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Month: October 2017

Old School Steampunk: Reading The Steam Man of the Plains (1883)

Old School Steampunk: Reading The Steam Man of the Plains (1883)

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In the days before television, movies, or even pulp magazines, readers who wanted exciting fantastic fare read dime novels. This style of popular literature lasted from about 1860 to 1930, before the pulps finally killed them off. In those 70 years, countless series and titles were published — mysteries, Westerns, historical dramas, romances, and even steampunk.

Yes, steampunk goes right back to the age of steam. I recently read one of the most popular titles, the 1883 edition of The Steam Man of the Plains, published by the Five Cent Wide-Awake Library, a series directed specifically at adolescent boys. You can read it online at Northern Illinois University’s excellent online collection of dime novels.

Warning: spoilers follow!

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Modular: A First Look at Elite Dangerous Role Playing Game

Modular: A First Look at Elite Dangerous Role Playing Game

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256 New COREBOOK Mockup
Clearly a labor of love

Yes, you read that right!

Elite Dangerous, the current incarnation of the granddaddy of all immersive video games, now has its own tabletop roleplaying game, and I’m sitting here with a review copy.

The problem with the video game is that, even with the new ability to land on airless worlds and trundle around in AFVs, it’s essentially space exploration on the radio. You don’t get to land on the worlds with interesting cultures and brawl with gangsters or tread the mean streets, or avoid being the main course at a barbaric religious ceremony. A tabletop roleplaying game has the potential to supply those missing experiences. But does the franchise really need its own game? (As you’ll see, “Yes, actually.”)

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Well written, beautifully illustrated

Frankly, I half-expected Elite Dangerous Role Playing Game (EDRPG) to be a cynically put together I can’t believe it’s not Traveller-lite (please don’t send round lawyers with pulse lasers) with a detailed trade mini-game. Instead I found myself reading what’s clearly a labor of love that emulates a different corner of the Star Punk genre, and does so with an emphasis  — in the core rules — on what you do when you’re not trading. It’s also loaded with material pitched for beginner GM’s, but — again in the core rules — assumes some familiarity with the computer game; not disastrous, but  confusing if you haven’t played Elite seriously in four decades (I’m told there will be free material on the website to help with this).

Given Elite Dangerous has 2-3 million players, and a cult of enthusiasts who enjoy the “shared” part of “shared escapism,” Elite Dangerous Roleplaying Game promises to be an instant modern classic. It’s a good thing, then, that the game mechanics are elegant, but more refined than innovative, which is what you want in something obviously intended as a workhorse to support happy years of sandbox gaming.

Let me unpack some of that.

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Support an Exciting New Magazine of Sword & Sorcery: Tales From the Magician’s Skull

Support an Exciting New Magazine of Sword & Sorcery: Tales From the Magician’s Skull

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Here’s the best news I’ve heard all month: Goodman Games, publisher of the excellent Dungeon Crawl Classics line of old-school RPG adventures, has launched a brand new magazine of Sword & Sorcery, Tales From the Magician’s Skull. The editor chosen to helm this groundbreaking project? None other than our very own Howard Andrew Jones. Here’s Howard with the scoop.

A gong shivers…
The mists part to reveal a grisly object lying upon a mound of rubble, a browned and ancient head with one glowing, malefic eye…
It speaks, in a voice of cold command: “Silence, mortal dogs! It is time now for
TALES FROM THE MAGICIAN’S SKULL!
Goodman Games [has launched] the Kickstarter for the exciting new sword-and-sorcery magazine inspired by Appendix N. I am mightily pleased to be the magazine’s editor, and I’ve had a blast assembling it with Joseph Goodman. We’ve been working together for almost a year, and I’ve got to tell you that the result is GLORIOUS. Just check out that Jim Pavalec cover.

The first issue, with stories by James Enge, John C. Hocking, Chris Willrich, Howard Andrew Jones, C.L. Werner and others, truly is a knockout. The Kickstarter funded in less than 24 hours, and continues to gather momentum. Make a pledge, and make sure you get your copy of the the first issue of what’s sure to be one of the most important magazine launches of the decade. And check back here this week for a 3-way interview with publisher Joseph Goodman, Howard Andrew Jones, and the grinning skull itself!

New Treasures: Zero Repeat Forever by G. S. Prendergast

New Treasures: Zero Repeat Forever by G. S. Prendergast

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Zero Repeat Forever-smallThe flood of YA fantasy that washes up at the foot of my big green chair every week is starting to all sound alike. The covers look alike too, all these big fonts on stark, sculptured backgrounds.

It was the strikingly different cover to Zero Repeat Forever that first drew my attention. Enigmatic and beautiful, it stood out from all the other YA books I’ve seen this month. In fact, it doesn’t look like any book I’ve ever seen. The title, nearly as enigmatic as the cover, intrigued me too, and I flipped it open to read the inside jacket flap with real curiosity. It’s the tale of the end of the world, an invasion of deadly creatures… and a sixteen year old girl who doesn’t intend to take things lying down. I like it already.

He has no voice or name, only a rank, Eighth. He doesn’t know the details of the mission, only the directives that hum in his mind.
Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall.
His job is to protect his Offside. Let her do the shooting.
Until a human kills her…

Sixteen-year-old Raven is at summer camp when the terrifying armored Nahx invade. Isolated in the wilderness, Raven and her fellow campers can only stay put. Await rescue. Raven doesn’t like feeling helpless, but what choice does she have?

Then a Nahx kills her boyfriend.

