it represents where the novels took command of Krynn and its future. 

Here are all three books in their glory between one set of covers. In addition, the volume has songs written by Michael Williams, and short essays by some of the original creators, including yours truly. The original stories are now forty (forty!) years old, and it makes me smile to see them available once more. 

Epic Tales (Alpha Playtest Rules) by Stan! Stannex Press, 4-page pamphlet,  2025, Gift of the creator.

This is the last entry of part one, and is a very small one, designed by friend, designer, and frequent youtube host Stan! Brown. Epic Tales is very simple RPG. You choose your Occupation (otherwise called Class), Specialty (what you're good at), Weakness (what you might struggle with) and head off to adventure. That's about it - target numbers of difficulty and how much effort you want to put into the roll (from Lazy to Maximum). You have Action Points to jimmy the odds in your favor. 

And that's about it. It's a simple, straightforward set of rules. Why do I mention it here? Because I want him to expand it out and get to a copy that he feels comfortable running at conventions. 'Cause I think he has something here. So if you see him at a convention, be sure to ask him about it. Not that I'm being evil and pushy about it at all.

And that draws us to a close on the First Part of the Winter of Too-Much-Content. Stay tuned for part 2

More later,