Theatre: Stranger in a Strange Land

 The Chinese Lady by Lloyd Suh Directed by Zenaida Rose Smith and Christie Zhao,  Arts West in co-production with Yun Theatre, through 11 October, 2026

Arts West kicks off its season with a powerful entry in The Chinese Lady. We caught it the opening Friday to an admittedly light house, such which the theater's Artistic Director jokingly blamed on the fact that the rest of the Alaska Junction businesses were engaged with a Wine Walk that night. Regardless, it was an amazing piece, well-acted, spurring a lot of deeper thoughts and conversations. This one has layers.

So, the Chinese Lady is Atong Moy (Zoe Ding) who was the first female immigrant to the US, arriving in 1835. This made be blink at first, but the Wikipedia backs that fact up. so OK. She was purchased by traders and put on display in New York within an exhibition of Chinese goods (at the start of the play, the items on the stage are described, along with their prices). She would speak about China and talk about foot-binding (she would walk to demonstrate), chopsticks, and tea. In the histories, she does not speak English, but through her interpreter, Atong (Sebastian Wang). Atong is lower caste, and informs us of the fact that he is of no relevance at the outset, but acts not only as translator, but as servant, minder, and protector. Here she gets to speak in her own voice.

Atong's performance at the outset is creepy and uncomfortable, and it is supposed to be - a performance that that overweening and saccharine for the rubes paying their coin to witness a human being from the other side of the world in their native habitat. But Moy engages with it with the optimism and positivity of youth - she intends to bridge the gap between East and West by telling her stories (the tales lose something in their translation).  Then we reset the act and run through it again two years later. And then again. And as we move through Moy's life as a captive in her role, a fly trapped in the cultural amber of her past, the world changes around her - Opium War and Gold Rush and the Indian Removals and Railroads. In history she vanished from the story in the 1850s - on stage she becomes immortal.

Zoe Ding is amazing in the role, starting at a coquettish 14 years old and moving through the years, growing more frustrated with the world and he place in it. Her dialect rounds and becomes Americanized, as does he manners, and the fact she is trapped in the same routine for decades. Sebastian Wang is excellent as Atung, the supposedly impassionate sounding board and servant lets the mask slip to show his true (and to him, impossible) devotion to her. Together they are an amazing team on the stage. 

The pacing of the play is fantastic as well. We run through Atong Moy's performance a number of times over the years, and watch the slow erosion and frustration of the character. And there are so many quiet moments within the play that carry a lot of meaning behind them. I don't talk about the pacing, but it works so well here.

The play covers a lot of ground within its small exhibition room, a curtained stage bedecked with Chinese crafts and curios. We get not only the history of the Chinese immigrants in America and the relationship between Atong Moy and Atung, but also the nature of theater and exhibition and how we tell our stories. We, the audience, are watching actors who are not Atong Moy and Atung, but are presented as them, who then present a China that altered in their lifetimes. Both Atong Moy and Zoe Ding gets her moment to address the audience and individuals, not just consumers of culture, and force us to confront the nature of what we were watching.

And its uncomfortable. And worth it. Forget the Wine Walk. Go see this instead.

More later, 

 

Twenty-Five Years Ago

 

More later,

Book: Book about Books

 The Bookshop; A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2024

Provenance:  Village Books and Paper Dreams, a three-story bookstore in the Fairhaven district of Bellingham Washington. According to the receipt I was using as a bookmark (and admit it, you do the same). I was up north for one of the Lovely Bride's tax-preparer conventions, and while she attended meetings on the tax implications of crypto, I book-shopped. 

I've noted elsewhere that actors love plays about the theatre, but I don't find a lot of writers writing about the process of making and selling books. Most of the "books about bookstores" have been fiction and in particular romances (cue up the movie "You've Got Mail"). So it's good to get ahold of something talking about the history of bookstore. 

And physical bookstores are odd things in our digital world, in that they have a "baby turtle" approach to sales. A host of authors create works, which publishers create a huge printing of individual volumes, which are then scattered throughout the country to bookstores large and small, independent and chains, on the off-chance that someone will come in and adopt them. There are cases where I go in looking for a specific volume or author, but just as often I'm just browsing, seeing if something piques my interest. 

Which is how I found this particular book. Up in Bellingham.

Review: The Bookshop is more of a collection of short vignettes and anecdotes than a solid linear history of the bookstore, which sounds about right given the individualistic anarchic nature of the history of selling books. It is a swarm of origin stories, and swings all over the joint and all over the country. We intro through the author's local bookstore, the Three Lives in NYC, then spring back in time to Ben Franklin and printer/publisher/ booksellers, then the oldest Bookstore - the Old Corner in Boston. Then we go to bookmobiles, Marshall Fields to introduce the department store bookstore, and the Strand, again in NYC, as the first superstore. we skate along specialty bookstores (Socialist, Nazi, Queer, Black, though nothing on SF or Mystery book shops), then into Barnes & Nobles and the mall/destination bookstore, and Amazon's attempt at a physical bookstore (There was one at University Village, but that's now a restaurant). We take a side alley into the sidewalk vendors of New York, and finally lands on a bookstore co-owned by an author, Anne Pattchet, as an example of the modern indie, blonde-wood bookcases and all. 

Despite the scattershot vignettes, there are a lot of through-lines. The modern independent bookstore is a community gathering place - its owners are in the shop (and often characters in their own rights), and has its regulars and its signings, lectures and events. These bookstores have also always been under siege - underfunded and often running on fumes, with threats from larger chains, censorship, local government regulations, the Internet, Book of the Month, e-books, and even libraries. Plus they have taken the hits from the twentieth century - war and depression and AIDs and COVID. Bookstores close and move and get new owners. So the story of the bookstores are one of survival and community. 

And despite the wide net cast by the author, we're missing stuff. A lot of bookstores get a glancing mention (Powell's in Portland, City Lights in SF, Third Place in Seattle), with the assumption that the reader knows about them. Brentanno's gets mentioned a lot but I don't know much of their story from what is here. There is a lot of famous-authors-as-patrons. But what's missing is the publishers - they move like great dark shapes in the waters offshore, mysterious and powerful. I am STILL looking for a good history on publishers. 

Still, it is a worthy and readable volume that lionizes the independent bookshop and presents its people as unlikely community heroes. Worth diving into.

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.

Books: Seattle Time Capsules

 Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas, by Terra Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross, Sasquatch Press (at that time part of Penguin Random House), 2018

Filmlandia! by David Schmader, Sasquatch Books (at the time part of Penguin Random House, but soon to be sold toe Blue Star Press and given its freedom), 2023 

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces by James Rupp and Miguel Edwards, University of Washington Press, 2018

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography by David B Williams, University of Washington Press 2015

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, Ballantine Books, 2013 (paperback 2023)

Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books, 2009

Provenance: Various. I believe Seattleness and Art in Seattle's Public Spaces were gifts from the Lovely Bride (Seattleness has a Half-Price Books sticker on it). I found Too High and Too Steep at the Elliot Bay Bookstore when it was in Pioneer Square, The Mushroom Hunters was recommended by colleague Wolfgang Baur, and when I couldn't find it locally, ordered it from Amazon. Seattle Noir was a whim purchase at Barnes & Nobles when I was looking for something else, but it was shelved face-outward and caught my eye. I have no memory of where I found Filmlandia! - it just showed up one day and refused to leave until I read it. 

The Reviews: Books are times capsules. They can't help it. As soon as the last word is written, the final change is made, and the switch thrown and the electricity pumped into the presses, they are frozen in amber. They can be revised, they can be rewritten, but the sheer physicality of the book gives it permanence that no computer file can match. Historical books are trapped not only by their subject matter, but also that they represent the thinking of their times. Even those that want to be current (in PARTICULAR those that want to be current) are stopped at the point when they are finished. 

Anyway,

I've lived in Seattle (OK, a suburb of Seattle) for longer than I've lived anywhere else. I've got my 25-year chip, which allows me to complain about new people moving into the state. But I still have that newcomer's vibe of interest in the area, and picking up what I may have missed before I got here. So I've been accumulating books about Seattle, not out of a passion, but just finding them along the way.

So here are some books about my current home town:

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is an infographic book, in that it takes stuff about Seattle and its history and presents it in a variety of graphics - charts, maps, and tables. Some of them are cool. Some of them are obscure, some of them are historical, some of them are time capsules in that they are no longer applicable (listing of pinball parlors in Seattle, most of which are gone).

The infographics are good-looking, but are often more graphic than informative, and you have to do a little digging to understand what they are saying. But, it is immensely browsable, and worth keeping around, even as it slowly moves into the past. 

(They do hit on one subject that always irritated me - they talk for several pages about Shadowrun's Seattle. In the Shadowrun future, a virus transformed a large part of the population into orcs, elves, and dwarves. The orcs took over the Underground. The problem is, the REAL Underground (and Seattle has one), is located beneath Pioneer Square (created when they raised the streets), and FASA put a corporate pyramid on top of it. That's a nit, but in its defense I will point out that FASA, Shadowrun's publisher, was based in Chicago at the time.)

