Black Gate 14 Game Reviews: Sneak Peek
You may have noticed lately that all the game reviews are favorable. It’s not that we don’t find bad
This time we’ve got a big review for Paizo’s impressive Pathfinder Role-Playing game core rulebook. The indefatigable Andrew Zimmerman Jones (no relation despite certain name similarities) dug in deep and then took the rules for a spin with several Paizo modules.
New reviewer Robert Rowe took a long look at the Mongoose Games new Judge Dredd hardback.
I’m an unrepentant Traveller fan, so I was delighted to find much to like in the new Mongoose Traveller releases Aslan and Tripwire. As sword-and-sorcery is my favorite genre, my heart was won by Legends of Steel. .
I
Perhaps the biggest surprise to me was a boardgame I’d been sent. I foolishly put off reviewing it until the last possible moment, never dreaming how much fun it would be to run with the family. I tested out the game with HeroScape’s new wave 9 products (I especially liked the Mohican Indians that came in two of the four expansion packets) 
with my good friend ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bthepilot and two young gamers I found loitering in my living room, and all four of us were converted. I’ll explain why inside the issue. I hope to cover HeroScape’s wave 10 products and their new Dungeons & Dragons playset in an upcoming issue. Be warned — I’ll probably do my best to convert all of you into players.
All of these products and more will be reviewed in depth in the upcoming issue of Black Gate, available in December. See you there!
–Howard Andrew Jones
As far as I’m concerned, Christmas just came early.
If there is a watch, then there must be a watchmaker. That’s the crux of the argument for intelligent design, that existence, and specifically you and me, are the result of some conscious creator. My main problem with this is the adjective “intelligent.” If I was designing existence, there’s a lot I’d leave out, like cancer or maggots or flatulence or Glenn Beck. Or that for certain kinds of life to continue and thrive, other life forms must suffer. Besides, this all begs the question of, if there is a designer (intelligent or otherwise), who created the designer?
I’m not going to say anything about how Hollywood hasn’t had an original thought since 1997. Or the absurdity of remaking films when they are going to be rewritten or re-imagined anyway. Or how most remakes turn into hyper-kinetic kaleidoscopes of eye-candy and dumb dialogue.
From Jason Sizemore of Apex Magazine:
My novel-writing continues apace. Therefore, I shall be brief today. Or as brief as I possibly can.
While her work sometimes hints at the fantastic, Lydia Millet isn’t strictly speaking a fantasy writer, certainly not in the sense of questing elves or weird alternate universes, and certainly not as evidenced in her new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys. Yet Millet’s work is frequently mentioned in genre venues; indeed, one of the stories collected here, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” (in which the famed inventor of light bulbs and power generation attains metaphysical illumination by continually re-running a film of a circus elephant’s seemingly Christ-like electrocution)previously appeared in 
Chances are if you are at all interested in fantasy or science fiction books or games, you’ve at least brushed against Games Workshop’s ubiquitous Warhammer franchise. Warhammer comes in roughly two flavors, the fantasy version which is a Tolkien, D&D, and Moorcock mash-up, and the space opera version, called Warhammer 40,000. Taking place in the bleak world of the 41st millennium, with the tagline “In the grim darkness of the future there is only war,” Warhammer 40k is a violent world of warring factions, lost technology, dark and corrupting forces, fanaticism, and a medieval Gothic aesthetic. It is a universe where power armored soldiers charge into battle with chainsaw swords screaming religious oaths, millennia-old spaceships a mile long look more like Notre Dame Cathedral than the starship Enterprise, and daemonic forces and hostile races in the form of orks, ‘elves,’ and H.R. Geiger aliens erode the power of a moribund human civilization presided over by a nearly-dead God Emperor.
Right before I begin writing any major-length work, I do some important “stretching” exercises. No, not writing exercises; I do those nearly every day of the year regardless of what other projects I’m working on. This exercise is picking some DVDs off my shelves and queuing up a few key scenes that get me in the mood to tackle writing a novel. I don’t watch the whole movie (I usually don’t have the time), only a specific scene that does something to the synapses in my brain and makes me want to charge at the word processor and start slugging.