What Games I’m Playing
What am I playing?
5e.
I ran a game for a bit until two TPKs got me a reputation in town as a killer DM. This made me sad, but my buddy took over the gaming duties. Now, I’m playing in his game and being the yahoo running amok. For laughs I’m a playing a goody two shoes who makes everyone’s life miserable.
I like 5e, but it takes forever to make a character and all the crunch gets to me.
(I’m also playing a f**kton of board games but that’s a subject for another post.)
What am I running?
Apocalypse World.
The Stars Without Number game stalled out, then I killed a few parties with 5e, and ran a Numenera one-shot that never really became more than that because two of the players left town (although I wouldn’t have minded if it had become a longer running game).
Apocalypse World has been fun, but it certainly takes more reading the table, than D&D ever did. Also, D&D has very clear role demarcations whereas Apocalypse World doesn’t, so if you have a player who wants to do everything and control every other player, they will try to. Generally, this same person outside of the game is a bit of a bore.
What do I wish I was running?
Beyond the Wall.
The more 5e I play, the more I fall in love with this retroclone. Yeah, the YA protag thing could be a bit annoying – but as a system this might be my favorite iteration of D&D.
Who does it suck to game with?
Two kinds of people:
The never played D&D before but loves Wil Wheaton nerd who sees D&D as a signifier of their nerd status. It’s not just a game, it’s a pop culture reference! If there are no Cheetos and Mountain Dew on the table they feel slighted.
Chess players. Chess players are the worst.
The Thirty Years War
I’m reading CV Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War. I’m near the start of year three of the war. This is what has happened so far:
Bohemia needed a king but couldn’t decide on one because electoral college/religion. It didn’t help that the two potential kings were more or less identical taciturn, easily manipulated young inbred aristocrats with the names Fred and Ferdinand. No one cared who sat on the throne except some asshole Catholics and some asshole Protestants. What mattered was that Bohemia was in Germany, and Germany was the highway between North Europe and South Europe.
If you wanted to sell British linens in Venice and North Africa, you marched them through Germany and Germans made a lot of money being a superhighway full of beer and inns. So many people wanted to control Germany that it was overseen by something like 2000 minor princes, families, and church holdings. And not just because of beers and inns and linens and markets but to control the road so when the time came, and everyone knew it was coming, and the shit finally hit the fan in Europe, that Austro-Spanish Superpower couldn’t march their soldiers out of Italy (breeding place of strapping young lads with low job prospects and mercenary captains eager to bulk up their CVs) along the German superhighway to Northern Europe where someone else’s Sister’s Father-in-law-Uncle-Cousin has his kingdom and he’s rich/also happens to be their cousin!
Everyone expects the fan shit hit to happen in a few years when a treaty runs out in Flanders, but surprise surprise a bunch of asshole Catholics got thrown out a window in Prague by a bunch of asshole Protestants because they had an electoral college/religious freedom (which totally only applied to Protestants and Catholics anyways*).
So two years ahead of schedule it’s time for proxy war in Germany, and Fred or Ferdinand is like Hey Uncle/Cousin/Father-in-Law can you help me out? And that Uncle-Cousin-Father-in-Law is like okay, and his enemies (the Uncle-Cousin-Father-in-law’s) are like No Fucking Way you Austro-Spanish asshole, you ain’t getting anywhere near that sweet German Superhighway. And they go to Not-Fred nor-Ferdinand and are like, let me help you out, because no way that asshole gets access to that superhighway religious freedom!
One faction sends an army, the other faction goes to Italy and buys an army, and march march march, let’s have a fight. And if we can’t have a fight let’s just burn and loot shit. And at some point the Hungarians are like Man – we need to get in on all that looting, so here’s an army because Sister-Uncle-Brother-in-law-Treaty and Fred Ferdinand is like “Gee, thanks?” as his own kingdom is looted by his own allies.
And it’s more marching, more looting, and more fighting and then there’s a big fight outside Prague on a white mountain and the rebellious Bohemian side (Fred’s) loses, and Ferdinand’s like that’s all sorted out – by which I mean he has a bunch of protestants executed and their heads put on spikes and cuts up their paper telling them they have religious freedom, and he felt really awful doing it because he’s really just a shy, misunderstood privileged bro aristocrat manipulated by everyone around him but he totally went to confession before signing the death warrants so it’s all good.
Meanwhile Fred’s run off to the King of Sweden and is like Wah wah, my kingdom, and right behind Fred is this Manfred Max mercenary captain character like Wah wah where’s my f—ing money. And Fred’s like I ain’t got it, and the King of Sweden is like Let me help you because German superhighway RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!, and Manfred Max mercenary captain is like, I’ll stick with you guys because war=money and maybe this time I’ll f—ing make some.**
And that brings us to the end of year two. Not confusing at all, right?