Filmlandia! A Movie Lover's Guide to the Films and Television of Seattle, Portland, and the Great Northwest. has a subtitle that pretty much describes it in full. It is a collection of short bits about productions filmed and/or set in Seattle area and the greater PNW.  Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. Frasier (though only for one episode), Grey's Anatomy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 10 Things I Hate About You. Even the risible McQ in which John Wayne gets in a car chase up I-5 to South Lake Union, and there's no traffic. David Schmader was a columnist for The Stranger back in the day and does a good job. Yep, with all that old movie lore, it's a time capsule.

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces. Seattle is a land of public art. You're walking along, minding your own business, turn a corner, and BOOM! there's a mural or a statue or an installation right in your line of sight. In part that's because Seattle and King County have a 1 Percent for the Arts ordinance, where 1% of the budget for capital project improvement funds go to art. Nice plan, and it often means you get some monumental artwork (one my favorites is parked outside of Safeco Field, a Tsutakawa piece of a baseball glove with a hole in it. For many years, this was appropriate for the Mariners outfield). 

The book deals with public art in Seattle from SoDo (SOuth of DOwntown) to South Lake Union (now called Amazonia). Lots of pictures, ranging from the big orange Calder stabile in the Olympic Sculpture Garden to the Hammering Man outside the SAM to the Ken Griffey Jr statue outside Safeco. It includes plaques, large installations, and internal pieces within the city's buildings. The presentation is broken up by zones, south to north, and while massive, leaves out a lot of public works not in the city center - like Totten's Changing Form on Queen Anne Hill, Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, or Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont. 

What makes it a time capsule is that, despite the size of some of these art pieces, they do tend to move around. Pieces are sold, moved, reinstalled. The cover displays Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, which is, well, a gigantic typewriter eraser. Owned by the Paul Allen family, the sculpture was at one time near the Sculpture Park, but moved to Seattle Center, outside the MoPop (Museum of Popular Culture), and was then sold at auction after Allen's death. I cannot find out who bought it or where it went from there. There are similar/duplicate pieces in Washington DC and Las Vegas, but that one was Seattle's.

(Should I ever win the lottery (fat chance), I'd like to create a web site listing all of the publicly-viewable art in Greater Seattle, because I think it deserves it).

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography. Denizens of the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being love-the-land tree-hugging environmentalists. But we've engaged in a lot of terraforming over the years, making low places higher and high places lower. This books hits the major ones - filling in the tidal flats south of the city, the Montlake Cut which dropped the level of Lake Washington 8 feet, and in particular the Denny Hill Regrade. 

Back at the turn of the previous century, the area north of Seattle's downtown was a large hill, which blocked future expansion and required too many horses to pull wagons up it. The answer from the city fathers was to use sluicing equipment from the gold rush to wash away the hill, load the dirt into barges, and take it out into the sound to dump it. By the time they finished, trucks had replaced horses as transport, and the area became a site of warehouses and used car lots for many decades until Amazon moved into the neighborhood (my first office at Amazon was on the 5th floor of a building on 6th Avenue, and I figure I was still under the original ground level). Williams, who writes a lot about nature in the Northwest, covers a lot of ground (heh) in describing the monumental early efforts that made Seattle what it is today. 

Seattle Noir is one of a series of local mystery novels offered by Akashic set in various cities, ranging from Baghdad to Baltimore and from Lagos to Las Vegas. It is collection of shorts set in the Seattle area, and it cool from the local angle - you've been in that neighborhood, you know what they're talking about, yeah, that feels like Seattle. And Seattle gives itself over to a lot of noir tropes - its power centers moving behind the scenes, its rain-spattered streets and continual gloom (mostly in October and November) creating a continual twilight broken by the neon of business and late-night lights of office workers. It sometimes feels like a city filmed in black and white. Noir town.

For me, though, noir is defined by people making ethical choices and being punished for it. Bogart loses the girl. MacMurray takes the rap. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. What is the morally right choice often goes up against the societal rules. And some of the stories fit that mode. Others, not so much.

Similarly, a lot of good stories are here that are "pure Seattle" - Duwamish tribal rites and Chinatown in the1900s and roadhouses at the city limits. Stories that embrace both our history and our outlook. But there are a few that, while good, you have to to fill in the locational blanks without losing too much of the tale. They're still worth reading, but don't hit the mark as Seattle tales. 

There are a lot of good stories here "The Wrong End of the Gun", "The Taskmasters" and "Blue Sunday" all have that hard-boiled edge. The protagonists are strugglers, the challenges down to earth. Some of the stories could slot in anywhere with a change of street names, but a lot of them feel very Seattlish. Best of that group was "Blood Tide" and "Center of the Universe".

So this is a time capsule in that a lot of the stories take place in that mythical ancient Seattle, But also the way the city has changed from the more recent dotcom boom and conflict between New Seattle and Old, in the evolving conflict since the book was published. It's worth looking at, but not too deeply.

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventures was written about ten years back, and reflects a Seattle of that age, with a rising food culture situated at the borders of a wilderness. Ten years later, the food culture is more established, and the wilderness pushed back a few more miles. 

The book is about the people in the wild mushroom business - those who go out and harvest them and those who sell them to the restaurants that feature them. These are no white buttons grown in a controlled atmosphere of a former coal mine. These are wilderness mushrooms - morrels and lobsters and chanterelles and white truffles, found in the more undisturbed parts of the PNW, sprouting up at rare times and only under certain conditions. It requires a lot of hiking, watching, getting up at ungodly hours and driving deep into the hinters. It also requires a flexible regard to local laws and trespassing signs. Langdon Cook weaves a tales of the mushrooms and the various people who hunt them out, from bus-loaded tourists on a spree to Vietnamese expats setting up their own claims.

Its only ten years ago, and I can feel the ground has changed. A lot of the restaurants mentioned on the receiving end of the mushroom train are no more, while others remain but have changed ownership. And likely the basics of the mushroom trade have remained, but are buried by more exurban and suburban sprawl. Its a good snapshot of an age and a business out here in Seattle.

And that's it - a whole collection of Seattle books that have popped up. More may show up over time, whether they are our history or are trapped in the amber of the moment that fingers strike the keys and the files are sent to the publishers. All in all, a good collection.

More later, 

Book and a Movie: Canary In a Coal Mine

 The "Canary" Murder Case by S.S.Van Dine, Fawcett Publications, 1927

The Canary Murder Murder Case, written by S.S. Van Dine, Albert Shelby Lovino, Florence Ryerson, Herman Mankiewicz, directed by Malcom St. Clair, Paramount Pictures, 1929.

Provenance: The novel is from the collection of Sacnoth, who provided a large number of mysteries for my late mother-in-law when she lived with us, and which I have been slowly burrowing through over the years. The book itself became a shop-worn volume tucked in my jacket pocket, to be read at the moments when I was waiting for someone or something else (the rest of you use phones these days, so you understand the principle). Nearing completion of this particular mystery, I inveighed upon my Saturday-Night crew to watch the film version (we had previously watched The Kennel Murder Case, another Philo Vance mystery. 

The Reviews: The "Canary" Murder Case (the original put the name in parenthesis, and I'll use it here to separate it from the film) lived for several months on the best-sellers lists, and was regarded as being a definitive advancement of the genre. Its detective, Philo Vance, was a erudite intellectual dilletante who is good friends with the New York City DA, Markham, and is allowed to tag along on investigations. A Broadway actress is slain in her locked apartment, and all clues point to an interrupted burglary. Vance, who is more concerned with the psychology of the criminals than mere apparent evidence, disagrees with the prima facie appearances. And the fact that all the initial evidence points to a burglar only strengthens his opinion. The crime scene is, in his opinion, "too perfect". 

It turns out that the Canary had numerous suitors and former suitors and a taste for blackmail, and that her apartment building had more visitors that evening than the news stand at Penns Station. Suspects are gathered, solid alibis are established, then shattered, and it all leads up to an unreasonable poker game with Vance, Markham, and the suspects. Vance knows who the killer is after that game, but the evidences shows it impossible. Until in the final pages, Vance discover "how he did it", with a bit of high tech wizardry (for the time) which left me shaking my head. 

The writing is engaging, though I had a hard time putting William Powell (who is Vance in the movie - more about that later) into the mold of Vance of the book. Instead I kept getting Frasier Crane as Vance - he would quote Latin, refer to obscure artists, and noted that he had to dash out to the opera or a Monet showing. Vance of the books is extremely elite and dilettantish. As a result, he also codes gay - his encyclopedic knowledge of art and disdain for the commonplace, his elaborate mode of speaking, his fondness for NYC Clubs, plus his relationships with the other male members of group (Markham, the rougher, doubting Chief Detective Heath, and the narrator) gives off strong gay vibes in the modern age. (Of course, Van Dine himself believed that romance had no place in mysteries, so this may account for some of that attitude).

And then there is the matter of the book's narrator - supposedly Van Dine himself, who is presented as Vance's lawyer and constant companion, but who vanishes as a character whenever Vance has someone else to chat with. Indeed, all of "Van Dine's" conversations with Vance are along the lines of "I tried to convince Philo to tell me what was going on, but he remained tight-lipped".  Narrator "Van Dine" is effusive in his praise of this great detective. And the "Van Dine" of this volume was living with Vance in Manhattan, since his own apartment was being renovated. So yeah, the aura of "more than just friends" hangs heavy over their relationship in a way that those of Holmes/Watson, Wolfe/Goodwin, or Poirot/Hastings does not. 

So, with twenty-some pages to go in the book, and with me confident of whodoneit and having an idea of howhedidit, I sat down with my Saturday night group to watch the movie based on it. And it is pretty bad in movie form. We get that The Canary (The OG Flapper Louise Brooks) is a nasty blackmailer right off the bat, and she vanishes from the film upon her demise. Vance (William Powell) is already on the case, investigating her on the behalf of a local banker, as she was blackmailing his son. The son was innocent and one of the young ingenues with Mary Astor, herself in an early role (and therefore innocent as well). Most of the bits of gathering the suspects were shortened, but it concluded in the same unreasonable poker game where Vance tests the mettle of the suspects. He realizes who the murderer is, but that murderer perishes before they can confess, and Vance must find out the howhedidit on his own (though better than the way he did in the book).

I say it was pretty bad - it was slow, pokey, and there were odd shifts in the filming. The reason for it was that it was originally filmed as a silent movie, and then retrofitted with dialogue and additional scenes afterwards. This was Powell's first appearance as the lead, and his theater training gave him a natural diction and movement that was missing from the silent-scenes filmed earlier (There was a lot of held shots of people looking grim). And Louise Brooks herself refused to participate in the reshoot, so a lot of her lines were dubbed and in many cases her face obscured. 

This is Powell's first gig as a leading actor in the movies, his first talkie, and and an early establishment of his film character as a hero as opposed to a villain. His calmness and comfort really stands out here, and while he does not have the wit and savoir faire of the Thin Man and other roles yet, neither does he come off with Van Dine's eliteness and esoteric nature. He is dapper, mannered, and restrained.

So, the end result - both movie and book are verging on their centennial. They're of their era (The movie in particular has a couple black actors in supportive, comical roles  - yeah, cringeworthy). They are both worth revisiting, though know that you may face disappointments in their resolutions.

More later, 

Recent Arrivals: The Odd Lot

 So it has been a while, but new games continue to accumulate here at Grubb Street. Some are Kickstarters, but others are from various stores in the area. And I have to say, it's a good thing. There are more game stores operating in the Puget Sound region now than there were 10 years ago, and I am pleased to see brick-and-mortars even as I take advantage of funding new products in advance. 

Some of these new projects that have shown up push back the standard limits of what is a role-playing game, and reflect the wide diversity found in the hobby. Some cleave closely to one version of D&D or the other, or have that heady whiff of nostalgia to them, while others challenge a lot of basic assumptions and tropes in the play-style. So this is a mix of old and new 

Let' see what's here: 

Elder Mythos Deluxe Edition by Michele Paroli and Marta Palvarini, Mana Project Studios, Boxed RPG containing a 240-page digest-sized hardbound, 2 Card Decks, 9 dice, GM Screen, and 10 scenario maps, 2025, Kickstarter. This is a Lovecraftian game where you play. not a cultist or an investigator, but a Mythos Entity itself, both competing with and collaborating with other (player) Mythos entities. It is listed as using the Year Zero engine, but that is pretty much just using that system's dice pools and a card-based initiative session. As an Elder God, you use your turn to manipulate lesser entities (including mere mortals) in the play field, and to mess up the manipulations of the other players, then describing those manipulations in detail. There is a GM/Eldritch Master who is supposed to corral the whole thing. The game play feels like a brain-storming session where there are no bad ideas, but there are bad ideas. The entities you represent stand outside of time, space, and traditional role-playing tropes. The book itself has variable fonts, white on black printing, and a lack of index to help you navigate. So this one would be a learning experience.  

Pendragon Gamemaster's Handbook by Greg Stafford et. al, Chaosium, 238-page hardbound, 2024, Wizard's Keep Games. I mentioned there's been a rising tide of game stores in the area, and I was happy to see one of the locals, Wizard's Keep Games, carrying a deeper level of Chaosium products. This Gamemaster's book is a toolkit-style of book on diverse subjects, supporting the core book -- court life, religions, and the supernatural, as well as new rules for running large battles, plus a goodly collection of NPCs and creatures. The presentation on parchment-ish paper is as solid and the art styles are appropriate for the period, and should become a browsable book in my collection.. 

Call of Cthulhu The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising, by Damon Lang, Andrew Logan Montgomery, Jason Sheets, Yukihiro Trada, et al, Chaosium, 192-page hardbound, 2025, Wizard's Keep Games. The past is another country. Japan is another country. An adventure set in Japan in the go-go eighties (40 years ago) is several countries removed. This particular adventure establishes a new manifestation of the King In Yellow and its infiltration into Japanese society. The book deals with Japanese mythology, manga, and the Yakuza, and sets up for a SECOND volume of adventures, Carcosa Manifest. The primary designers come out of the Sons of Singularity, who did The Sassoon Files, and The Blessed and the Blasphemous, and the design here shows a lot of their approach in the form of flowcharts to guide the adventure and confidants to use as plot hooks to bring the players in. 

Orbital Blues by Sam Sleney (writing) Josh Clark (art) and Zachary Cox (more writing), Soul Muppet Publishing, 206-page digest-sized hardbound, 2021, Mox Boarding House. An impulse buy, as I note that Mox has slowly be growing its RPG selection over the years, and bringing in some more esoteric titles. Orbital Blues has been out a few years. It is a pretty straightforward game system - a character has three stats (Muscle, Grit, and Savvy) and uses d6s to resolve tasks and combat. Its genre is "Space Western", which includes Firefly, Mos Eisley, and in particular Cowboy Bebop. It's a dystopian setting, where the future has passed through the planets and satellite settlements and then moved on, leaving poverty and oppression in its wake. You're outlaws on the fringe of society, trying to make a dishonest credit by smuggling, bounty hunting, and heists. Also picked up a copy of A Starborne Resistance,  a slender 48-page squarebound, which provides a planetary setting of a dying colony ignored and oppressed by a once-mighty Confederacy. The books have that art-book look, in that no two-page spread looks like any others. Lack of an index means you're going to have to remember where you read that particular useful rule. Looks interesting. 

Orders of Inquisition by the RPG Professor, Self-published,  120-page softbound, 2025, Kickstarter. This is the sort of product I enjoy, and one that kickstarter excels at bringing to a wider audience. It takes the traditional tropes of gaming fantasy and turns them on their heads. As opposed to the gods (of all alignments) being player-supporting forces, the gods are distant and cruel, and their agents in the world fanatics. The book rolls through the alignment godheads presenting the negative side of faith, followed by specific orders, new classes, spells, and relics. In general, its crammed with some really nice, non-standard ideas. It would be an excellent addition to the more grimdarkish campaigns.

(And as an aside, I always wanted to develop a Good-aligned cult that believes fanatically that the dead should stay dead. Which is a really good thing when talking about vampires, and a really bad thing when you're talking about your fighter who has just been resurrected.)

Mythic Bastionland by  Christ McDowall, Bastionland Press, 208-page hardbound, 2025, purchase at PAX. This is the weirdest book of a weird lot. It looks great, but you really need to bore into it to understand what is going on. It's a fantasy Pendragonish setting, where you are a knight with powers and a mentor. You travel the land (hex-crawling to create the Realm) and encounter stuff, until you are powerful enough to go to the City and join the Round Table. I think. The presentation is the challenge - a collection of  one-page summarized followed by detailed descriptions of the various knights you can be. It wraps up with a series of dialogues between DM and players which to make some sense of it all.. The is beautiful, the presentation is compact, but it requires a lot of engagement just to wrap your head around. 

Random Jottings 22 Omnibus by Michael Dobson, Canal Press, 202-page softbound, 2025, gift of the author. Mike Dobson was my boss for several years at TSR, and following his tenure there he continued to write histories, books, articles, and commentary. A lot of that can be found here. This is a personal fanzine in which he talks about his travels, Wikipedia, and most relevant to this audience, his time at TSR and other gaming companies, and includes an article in the Comics Journal. Good bits of history. 

The Planar Codex by Cody Faulk et al, Daggerwood Games, 200-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter. Coming from my Manual of the Planes background, I always find planar books interesting. And this is a 5E (2014) product and is Great Wheel adjacent, and you'll recognize versions of the Feywild the Nine Hells, the Seven Heavens, and Mechanus (formerly Limbo). That means that they can be supplement old-school and Planescape-style settings, or be used to create a new planar arrangement. The approach is nice and very player-centered - new subclasses for all the original classes, new spells, and new races. My only gripe is that the fiction that headers each section is printed in an italic script font, which makes it slow going for these old eyes. 