* The book makes no reference to what Germany’s Jewish community thought about all this high-falutin religious freedom talk. It’s accepted as a given that religious freedom was meant only to mean Calvinists and Jesuits shouldn’t be assholes to Lutherans and old fashioned folk Catholics. But the book’s not a series of cross-sections like Purkiss’s The English Civil War. It’s much more straightforward and chronological. From a folklore prospective this would be the eras of the the European witch-hunts, the Golem of Prague, the events depicted in Simplicus Simplicissimus, and the fairy tales the Grimms and Von Schwonwerth would write down two centuries later. Wanting to know how all that mixed into this brew of events is likely another book entirely.
** All every mercenary captain wanted to do was make enough money to retire to some nice quiet out of the way principality somewhere – and by that I don’t mean as like some dowdy bourgeois merchant, but as The Prince of the place. These guys seem like they come right out of a Jim Thompson crime novel like The Getaway. “Just one more war, baby, then I promise I’ll retire to that valley outside Genoa.”
The Steerswoman Series by Rosemary Kirstein
“If you ask, she must answer. A steerswoman’s knowledge is shared with any who request it; no steerswoman may refuse a question, and no steerswoman may answer with anything but the truth.”
So last month I breezed through all the books in Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman series. And now I want to tell you all about them because they’re smart and fun.
The Good… They’re limited in setting, POV, and scope. This is definitely a pet peeve of mine, but I much prefer stories set against a local area than one that sprawls. These books don’t sprawl. They’re smart in their presentation of their world and philosophy. I can’t say enough about how great it is to read a speculative fiction novel that digs deep into a place and way of life and not send its characters careening across the landscape like tourists or anthropologists for hundreds of pages. And this is even though the Steerswomen do approach their work like anthropologists would, studying their society and the world they live in – but it’s presented as part and parcel of a developed milieu.
These are very much books about people in places and not about broad political movements or the internecine strife between nations or kingdoms. Those things are present as are elements of the sword & sorcery genre, only their brought down to the level of neighborhood politics and local actions. Their perspective is not the Epic but the Realist. Rowan the Steerswoman is on a journey of discovery and we learn as she explores different places and communities. Even the map in the front of the book is an artifact of her journey towards a greater understanding of her world, as each book opens with a different map encompassing her explorations up until that book.
The Bad… It’s a series and it’s not done yet. The first book was written in 1989 and the fourth in 2004. The author has said there are likely two more books to go. So coming into the series now, you need to know ahead of time that while each book is self-contained and short, the main story-line is yet to be fulfilled. All those plots and adventures and slow reveals of wider world details have yet to pay off. That’s a drag. But to let that stop you would be to miss out on some very good and very smart adventure fiction.
The Ugly… There’s a reveal. It’s not well hidden. Look at the covers to the first two books, The Steerswoman and The Outskirter’s Secret, you don’t even need the author to tell you she’s writing science-fiction not fantasy. (But if so, it’s the science fiction of Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia and not so much Non-Stop.) The fact that there is a reveal isn’t such a bad thing, but don’t get hung up on it. Really, it’s not a secret. It’s on the covers after all. The rest of it is all good, so check’em out!
Favorite Reads: October Books 2016
This was a great month for books. I read a ton of fun stuff. Here are some highlights:
The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain by Diane Purkiss: I’ve been slogging through this for months, reading a chapter here and there and then putting it aside for weeks on end, but you shouldn’t take my slow progress as a judgment. It’s a thick history book and I can’t be blamed for wanting some occasional zap/pow/boom along the way. The weirdness of the time comes through, but I’m sure it could be even more deeply explored (if you know of a book that does, I’d love to hear of it). But yeah, this is one of those people’s histories so draws on a lot of first hand accounts from various outsider sources such as kitchen servants, pamphleteers, and soldier-preachers.
Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy Hughes: Weird pulp crime novel that reminded me of Nightmare Alley while managing to be even pulpier. Sailor is a Chicago gangster who works as the personal secretary to a corrupt senator. When a deal goes bad and the senator cuts ties with Sailor, Sailor tracks him to New Mexico where they play cat and mouse in the midst of a fiesta. Meanwhile McIntyre, a Chicago cop, is trying to get the goods on the senator and hopes he can convince Sailor to do something good with his life for once. I will probably do a “One Book Four Covers” for this book, but I absolutely loved it.
Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente: An AI/human hybrid teaching itself how to love by listening to stories? Maybe. I was along for the gorgeous prose and imagery. The story unfolds at its own pace, so you need to give this time as it puzzles itself apart and reveals its workings to you. I’d say the journey is worth it.
Bleakwarrior by Alistair Rennie: This is a bad book for bad people and as good as they say. It’s the grim dark genre pushed to absurd lengths and a long form riff on Elric and his like. Imagine Elric by way of GWAR by way of the WWF if Jodorowsky were in charge of the script. If you can imagine it and can stomach copious amount of violence, more violence, and genital violence, then get your hands on this book. It’s something.
The Language of Power by Rosemary Kirstein: This is the fourth book in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series, and the most recent. I plowed through all four this month and will do a longer post on the series some time this month. Safe to say I adored them and they did so much right that most speculative fiction gets wrong in regards to pace and plotting. This book has Rowan the Steerswoman still on the trail of the wizard Slado and the mystery of “routine bioform clearance”, but has her staying in a small town as she tries to uncover more of Slado’s history. The thing I loved was how the entire book stayed focus on one locale and situation, and didn’t do the standard spec-fiction thing of sending people running all over the world to discover plot tokens. The downside is that there are still two more books to go in the series.
I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas: An enjoyable book that satirizes fandom or at least the areas of it I’m partially familiar with. The Summer Tentacular is an annual HP Lovecraft convention that draws a host of weirdos to Providence, RI. Only this year a notoriously disliked author has been murdered in the hotel and his room mate decides to play detective and tries to find out why no one cares that a murder has happened among their members. A fun read that at its worst becomes a Lovecraft sitcom or riff on Bimbos of the Death Sun, but at its best is funny, sad, and a little bit terrifying.
And there we go…
Favorite Reads: September Books 2016
I made slow progress on a few books but didn’t finish them, put down others, read some short fiction, and so here we are.
I went on a binge of old school space opera. “A Planet Named Shayol” by Cordwainer Smith is some seriously gross, bizarre stuff about a man convicted to live on a horrifying prison planet. It’s a crazy ride and well worth reading if you like weird, SF, or weird SF. The picture above is the Virgil Finlay illustration for it. Smith has some notoriety for being an early CIA agent and writing a manual on Psychological Warfare. An interesting guy and his stories are always interesting.
Second short fiction binge: James H. Schmitz. Have I blathered about the Witches of Karres? That’s a fun space opera and Schmitz by and large delivers fun space opera. Agent of Vega offers more of the same. Intergalactic secret agents foil various threats from hostile alien invasions to crimelords that are nothing more than the puppets of telepathic alien parasites. Stuff like that. I’m have a fun time working my way through Agent of Vega and Other Stories. One thing I really like is Schmitz’s a much more compassionate and a lot less hard-edged than his peers without coming across as being naive or sentimental.
Third short fiction binge: Elmore Leonard’s When the Women Come Out To Dance. Mostly crime short stories with some more literary and a few westerns pitched in. This book made me understand why people love Leonard’s stuff. His range from short and clipped to long and dense is amazing. I plan on getting a copy of his collection of Western stories, cause the ones in here were pretty great.
On to a novel:
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by DG Compton: A 70s SF novel about a world where most illnesses have been cured and people mostly only die from old age. This has led to a sort of despair in the society that’s being countered by reality TV shows centered on the rare young and middle-aged individuals who suffer from terminal diseases. Katherine Mortenhoe is one such individual, and the novel centers on her coming to terms with her mortality while a media empire tries to maximize her suffering to their profit. And I would probably go on about that and mention how much I love NYRB’s stuff… except over the weekend NYRB doxxed an author who has gone to great lengths to maintain their anonymity and even said they’d likely quit writing if their identity was revealed. So I don’t know what to think except fuck NYRB.
On the Nature of Assholes
A theory of assholes:
You aren’t an asshole. You are being an asshole.
That’s an important distinction. Being an asshole isn’t a state inherent to your identity, it’s not who you are, but simply the state of being you are passing through at that moment. At some later moment, you may not be an asshole.
Now it’s possible you have a low resistance to being an asshole and the asshole path is so clearly blazed and marked it takes an act of extreme willpower not to go full asshole at the slightest provocation and your average state of being manifests asshole so often that it takes on the appearance of permanence. Or maybe you’re a performance artist and have decided that it’s much easier to perform being an asshole at all times as a mask to hide your social anxiety and feelings of inferiority and resentment than actually engage with people as people.
These are the easy paths, the lowest hanging fruit. You don’t have to take the easy way. Learn to read the road signs and get past that first off-ramp that takes you to asshole.