The Medieval Fortress by J.E.Kaufman, H.W.Kaufman, Illustrated by Robert M. Jurga, Da Capo Press (Perseus Books Group), 320-page softbound, 2001, from the collection of Sacnoth, but actually purchased from Barnes & Noble in Tukwilla in 2005 (The receipt was being used as a bookmark). OK, NOT a gaming book per se, but the type of book I really like - a comprehensive reference work on medieval fortresses and walled cities. So this is browser's book for me, to be picked up and leafed through, and a reference if I'm doing any serious historical castle design. Good illustrations, though the photos are a bit muddy in black and white.

Draw Steel Heroes Book One: Heroes by Matthew Colville, James Introcaso, Willy Abeel, and Robert Djordjevich,  MCDM Productions, 402-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter; Book Two: Monsters, 378-page hardbound. This one demands a LOT more attention that this brief write-up can provide. This is a deeply impressive re-imagining of the D&D-style of game, reconfigured from the ground up, showing origins in 4E in its crunchiness. It is quite specific in its goal - it is about combat encounters, and the rules reflect that at every turn. No base assumption of D&D is left unchallenged - use of 2d10s instead of a d20, you always do SOME damage in combat (the only question is how much), Characteristics are refashioned with a small spread of scores. The archetypical classes are rethought, as well and while recognizable, function in different fashions. Spell are are rethought as abilities. Everything has shorthand box. 

The game is more than combat, but will function best at a table with a battlemap or online, as opposed to everyone in comfortable chairs scattered across the living room. The monster book contains new versions the reliable and recognizable foes, along with high level baddies that do some world-building for us, and rethought alternates for the TMed creatures like the Mind Flayer and the Beholder. There is a lot of lore in the game, but most of it is parked in descriptive text of the character classes and creatures, so it bears a complete reading. My one nit in presentation is that the excellent art for the monsters needs to be labeled, so I know which of four stat blocks on the page is applicable.

In short, Draw Steel is an adventurous reincarnation of the traditional TTRPG, and if you bemoan the lack of crunch in a lot of modern incarnations, this is one to check out. Its the one I'm going to be moving through in the next few weeks. 

And that's it for this bag of stuff, mixed though it be. I really like the spectrum of projects that come out of roleplaying, and while not all of them are my particular pipe of tea, I am glad they're available, and if they strike your fancy, you should hunt them down.

More later,  

Recent Arrivals: All This and North Texas, Too!

 There has been a slow accretion of new games here on Grubb Street for the past few months. Kickstarters fulfilling. Old games I found at my favorite local used bookstore. But generally things have been quiet.

And then, a large, heavy box, attached to a large, heavy deadline, shows up on my doorstep. The Three Castles nominees have arrived. 

The Three Castles Award (3CA) is given every year at the North Texas RPG Con, in Dallas, which this year is the weekend of 7 June. NTRPGCon is a small, definitely old-school convention that celebrates the older games of our shared histories, including the early editions of D&D. The process consists of four or five ancient eminences reviewing the presented product, filling out their votes based on previously-agreed-upon standards, and go from there. I am occasionally one of those grey eminences. Sometimes the project I think of as best doesn't win. Sometimes it does. Here are the nominees. 

A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633, by Ezra Claverie, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, three clothbound hardback digest volumes - Volume I: Jamestown and Environs, 96 pages, Volume II: Lo! New Lands, 192 pages, Volume III: Prodigies, Monsters, and Index, 130 pages, 2024, 3 Castles Award Candidate.  Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a weird game in the literal sense – it thrives on the weird, strange, and occult. This is an extremely impressive adventure both for size (three hardback volumes) and the nature itself (An alien ship crashes into Earth, in the process creating a rip in reality 150 years previously outside of Jamestown Virginia in the seventeenth century). The melding of historical accuracy (a lot covering the time period) and outré strangeness (mutated plants and animals, animated corpses, alternate realities) make it a very interesting read and should be an interesting play as well. This is the sort of thing that RPGs can do very well.

The End of Everything by Alex Kammer and Alan Patrick, Frog God Games, 216-page hardbound, 2023, 3 Castles Award Candidate. Once upon a time, the 32-page saddle-stitched booklet was the standard for adventures, covering a single location and adventure. Now they tend to be larger, in full cover, and cover a lot more levels and a full campaign. This one couples an epic “end-of-the-world” threat (very Cthulhian in nature) with an out-of-the-ordinary fantasy setting (The Haunted Steppes of the Lost Lands) with its own unique cultures (horsemen, tribal groups, and convivial Gnolls). Carries the players from level 1 to level 12 and spans the width of this rolling, roiling land. Nicely done.

ShadowRim by Greg Christopher, Chubby Funster Games, 200-page digest hardbound, 2023, 3 Castles Award Candidate.  My day job is a Senior Writer on Elder Scrolls Online, so imagine my surprise when I saw this volume, which uses the ShadowDark rules (which it recognizes) in the Skyrim setting (which it doesn't recognize, at least not directly). It does not SAY Skyrim, but it uses the races (name-changed), pull-quotes from the game, the Skyrim map (available separately, but also name-changed), and a declaration that it was “Inspired by the greatest CRPG of all time” (again, without mentioning that CRPG by name). Oh, and the back cover has a hand print with the words “We Know” written beneath it.  It reads well, uses the ShadowDark layout, and looks like a labor of love, but … really?

Dragonslayer by Greg Gillespie, Old School Publishing, 298-page hardbound, 2024, 3 Castles Award Candidate. My gaming group has played in some previous Gillespie adventures – Barrowmaze and Lost Canyons of Archaia. We had a good time with the old-school feel, and our GM (hey, Steve!) transposed what was there into D&Dish terms (%E 2014 edition). This is the rule set that ties more directly to it. It is definitely old-school right down to its Jeff Easley cover, and embraces the original rules with a strong eye towards combat and a delightful lethality. Some of the material has appeared in the adventures where they first showed up, but now they are gathered in one spot. Strong, intense rush of old-school nostalgia here.

Don’t F*ck The Priest by James Edward Raggi IV, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, box set, 64-page hardbound digest, cards, dice, 2024, 3 Castles Award Candidate. Good points? Excellent production values, that outré, weird, mushy organic vibe that exudes from LotFP products, and a card-based dungeon design that actually works for the story they’re telling. Bad points – Black on puce interior text, unreadable death metal heading fonts, extreme sexuality and grossness, and edgelord GM approach that tells you that if you play the adventure in any way other than being a CPU for the brilliant design, you’re having badwrongfun. Can’t mention the title at dinner parties. Didn’t even know if I want to show the cover. It's there, but didn't like it enough not to censor it.

And the winner is: TBA

And as for the rest that has come over the transom recently:

Rapscallion by Elizabeth Chaipraditkul (Product Management) and Whistler (Lead Designer/Lead Writer), Magpie Games, 288-page digest hardbound, GM Screen, playing maps, dice, dice tray, 2024, Kickstarter. So I’m a fan of pirate games, and this looks like a good one. It is of the Powered By The Apocalypse (PBtA) family, so we’re talking playbooks and moves. One of the key things I like about this is the rising tendency to make the case ship as a separate character with its own playbook. This sort of group identity has shown up in games like Blades in the Dark, and creates a cohesive identity for the players, as opposed to just “You are adventurers meeting in a bar”. Worth further investigation.

Dreadnought Return of the Black Maw by Alex Beisel and Nicholas Ross, Liminal Artifact, 88 page softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. The was part of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest, but it really is a bit large for that moniker. It is a horror game with a nautical theme, where tidal waves destroy a fantasy-ish Port Royal and an evil black submarine (?) washes up in the ruins, leaking evil from its reactor.  Your choices are to investigate it or run away. Neither are good options. It is yet again Powered by the Apocalypse (uses moves) but is mostly statless and uses a unique fear (dread) determining mechanism - 2d8 roll against a third die (starts at a d4 but ratches up). Interesting.

Flying Circus by Erika Chappell, Newstand Press, 304-page digest softbound, 2020, Page Turner Books. OK, besides pirates, I always had a fascination with WWI air games. Dogfight from Milton Bradley, Ace of Aces from Nova Games, Richthofen's War from Avalon Hill. Flying Circus is a fantasy air game, which means dragons and biplanes among other things. It is PBtA again, and uses a playbook for your aircraft as well. However, the playbooks are not in the book, but can be found online, and the links provided in the book are no longer accurate. I had to dig around in Reddit and their Discord to figure out where they were. Cool thing, unlike a lot of PbtA, the game gets down into the nuts and bolts of air-to-air combat.

Cthulhu Dark Ages by Chad Bowser and Andi Newton with James Holloway and Mike Mason, Chaosium, 272-page hardback, 2020, Page Turner Books. So the conventional wisdom about old TSR was that it put out too much stuff – splatbooks and new settings and revisiting old ones. Yet the modern Chaosium has been doing the same thing and seems to be doing OK. This is a revision of earlier Call of Cthulhu books covering Cthulhu adventures in the medieval world, and is a serious, serious upgrade. It has the standard features of new and modified investigator skills, game systems tweaked to the new setting, and appropriate mythos monsters, but also has a history of 10^th century England, a new setting (in the Severin Valley, of course) and a few new adventures. Very well done.

Get It at Sutlers by Daniel Sell, Melsonian Arts Council, 110-page digest hardback and numerous small booklets, 2024, Kickstarter. Troika is a very weird little game, and this is an … I think “adventure area” would be the best description of it. Imagine a weird tales version of Harrods of London, or Mike Moorcock writing an episode of “Are You Being Served?”. The setting is an all-purpose department store (remember department stores? And malls? Yeah, good times), which has a eclectic clientele, bizarre staff, and unique and alien challenges. You’re assumed to be working a shift there. Bunches of random encounters. Sort of an opium dream of a setting.

 Bounty Kingdom Gazetteer by Simone Laudiero, Acheron Games, 184-hardback, 2024m Kickstarter. Well, half a Kickstarter – the other half (a monster book) will show up eventually. This is an expansion/setting book for Brancalonia, a whimsical Spaghetti Fantasy based on Italian folklore and more than a dash of Commedia delle-Arte. New races, new classes, new subclasses, then a long tour though the city-states of the Italianish peninsula. This one’s set up for 5E, but it is just a good sourcebook. 

And that is it for now (though more has shown up in the meantime). Stay tuned for the winner of the Three Castles Award, and as always -

[UPDATE: And the Winner Is - A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum. Congratulations to Ezra Claverie and the LotFP team]! 

More later,

Theatre: Anniversary Plays

Covenant by York Walker, Directed by Nicholas Japaul Bernard, Arts West Through 2 March.

Blues For an Alabama Sky by Peral Cleage, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, Seattle Rep through 23 February

The Lovely Bride and I have crested 42 years of marriage this past week (thank you, thank you), and to celebrate, we decided to hold a "staycation" where both of us took off work. As a result, we played games (I lost several games of Wingspan), ate a lot of good food (Chestnut Cafe, which is the LB's favorite's lunch spot, Lobster Shop in Tacoma, Mashiko Sushi in West Seattle, and Toulouse Petite near the Seattle Center). And, as fate would have it, we had two plays scheduled over three days - Covenant at the Arts West, and Blues for an Alabama Sky at the Seattle Rep.

Let me get to the heart of the matter - Covenant was the best play and the best performance I have seen in Seattle for years, Arts West has been putting together bang-up seasons for the past couple years, and this one fired on all cylinders. The writing was top-notch, the performances were amazing, the direction was fantastic, and set design was grand. The small nature of the theatre brought an intimacy that allowed the actors to reach out across the void of the forestage and grab the audience by the collective shoulders and give them a good shake. The play is mythic and suspenseful and fully engaged.

Covenant is about secrets. It is also about faith and superstition, but it is most of all about secrets. The setting is a small town in Georgia, 1936. Johnny (Donavan Mahannah) comes back to his home town. He left town a stammering boy in the wake of his older brother's death. He returns now without the stammer, a master musician with his guitar, and possessing a smooth self-assurance. Naturally there's suspicion he made a deal with the devil. He came back for Avery (Simone Alene), who was just a friend but now something much more. Avery's Mama (Felicia V. Loud) is a god-fearing woman who does not approve of Johnny and his juke joint antics. Little sister Violet (Deja Culver) and family friend Ruthie (Kaila Towers) round out the ensemble. They're all brilliant.

And I don't want to say more because I don't want to do spoilers here - it's that good. Each character gets their turn to tell stories and reveal secrets, as well as sparking off each other in meaningful relationships. And the writing is SO GOOD, of the level that I was left thinking "Man, I wish I had written that" and "Man, I wish I could write like that". There is a not an ounce of fat in this play - even the most cast-off line has meaning and subtext, and is delivered in such a natural and engaged fashion, that over the course of the play as you realize (often to your horror) what is really going on here. All questions are resolved, even the ones you didn't know you had.

And part of that is the direction (Nicholas Japaul Bernard) and the dramaturg (Marquisa 'QuiQui" Dominguez. The players maneuver perfectly a two-tiered stage, the back stage being Mama's dining room, dominated by a cross, which the forestage was open for a variety of purposes, including a general "theatre space" as the actors share secrets with the audience. The sound design was excellent, accenting the action on the stage. Even the stagehands, the black-dressed theatre ninjas moving props onto and off the stage, were used perfectly. 

I rarely say that something is a near-perfect play, but this is it. Get yourself out to West Seattle for this one. 

Sunday we decamped for the Seattle Center and Blues for an Alabama Sky. And I will be honest - it was good. And if I saw it on its own I would probably give it greater praise. But it suffers in comparison with Covenant.

We're still in the 1930s, but this time in Harlem. Angel (Ayanna Bria Bakeri) is a hot mess of cabaret singer who just lost her job, her living space, and her boyfriend. Guy (Jamar Jones) is her gay best friend from Savannah, who is a costumer and is sure that Josephine Baker will sweep him up and invite him to come work for her in Paris. As he is trying to navigate a drunken Angel home, they're aided by Leland (Ajaz Dontavius), newly arrived from Alabama in the big sinful city. Delia (Ester Okech Lewis) is the prim neighbor from across the hall who is working to bring a family planning center (read: birth control) to Harlem, aided by a boisterous local doctor (Yusef Seevers). The five of them struggle with life and survival in the wake of the fading Harlme Renaissance.

And it works, mostly. The first act feels like it drags a bit, Checkov's gun makes a requisite appearance, and you can see some of the twists and turns coming a ways off. Some personal revelations and traumas show up rather late in the day. And there is a huge amount of name dropping going on - Marcus Garvey, Josephine Baker, Adam Clayton Powell (Jr and Sr), Margaret Sanger, Langston Hughes, none of whom show up on stage. 

The music, however, is haunting and delightful, with Nathan Breedlove on the trumpet acting as the ghostly spirit of the city itself to show time passing. Which is a good thing, since the stagecraft involves a turntable set that shifts back and forth to show what apartment we are in. I would wonder if the play would work better in a smaller confines, or, on the other hand, if Covenant would fade if thrust onto a larger stage.

Yet, it all comes together. The actors are fine. It is the best of three revivals at the Rep this season (it was originally produced 30 years ago). Given a choice between this and the Super Bowl, I'd definitely choose Alabama Sky. But seriously, go hunt down Covenant and prepare to be impressed. 

More later,

Game: Auf Weidersehen Berlin

 Berlin: The Wicked City, Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin By David Larkins with Mike Mason and Lynne Hardy, Chaosium 2019

I've mentioned this before, but the concept of doing full-fledged reviews carries with it the responsibility of actually playing the game. I talk about my recent arrivals with the light hand of first impressions and initial read-throughs, but full reviews demand a higher level of engagement.  The downside of this is that it may take weeks or months to get to a post-worthy review. This is hardly a good recipe for telling you about the new hotness.

But anyway, Berlin: The Wicked City.

Berlin was the capital of Germany in the twenties and thirties (the government was based out the town of Weimar briefly after WWI and that's where the name "Weimar Republic" came from). It was a vibrant, cultured, and often decadent city, with cabarets, art, a thriving literary scene, and a nascent movie industry. And sex. Lots of sex.

The book is recommended for mature readers, and leans hard into the city's cabarets and sex workers. A lot about sex workers. Even when talking about the various districts in Berlin, it drills down on what kind of sex workers are common there. Sort of like if you were writing about Las Vegas, but concentrating on strip clubs and escort services. It's a bit much, and while it adds depth to the setting, I never want to hear  people complaining about the Random Harlot Table in the DMG ever again.

The sourcebook section is incredibly detailed - we're a hundred years in the past in another country. And most people's knowledge of that era is primarily watching Cabaret on their iPad (which is not horrible, since the movie is based on the musical which is based on the book by an author who LIVED in Berlin during that era). So the first hurdle is getting people to understand what it is about Berlin they should consider when adventuring there.

And the authors have done their homework, and want you to know about it. Bios about everyone who hung out in Berlin in the 20s and 30s. Floorplans of famous buildings of the era. The adventures themselves are filled with name-checks and famous characters, such that I took the rare measure of asking the players not to look up everyone they encounter on the Wikipedia. 

The game rules? OK, we talked about the new system a while back. In general, they hold up well in play, and I like the fact that the staged nature of success makes it easier to narrate combat. In addition, the setting for the adventures makes for new players to slide into. Germany in the immediate post-war period had stricter gun control laws, so the idea of player characters packing heat is initially off the table (Gun laws were loosened later, but then only for "approved" people).