And if your identity and money stream requires you to maximize instances of being an asshole, well, I got nothing for you. Go eat shit.
But I’ll highlight that being an asshole isn’t such a horrible thing that being one must be viewed as a complete evil to be avoided entirely. In certain circumstances it’s advantageous to be an asshole. Or at least know a good one. I’d certainly want any lawyer I’d hire to be able to go full asshole on my behalf in court. And when setting and maintaining boundaries being an asshole helps – at least being thought an asshole, because those susceptible to assholery in your life will think you’re an asshole when you cut them and their nonsense out of your life. Good on you. Be that asshole. Make the filter work. Because you’re only being an asshole, it’s not who you are.
So to recap: if you’re accused of being an asshole, take heart because it’s not who you are, it’s just where you are at that moment, and if you have to be an asshole from time to time it’s okay because it’s what you’re being and not who you are. Unless you’re a lazy performance artist going for the low hanging fruit in which case, eat shit.
Favorite Reads: August 2016
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley: In a world where all women have died, a group of men live out their last lonely days in The Valley of Rocks, listening to young Nate tell stories that weave their past and remaining years into a cohesive whole – then the strange mushrooms start growing in the cemetery and everything changes. At times gory, at other times sublime, and definitely weird The Beauty’s a creepy read.
Persona by Genevieve Valentine: SF novel about a world where celebrity “Faces” represent countries and perform international politics while all actual politics are hashed out behind closed doors, except one Face is starting to take her job seriously and actually aid her constituency. Persona’s light on world building and heavy at times on breathless melodrama, but it’s even heavier on the speedy pulp paranoia that I enjoy.
My Father, The Pornographer by Chris Offutt: Book about Andrew J. Offutt, science fiction and fantasy writer (he created Shadowspawn for you Thieves’ World fans) who had a longer and more lucrative career as a writer of paperback porn. Meanwhile his son, Chris Offutt, grows to be a well-regarded lit writer and screenwriter who’s trying make sense out of his father’s output while also coming to terms with his dysfunctional relationship with his dad. This book crawled under my skin, because the portrait it crafts of Offutt the Elder’s petty, hair-trigger temper. The fandom bits are particularly chilling.
Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday (with William Dufty): Harrowing but great autobiography of Billie Holiday. There are a lot of sad and bitter details here. Not only in regards to the racism she had to bear, but the harassment she encountered while trying to seek treatment for her heroin addiction. But all that was what I expected. The bit I didn’t expect and left me shocked was that she smoked a carton of cigarettes a day. A CARTON!?!
The Glory of the Empire by Jean D’Ormesson: Fake history full of fake metaphysics and fake conflicts that purportedly shaped the ancient and early modern worlds. I LOVE BOOKS LIKE THIS! It starts back in the ancient era with a legendary feud between brothers, tumbles forward through the ages, detailing wars, uprisings, and eras that never happened, speaking of kings and queens and personages who never existed – but might have, making something of a shadow history of the world. It’s a wee bit stodgy at times, but take it slow and it’s worthwhile.
Favorite Reads: July 2016
Books took a backseat to graphic novel trade paperbacks this past month. Most of this stuff has been out at least a year or so – but I’m only catching up with them now since I’ve been back in the USA and am still in the Stone Age because I like to read my comics on paper.
Low: The Delirium of Hope by Rick Remender and Greg Tochini. I’ve been delighted by the recent trend for more science fiction and fantasy style comics. And while I’ve slipped behind on Saga and wasn’t so impressed by Empress (Saga vs. Immortan Joe), I quite liked Low. Maybe even more than I expected. The art’s great. The story’s pretty neat (a bit like Henry Kuttner’s Fury, which is pulpy madness), full of sea monsters, weaponry, and dysfunctional family dynamics.
DMZ: On the Ground by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchelli. I’m very late to this party, but I’m here. A buddy of mine in Korea had a stack of assorted issues that I devoured, but it was all scattered throughout, so finding the beginning was my prime objective when I came here. Second US civil war. Manhattan as a demilitarized zone with factions competing for power within it. This book’s great, and I’m looking forward to the eventual TV series.
Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. Weird science-fantasy with weird monsters and weird soldiers fighting among themselves and a main character trying to solve the mystery of her origin while cats lecture on philosophy and natural science, yes, I’m on board and looking forward to where this goes and don’t need the lecture from some nerdio about how this is totally derivative of their precious favorite manga series.