What about the adventure? Ah, there's the rub.

Well, I wasn't impressed. I ran the first of the three adventures, and after reading the second, thought about just going on to something else with my team. But after a vote, we pressed on, and had a good time of it. Of course, this requires a bit more detail and explanation, and with it a big SPOILER WARNING for those who are planning to get involved with this. So consider the SPOILER LIGHT lit and know that HERE BE SPOILERS.

My regular group on this was four players. A big-game hunter looking to book rich tourists to safaris in East Africa. A grizzled American reporter who came for the war and stayed for the beer. An albino heiress who lost her father and brothers in the war. An alienist who had an unpleasant encounter with Deep Ones when he was in the Kriegsmarine in the Baltic. You know, your typical grab-bag of Call of Cthulhu characters. They were all members of the Independent Order of the Owls, a club of paranormal researchers. This was one of the groups suggested by the book for creating a common theme among diverse heroes, and it gets good marks for giving the Keeper a place to start and unify the team.

The further good news is that the adventures swing away from the standard CoC plot ("You are summoned to a distant, unfamiliar place by someone who will be dead by the time you get there"). The bad news is that the players are often bystanders in their own adventure. They are roofied, magically teleported (a couple times) and in the case of the first adventure, have their fates determined by a single die roll at the beginning of the game. At the same time, there is a lot for the Keeper to do as well, in that you have to come up with encounters as the Brownshirts and their allies in authority close in on you (the Owls were raided at one point, and I had to make that up on the fly). Plus there are places where the text leaves you high and dry on basic reasoning about NPC behavior (Why DOES the Russian count choose to hire you?) and places where you have to make sure certain clues are delivered (make sure the amnesiac Grand Duchess mentions the Berlin Zoo to lead their players there later).

The adventures cover the rise and fall of postwar Berlin. The first adventure takes place among the physical and economic decimation following the end of the War and features the malevolent spirit of a mass murderer. The second occurs during the roaring 20's recovery and deals with a group seeking to incarnate an ancient goddess (and unfortunately succeeding). And the final adventure occurs during the authoritarian takeover of Germany, with the SA (Brownshirts) rising, and takes a tour through German cinema.  And through it all we have murdered prostitutes, dissolute, naked celebrities, and SS-supported brothels. 

How did our group fare? They lived, sorta. The American reporter sacrificed himself to defeat an elder god and was replaced with an exact duplicate. After the third adventure he joined the big game hunter and emigrated to Wisconsin. The alienist fled to Switzerland, and the heiress attempted to use the knowledge they gained to resurrect her dead husband. This last bit did not go well, and she went quietly mad and remained in Berlin until the Allied bombers arrived.

Berlin: The Wicked City, is an impressive sourcebook. The research is excellent, and by using period maps of the city, the maps are well-done. The handouts were well put together, and we discovered that even the newspaper typefaces of the time were politicized. Ultimately, though, this is a challenging product, not so much for the adult nature of it but because the adventure often denies players their agency, and requires the Keeper to thread some very narrow needles to keep the plot moving forward. 

More later,

New Arrivals: PreConventional Entry

 So later this week I'm heading out to Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin, along with a whole host of friends, colleagues, fans, and fellow professionals. So I want to get all this out the way before I add more to the pile.

The vast bulk of these come from Kickstarters resolving, and arriving on the doorstep. So I may comment on the process as well as the product.

Let's start.

Ryder's Intergalactic Guide to Robots by Jake Parker, JP Creative, 128-page landscape-formatted softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Jake Parker did Kepler's Guide to Spaceships last year, and I thought well enough of it to get the next volume. Parker wraps a story around a collection of autonomous robots, worker mechs, AI-guided vehicles, and warbots. I love the variety, and am sure there is a full universe in here somewhere, just waiting to come out.

Sentai & Sensibility, by Bug Boll, 9th Level Games, 108-page digest-sized softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. This is one of the stranger games I've picked up, but I'm glad I have. It's a combination of Japanese tokusatsu (live action with extensive special effects) with Regency Romance, in Boll's words, "Power Rangers as written by Jane Austen". You are one of the Gentlefolk (gentry), who can become a heroic Ranger when danger threatens, and with the rest of your allies (sentai) you combine to form a colossus (Voltron) to battle kaiju (giant monsters). The rule system is interesting in that your class (Station) determines the die you roll, and different type of challenges (Dance Moves) require different results, such that the physically weakest class is also the best at social interactions. The challenge is that all of this is buried under a mass of unique terminology set for the Regency era, so you're learning new terms to go with new mechanics. The Kickstarter comes with a deck of cards (characters, classes, and rules) and some standups, which are very nice, but now I have to make sure they don't get separated in my mess of an office. 

The Electrum Archives Issues 1 & 2 By Emiel Boven and Ava Islam, Cult of the Lizard King, 70-page and 78-page Digest-sized softbound books w/ four-panel paper maps, 2024, Kickstarter. This is a game system masquerading as a campaign setting. It is set in Orn, a desertified world that has seen several rulers and conquerors (and their ruins) over its long history. It is alien in many ways, and its magic runs off of ancient ink, which is also the coinage. Five attributes, three character classes, and a whole lot of weirdness which really tickles my Tekumel-based biases. The rules are presented cleanly and clearly, and while the players need a bit more investment (Spell names are random-rolled, and you get to figure out what they mean with your GM/Seer), it looks absolutely fascinating. My only gripe? I saw it for sale at GenCon a month before I got it in my hands. Yeah, it would be nice for the original funders to get their copies. 

Historica Arcanum: Era of the Crusades, Sarp Duyar &  Doga Can Sayilkan (Project Leads), Meta Creative 272 page hardback,  and Historica Arcanum: The Sigil of Jerusalem,  240-page hardback, two full-color maps, slipcased, 2024, Kickstarter. Meta Creative, out of Istanbul, rates up there with Free League for producing beautiful-looking books. They've concentrated on historical fantasy, expanding out the 5E system into Cairo and Jerusalem in the 13th century. There are new classes, the the system is growing outwards with new Professions, and a Deck of the Damned to make combat more stressful (with the stress mechanic developing in a similar fashion to CoC's Sanity Rules). Sigil of Jerusalem repeats some of the player-facing material, and launches into a conspiracy in Jerusalem itself.  Metis does itself a great favor in its release schedule, as this showed up on my doorstep JUST as they were launching their new Kickstarter. 

Campaign Builder: Castles & Crowns, by Richard Green, Tim Hitchcock, Brian Suskind (Lead Designers), Kobold Press, 272-page hardbound,2024, Kickstarter. Kobold hews closer to 5E than a lot of the other D&D Descendants listed here. This is the second volume of their Campaign Builder series, and deals with the elites - nobility and the court. And it is a toybox of new heritages, subclasses, settings, factions, kingdom types and monsters. It works closer to traditional Western European D&D, but has a lot of good foundational material for kingdom building. Yes, I Kickstarted this, even though I could have mooched a copy off chief Kobold Wolfgang Baur, but I wanted to see what was in it. 

Never Going Home by Braden Aten and Matthew Orr, Wet Ink Games, 118-page softbound, 2019, Purchased from Grandcon (Grand Rapids) from Pete Petrusha, who had a booth there, This was originally Kickstarted, but I don't know why I didn't go in for it at the time. It is an original system using both dice and cards for resolution and resources. The setting in 1916 in the trenches of WWI. In the Battle of the Somme, a tear between worlds has unleashed a horde of nastiness on the battlefield. Where your unit is. Your squad has to deal the the atrocities of the battlefield as well as horrible things that crawling into our reality. 

Sol System by a small host of talented people, Green Ronin Publishing, 112-page softbound, 2024, Midgard Comics. Designed for The Expanse RPG, this is very much an old-school sourcebook, with tons of subject matter and just a smattering of RPG rules. It handles a lot of the factions, corporations, religions, and criminal operations in the sol system, an expansion of the trade rules from the original book. This is much more in the "readable" column than the must use to play column, but given that the company is upgrading the core rulebook to handle the current situation in the universe, it's pretty cool.

Astro Inferno by Andreas Ruu, Haxan Studios, 384-page hardbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Astro Inferno is the most recent arrival here, and requires a bit more thought. It is both stylish and convoluted. Set in a post-apocalyptic demonic SF universe, it uses a lot of unique mechanics and, like Sentai & Sensibility, buries them under a mass of setting-related names and descriptions. It is a beautiful art-game, with excellent production qualities, and a variety of hard-to-read fonts, including that jagged-lightning typography favored by heavy metal bands. Long ago, at TSR, we received a copy of Wraith, from White Wolf, which used this iconography for its cover, and could not decide what the title was - we finally settled on "Noseroids". It's the same thing here. Yeah, this one's going to be a tough climb to wrap my brain around.

And that's it for the moment. I will be at Gamehole Con later in the week, and will probably find some more cool stuff there. 

So definitely More later. Noseroids.

Theatre: So It Goes

 The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder Directed by Damaso Rodriguez, Seattle Rep, through 20 October,

The new play season at the Rep began for us with another adventure in short-distance theater commute. The weekend traffic situation has been painful in the region for the past couple weeks, so we chose to leave early. Which was fortunate because an accident on one of the freeways ate up all the time we gained. We still got there before curtain rise, but it has been a challenge.

Anyway, Skin of Our Teeth:

I wanted to like this. I SHOULD like it. It ticks a lot of boxes that I grouse and complain about in this space. It is traditional theatre, as opposed to dance troupes and improv groups. It uses talented actors I have seen before on the boards, living up to the "Repertory" part of the name. It has a huge cast in a world where five-person plays push the limits. It has community volunteers on stage. The author is well-known. It won a Pulitzer back in '42. It had a successful revival recently on Broadway. It runs 2 1/2 hours with three full acts, making it a blockbuster in theater terms.

And it landed with a thud for me. 

Let me summarize. The Skin of Our Teeth is a the story of the immortal Antrobus family, who represent the human race. Everything is allegory here. George (Carlos Lacamara) is the patriarch, and represents progress and authority. Maggie (Emily Kuroda) is his wife, domesticity and family. Son Henry (Chip Sherman) is violence, daughter Gladys (Rachel Guyer-Mafune) is the future. Their story takes place in three periods where the world is ending, by ice, flood, and war. There is a lot of anachronism and absurdity. The first act takes place as the glaciers are bearing down on the Antrobus's suburban home in New Jersey, where they keep mammoths in the house and invite the great philosophers in for coffee and sandwiches. The most accessible character is the maid, Sabina (Sara Hennessy), who breaks the fourth wall to complain to the audience about the absurdity of the play itself. Allegorically, she is human nature, and is really the main character here. 

So first act, threatened with extinction during the Ice Age. Second act, rinse and repeat. Third act comes to the resolution that, in the words of Rosanne Rosannadanna, "It's always something". The program book comes with a handout explaining that we're being non-linear and absurd in places, and that's part of the point. 

Plus in the middle of this, the play being presented is plagued (in the script) with mishaps, miscues, and labor troubles, ending in most of the cast breaking character, having some honest moments, and recruiting volunteers to finish the play itself. The last is a good comment on the relationship between play and audience, but with the pacing it just sort of trundles along.

The main actors are fine, but their characters are flat, and only when they break away from them (portraying the actors who are portraying the characters) do they seem to come to life. The secondary tier of support characters are excellent, with callouts to Sunam Ellis as the nervous stage manager and Laura Crotte as the Atlantic City fortune teller. The teeming masses on-stage are pulled from the Rep's Public Works program, and some subscribers get to read quotes towards the end. I like that part.

The stagecraft is excellent. I usually bash on the overproduced nature of these things, but here the collapsing roofs, advancing ice sheets, and arrival of a ferry/ark all work out just fine. Also, a dinosaur and a mammoth. And a hydro race.

Ultimately, all this had more meaning some 80 years ago, and was experimental and engaging in 1942, but now it tends to creak from its age. There were two intermissions, and after each there were more empty seats in the house. The Lovely Bride would never insult the actors by leaving, and I wanted to see if the third act redeems that which came before (it does. A little). 

But really, the history of humanity? It all boils down to "It's always something". 

More later, 

The Book Backlog: Knives Out

 [Bloggers Note: So, I've been fretting over one particular entry for a while - a review of a game product that I'm spending way too much time fiddling with. I'd take it off the shelf, rewrite chunks of it, then put it aside as more immediate matters (the Political Desk, plays that have a closing date) get in the way. But as a result, I have created a backlog of books on the corner of my desk I want to talk about. So this is the Book Backlog. I will (once again) put aside the much longer piece and try to whittle it down, though  that may be a fool's errand. 

Anyway:]

Court of Daggers by Alexandre Dumas Translated by Lawrence Ellsworth, Cyrano Productions, 2022.

Provenance: It is no surprise to long-term readers (both of you) that I've been a fan of Lawrence Ellsworth's translations of the Musketeer Cycle. So I was a little disappointed when I could not find the continuance of the series on the Pegasus Books site or its distributor Simon & Schuster. But I found this volume and the next one on Amazon, continuing the story under Ellsworth's own imprint. 

Review: I'll be frank - we're in the doldrums here. It is season 5 of 7 seasons and the movie. The original Musketeers stories were written to be serialized in newspapers, and while that makes for reading them fairly neatly and compartmentalized, collecting them together lacks a bit of heft as we move further away from the original adventures. 

This is the second part of the Visconte de Bragelonne, which started in Between Two Kings. As such we get a a chance to deal with other characters than the four core musketeers. In particular, the rising star is the titular viscount, who is the son of the almost saintly Aramis. Of the others, Athos is now a clergyman. Porthos is nobility. D'Artagnan has land in France and England, and still works, off and on, for the Crown, resigning whenever the Crown displeases him.

There are three arcs within the text. The first centers the conflict between the Superintendent of Finance Fouquet, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who controls the late Cardinal Mazarin's wealth. The King sides with Colbert and signs the death warrant for two of Fouquet's underlings. Fouquet  hires mercs to capture his minions, escaping through a nearby building, and then covering their tracks by setting the building ablaze. Oh, yeah, the building is owned by D'Artagnan, who is on the scene when this goes down. D'Artagnan foils the plot, kills Fouqet's mercs, and lets Fouquet's men be properly hanged.

D'Artagnan is then hired by Colbert to investigate Fouquet's building up a fortress on the coast. D'Artagnan finds that Porthos is charge of the fortifications, and since Porthos is not the sharpest mental blade in the basket, discovers that Athos, now a bishop, is behind this particular development. Fouquet does from fancy diplomatic tapdancing to avoid the noose himself. Interestingly, Dumas (and D'Artagnan) likes Fouquet better than Colbert, even though he is working against him. 

The last act consists of the King marrying off his brother to the sister of King Charles of England (who our glad lads helped put back on the throne). A lot of young men are hot for Princess Henrietta, including the second Duke of Buckingham (which worked out SO well the last time). Bragelonne has to be the voice of reason here, even though he is himself smitten with his childhood love, who in turn has been elevated to a Lady in Waiting (and caught the eye of the King). More drama to come, but that will wait for the next volume, Devil's Dance. 

Bragelonne, the titular hero, threads his way through all this. He is D'Artagnan's Padawan in the first third. He argues with his father a bit in the second set of chapters, but then we scarcely see him until the final bit, where he comes into his own. And while the Viscount worships his father, he shares much with the bravado and cunning of D'Artagnan.

Ellsworth acquits himself well here, covering a lot of territory that most Americans and English-speakers have not heard of in the canon. He trims, edits and modernizes, without losing the plot or burying small bits. An earlier translation of the text can be found here, and it is clear that Ellsworth makes the work readable and engaging for the current readers, just as it was for serial readers in Paris itself. He smooths things out and reduces the stuffiness (to our ears) of the earlier translations. Plus he backs up with footnotes and character descriptions in the back that help clarify where everyone is standing with each other and what any asides and allusions refer to.

In short, I'm still enjoying the series, through we are now 30 years out from when D'Artagnan first entered Paris with his wobbling horse. And it gives me wonderful source material for Miseries & Misfortunes. And I'm looking forward to reading the next volume as well.

More later 

New Arrivals: The Gen Con Haul

 So, I was invited out to Gen Con back in early August as a Guest of Honor this year in Indy, and despite the Covid, it was pretty darn good.

The official house was 71,000 gamers, all of whom I suspect were on the exhibit floor at the same time as I was. The convention had spread out even more than the last time I attended, which surprised me, and worked into every nook and cranny of the surrounding hotels (and they are building more hotels in Indianapolis, which bodes well for future conventions). I had been invited to sit of several panels for the 50th anniversary of D&D (Here are some videos), and helped out with the Writer's Symposium as well. And I picked up a lot of stuff, including huge blisters on both feet from all the walking around (and Covid).

I will confess I packed a large suitcase, half-empty, just to account for all the things I was intending to bring back. I also sent a copy of Shadowdark to a colleague who asked for it, and it was a good thing, because they sold out of the last of their print run at the con itself. 

OK, so what do we have? 

Gen Con Program Booklet by Peter Adkison and many diverse and talented hands, 170-page magazine format. This bears out a call-out because of how much it shows the depth and diversity of Gen Con as it celebrated 50 years of D&D. Stuffed with ads from exhibitors but also showing the maps of all the locations, it covers the history of D&D, the guests of honor (I'm on page 91), the writer's symposium, the costume contest (one of my old D&D group from college is on page 125), and all sorts of subcons and special interest groups. An excellent memento of the convention.