Corto Maltese: Under the Sign of Capricorn by Hugo Pratt. HOLY SHIT NEW HUGO PRATT CORTO MALTESE REPRINTS!!! WHY ISN’T THIS HUGE NEWS!?! WHY DO I HAVE TO HEAR ABOUT SHITTY SUPER HERO MOVIES WHEN THIS EXISTS!?! WTF PEOPLE WHY ISN’T EVERY ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMIC READER IN THE WORLD PROCLAIMING THEIR THANKS TO THE UNIVERSE THAT WE MAY LIVE IN SUCH TIMES!?! Umm, if you’ve never read Corto Maltese, you totally should.
Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka
“The problem with conducting your own reality testing is that sometimes the people you’re surrounded with are not all right in the head either.”
STAY CRAZY’s a book in the vein of those Philip K. Dick novels written when PKD believed an alien satellite orbiting around the Earth was beaming thoughts into his head and telling him the truth he needed to hear. But instead of being about burnt-out science fiction writers, Gnosticism, and the evils of Richard Nixon, Stay Crazy’s about schizophrenic teens, interdimensional entities, and the evils of big box superstores.
Emmeline “Em” Kalberg is a nineteen-year-old living in Clear Falls Pennsylvania, a former mill town trying to survive by pretending to be a remote Pittsburgh suburb. Em’s just being released from a mental institution when the novel starts, a hospital where she’s been since her nervous breakdown during her freshman year at college. Once home she takes a job at the only remaining store in town, Savertown USA, a place part cult, part Walmart, and ostensibly all American if you overlook the fact that everything in it is made overseas (but they do make their employees wear red, white, and blue uniforms).
Soon the frozen foods and other merchandise begin broadcasting to Em, all the transmissions claiming to be from Escodex, an interdimensional investigator inhabiting a higher level of reality. Escodex needs help. An evil entity seeks to destroy our dimension and it plans on using a dimensional nexus point inside Savertown to do it. Em’s the only one willing to listen to Escodex, although she’s not quite sure if this is simply another schizophrenic episode. Soon the only thing standing between our universe and annihilation are the minimum wage earning and battered-down by life stockroom staff at that one shitty retail store.
Stay Crazy’s a weird and fun little novel. Em’s engaging as a mess of a character and her arc from miserable, arrogant, self-centered teen to slightly less miserable and less arrogantly self-centered teen is enjoyable. It’s not a perfect novel. There are some rough bits, not in the content sense, but more mechanical stuff, and once or twice I wished things were tighter. Some character interactions could have been expanded, and there were a few moments where events happened between scenes that I wish had been depicted for the reader.
But overall it’s that mix of the weird and the downtrodden that makes Stay Crazy fun – maybe not ha-ha fun, but fun of a kind all the same. It would be a slipstream novel, except no one knows what Slipstream is. It could be science fiction or horror, except it’s not. It’s one of those weird novels that sits oddly in the joints between categories. Resume With Monsters mixed with Bubba Ho-Tep with some Kurt Vonnegut by way of Nick Mamatas added in. And that’s all great stuff. So if any of that sounds interesting to you, don’t hesitate to check it out, you’ll enjoy the trip.
Favorite Reads: June 2016
Favorite reads for June. I put down more books than I finished… or am still stuck in the middle of them. Of the few I finished here are the highlights:
A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh: Probably the book I liked the least here. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it’s a mix of neat/cool facts and un-neat/un-cool rhapsodically waxing architectural that had not enough of one and too much of the other. But as a quick read, skimming to the neat bits such as monastic book thieves, tunneling bank robbers, and the guy they dubbed Spiderman who lived in a secret apartment he built in a Toys R Us, it’s a lot of fun. Added bonus feature! If you read it before bed it might give you home invasion nightmares!
The Looking Glass War by John LeCarre: A sad spy novel that the former CIA head Allen Dulles believed depicted what spy work actually was like. If you’ve read the George Smiley/Circus books you might like this one, because here they’re the villains standing aside as another British intelligence agency attempts to field a mission a bit too far beyond their capabilities.
Company Town by Madeline Ashby: A cyberpunk novel set on a city-sized oil rig about a body guard and her new assignment looking after the heir apparent to the corporation that bought the rig. It’s cyberpunk in the good way, focusing on those undermined or otherwise on the bad side of progress. I’ll warn you that I don’t think Ashby quite sticks the landing, but she’s close enough that I can appreciate the ride and the ambition she had attempting to pull it off.
Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey: I grew up reading a lot of fantasy, but have come around to not standing it in 99% of its modern forms (Epic, Grim, Sword & Sorcery, it’s all *blerg*). But when I find a book that sits in that 1%? Holy shit! I’m in love. This is one of those books. It’s brutal, but from the first sentence I was hooked.
There is a scarred, twisted old madwoman in a cage in the court yard.
Yesterweird 