Legions of Carcosa by John Harness, Kira Magrann, Sarah Saltiel and Monica Valentinelli, with Daniel Kwan, Pelgrane Press, 200-page hardbound, 2023, Gen Con, and Black Star Magic,  by Robin D. Laws, Sarah Saltiel, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, and Ruth Tillman, Pelgrane Press, 184-page digest-sized hardbound, 2023 Gen Con . Pelgrane's The Yellow King is one of the more intriguing games I have in my collection and one of the more challenging. Its system is a simplified version of their Gumshoe system, which uses condition cards as opposed to more traditional hit points and the like, yet it remains a bit of a mental climb for me. The setting itself is four settings based on the work of Robert Chambers, who in the 1890s created an alternate 1920s with a dictatorship in America with suicide booths in the major cities. The game itself has four separate time periods to it - Paris in the 1890s, during the Continental Wars, and post-war, post-dictatorship US, and a modern era. So all this is background. Legions of Carcosa is a monster book, Black Star Magic is a book of spells. Nice additions, though I know I'll have to do a bit more digging to see how they can be implemented. 

The Fifth Imperative by Robin D. Laws, Pelgrane Press, 192-page softbound digest, 2022, Gen Con  Also from the Pelgrane Press and also dealing with the alternate history of The Yellow King. This one is set in the period following the dictatorship, and involves politics and otherworldly conspiracy. I really like the lateral development and fiction books that Robin D. Laws and Pelgrane put out, and usually don't see enough of them through my standard purchasing venues. So this will likely end up as a "plane book" to be read en route to conventions.  

Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin D. Laws, Gameplaywright Press, 196-page softbound digest, 2010, 2015, Gen Con. This is the third time I have purchased this book. On the two previous occasions, I have recommended it others, loaned it out, and never saw it again. It is an interesting examination and mapping of beats and pacing within narrative stories. For Laws, such beats are instances with specific purposes, be them - Dramatic, Commentary, Anticipation, and the connective tissue of Pipe, and combine to create Hope and/or Fear in the audience. He then uses this analysis to examine Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No, under this lens. It's an interesting approach, and the only thing I can ding it with is the each beat is considered as a single unit - a particularly positive beat gets the same weight as a negative beat, so that the progress of beats is downward, regardless of resolution. But that's just a quibble. I'm glad I got another copy of this. No, you can't borrow it. 

Pendragon Core Rulebook by Greg Stafford, with input from myriad others, Chaosium Inc./Moon Design Publications, 254-page hardback, 2024, Gen Con. I'm a fan of Chaosium's games - I've played a lot of Call of Cthulhu. I've played almost no Runequest (but love the lore). Pendragon falls between those two poles, where I've done a bit as both player and gamemaster. And so a goal of this trip was to pick up the new version (I would have also picked up some Miskatonic Library volumes, if they had any on-hand, just so you know). The latest version is polished and is incredibly readable. The downside is that this is primarily a Player's Guide, with a lot of good information for players. For a GM, it would more of an uphill stroll, and hopefully there is a GM resource in the works. In the mean time, I would still likely spring the Starter Set on my players.

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, Tor Books, 266 page Trade paperback, Gen Con. So what's the deal with including all these books here? Well, they were part of the Gen Con swag I returned from Indy with. This volume was a reward for helping out the Writer's Symposium, spending part of an afternoon stuffing swag bags for the attendees. A good group activity. The book itself deals with a slacker taking on a temp job that takes him to another dimension filled with giant monsters. That's about all I know about it right now. Kate's read it on Kindle (I have a hard time concentrating on devices when I have other options to engage with) and says its pretty good. It becomes another plane-trip book. 

Miseries and Misfortunes: Roleplaying in 1648 by Luke Crane, Burning Wheel, six softbound digest volumes for 852-pages total, 2022-2023, Gen Con. This is the sort of thing I love at Gen Con - finding something I had never heard of before, something that is much tougher in this Internet Age. So I was delighted I found the six volumes of this game at the Burning Wheel booth and snapped them up. The gamer takes place in the post-Richelieu, post- Louis XIII era of the Musketeers Cycle, where you had the underaged Louis XIV, the Queen Regent, and a noble revolt known as the Fronde. While it notes its descent from Basic D&D, it has morphed from those early designs into a completely different animal with a lot of different mechanics. The books themselves are 1) a system book for game mechanics, 2) a character creation book (which should be read first so you know what they're talking about in book 1, 3) a book on magic, 4) and expansion to books 1-3, 5) an adventure set in Catalonia, and 6) a MASSIVE book on Paris itself. So yeah, I'm pretty pleased with myself.

Religion in the American West: Belief, Violence, and Resilience from 1800 to Today.  Edited by Jessica Lauren Nelson, University of New Mexico Press, 196-page hardbound, 2023. So at Gen Con, my hosts put me up at the Fairfield, which was one of a collection of interconnected Marriot-branded lodgings. My room faced the Eiteljorg Museum of American Museums and Western Art. And since I had arrived a day early, I actually had the chance to see something in the city where I was. And it is an excellent museum of Native American and European Western art, and I would recommend it just on the basis of that. But the special exhibit was on Religion in the American West, and covered both the stuff most folk know about (The Mormons, the Spanish missions), as well as lot of things that tended to get pushed to the back (Presbyterians and their influence on the Erie Canal, the rivalry between Catholic priests and Protestant ministers among the Native Americans). It was a good exhibit, and I went back on Sunday to get the book (which was half-price since that was the last day of the exhibit). Look forward to reading it. 

Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, Edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and Jose P. Zagal, the MIT Press, 372-page Trade paperback, 2024, Gen Con. Purchased at the MIT press booth, no less. The 50th anniversary of D&D has encouraged a spurt of commentary and analysis. This volume is a collection of essays from a number of talented individuals. I've been reading this is bits and pieces, and there are parts I find engaging, and those that I give the hairy eyeball and raised eyebrow at. The final collection probably should have had one more pass through it by a well-intentioned grognard or two to catch the nits. One obvious nit? For a document that pushes cultural accuracy in many of its essays, the cover shows two Viking-types fighting what I would guess to be a Lindwyrm. And the Vikings have wings on their helmets. Its a minor thing, but triggers that eye-roll thing. 

The Egg of the World: A Guide to Gaming in the World of Tekumel by Victor Raymond, 256 page ringbound draft, 2022. Gift of the Author. It is well known that I am a fan of Empire of the Petal Throne, but recognize that the very alienness and completeness of the world is a major stumbling block for new players. There's a lot to grok - no only all the strange names and alien creatures, but the non-Western-European concepts of rigid class and clan. The original EPT had 11 pages of backstory for the world at the start, before digging into it properly. So this volume sorts out a lot of this for the referee, hitting the important points of what makes a Tekumel campaign, as well a host of scenarios, adventures, factions and patrons that can be grist for your mill. This is a referee's source material to get your players into EPT without overloading them, and allow them to experience the world as opposed to confronting them with a big data dump. I'm looking forward to seeing this in its final form. 

Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, TopatoCo Books, 592 page trade paperback, Gen Con. Look to the blogroll to the right, and you'll see QC listed. And I check it out on weekdays. At Gen Con, I hunted down Jacques among the teaming thousands and myriad booths. He had already sold out of Volumes 1 and 2, but I bought Vol 3 and he included a drawing of Hannalore (I have friends who are artists, but it still lifts my heart when someone does that). Anyway, Questionable Content has been around for twenty+ years, and deals with the relationships of Marten and Faye, who were a couple back at the beginning, then broke up and dated others, then broke up with those others a few more times and now are in pretty stable relationships. This is of the era when Hannalore, who grew up on a space station, shows up more, Marten still has a band, and has such things a whether Penelope, the new employee, is really the superhero Pizza Girl and the threat of the the VespAvenger and her transforming robot scooter. The writing is smart, the characters are intelligent, and the strip remains excellent. The strip has evolved as it deals more with robots and SF elements, and there are a host of characters that rotate in and out, sort of like Doonesbury. I really like the strip, and you can rabbit hole through the archives if you don't want a physical copy. So check it out. 

Neoclassical Geek Revival Second Edition Acidic Rulebook (it is acidic instead of basic, get it?), by Zzarchov Kowolski, Neoclassical Games, 170 page hardback digest, Gen Con.  I'd seen mentions of this product elsewhere, and was delighted to see it with a booth (low-tech and high pressure), so I picked up the core book and a couple support products. I expected another OSR-clone hewing close to the original little booklets, but instead discovered that they took the core concepts and headed for the exits, changing them over time to produce something completely unique. The tone of the books are that same jaunty in-your-face attitude of the guy across the gaming table explaining his house rules, but everything has changed dramatically, such that you're learning a completely new game. The part that is most like original D&D is the presence of a GM (mentioned briefly) and the 1st edition tendency to create a new system whenever confronted with a new challenge. It's really impressive. I also picked up Havenvale (16 pages), a tidy little starting area in a mountain valley, and The Price of Evil (32 pages), a way to create haunted houses with a deck of cards. 

Whew! And that's the lot. And more have shown up, but we'll deal with them later. So, more. Later.