Thrown together in a violent, unfamiliar world, Eighth and Raven should feel only hate and fear. But when Raven is injured, and Eighth deserts his unit, their survival comes to depend on trusting each other…

G. S. Prendergast is the Canadian author of two novels in verse, Audacious and Capricious. This is her first prose novel.

Zero Repeat Forever was published by Simon & Schuster on August 29, 2017. It is 487 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. The marvelous cover was designed by Lizzy Bromley. Read an excerpt at Hypable.

Diplomacy and Trade in the Vastness of Space: Among the Stars by Artipia Games

Diplomacy and Trade in the Vastness of Space: Among the Stars by Artipia Games

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I’m still processing all the treasures I brought home from the Games Plus Fall auction on Saturday. Things move fast at the auction, and you frequently have to make a snap decision to make a bid, or lose your chance forever. So more than once I raised my bidding card while thinking “What the heck is that thing?”

That was the case with Among the Stars, a peculiar board game/card game hybrid… that I ended up winning for $16. It wasn’t until I took it home that I was able to puzzle out exactly what it was. (And truth to tell, I’m still not 100% sure. But Amazon has it listed for $69.99, so whatever it turns out to be, my copy was a bargain.)

I expected it to be another 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), but it’s quite a bit more original than that. Play focuses on construction of a vast station in space, and there doesn’t appear to be any exploration or combat at all. Several sources refer to the game as 7 Wonders in space, but that doesn’t really help me much, as I’m not familiar with 7 Wonders either. Best I can puzzle out, Among the Stars is an essentially conflict-free game of competitive trading and diplomacy in space, as players strive to build a space station in a galaxy crowded with alien life.

It was a 2015 Origins Awards nominee for Best Card Game. Here’s the description.

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The Past Remembered

The Past Remembered

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oie_945629XusRtgBBLast week I attended the funeral for my friend Densel’s wife, Sheryl. As these things tend to, it spawned a reunion of friends who don’t see each other anymore. Densel was a major hub of roleplaying on Staten Island, and our love for our friend, and each other, grew from our meeting together to play Dungeons and Dragons. Only in recent years have I learned that while he was gaming with me and my group, he was moonlighting with other groups all across the Island. He is single-handedly responsible for more people playing D&D on Staten Island than any other person I know.

The first time I met Densel was when his friend, Desmond, brought him to Boy Scouts to play violin for us and join our troop. He was a six-foot-four, sixteen-year-old black kid and I was a five-foot-four, eleven-year-old white kid. Though five years older than I, we hit it off. What really connected us were the three wildly illustrated pamphlets he brought on a camping trip: Dungeons & Dragons, Greyhawk, and Blackmoor. One of his older brothers had gone to school in Wisconsin and brought the game back to Staten Island with him. When we saw Densel reading them, a couple of us younger guys asked him what they were. When he asked if we had read Moorcock or Tolkien and we said yes, he then asked if we would like to play a game where we could be knights and rangers. Without hesitation, we said yes.

We didn’t play the game properly. Mostly, it was just us talking about the characters we wanted to play and then Densel talking us through adventures. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t really learning the game; I was hooked by the idea of roleplaying. The illustrations from those original books are a major part of what I believe fantasy should look like. The thought of getting caught up in playing someone like Elric or Aragorn blew my eleven-year-old mind.

Densel aged out of scouts and I didn’t see him again for a couple of years. I was still finishing grade school and he was getting ready to enter college. It was then that I started playing D&D for real with my immediate circle of friends. Both my neighbor and I got the boxed Basic Set for Christmas. For two years we played relentlessly; and I mean relentlessly. For anyone who played the game in that first flush of its popularity in the late 1970s, you know what I mean. Every free weekend was spent playing, and the days between designing dungeons and drawing maps. Soon I was building up a shelf of hardcover Advanced D&D manuals. Almost any money I earned or got as a gift was plowed into the game.

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Future Treasures: Vallista by Steven Brust

Future Treasures: Vallista by Steven Brust

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Vallista-smallI read Jhereg, the first book in Steven Brust’s long-running Vlad Taltos series, when my brother Mike thrust it on me in 1983. It was fun, fast-paced, and totally different from anything I’d ever read before.

Steven Brust was a fast-rising literary star in 1983, but Jhereg, and the series it spawned, established him as a major name. He’s produced numerous popular and acclaimed novels in the intervening years — including To Reign in Hell (1984), Brokedown Palace (1985), The Phoenix Guards (1991), and his ongoing Incrementalists series with Skyler White — but it’s the Vlad Taltos series that he remains most closely associated with. There have been thirteen additional novels in the series since Jhereg appeared 34 years ago, and this month marks the arrival of the fifteenth, Vallista, a deep dive into the mysteries of the world of Dragaera.

Vlad Taltos is an Easterner ― an underprivileged human in an Empire of tall, powerful, long-lived Dragaerans. He made a career for himself in House Jhereg, the Dragaeran clan in charge of the Empire’s organized crime. But the day came when the Jhereg wanted Vlad dead, and he’s been on the run ever since. He has plenty of friends among the Dragaeran highborn, including an undead wizard and a god or two. But as long as the Jhereg have a price on his head, Vlad’s life is…messy.

Meanwhile, for years, Vlad’s path has been repeatedly crossed by Devera, a small Dragaeran girl of indeterminate powers who turns up at the oddest moments in his life.

Now Devera has appeared again ― to lead Vlad into a mysterious, seemingly empty manor overlooking the Great Sea. Inside this structure are corridors that double back on themselves, rooms that look out over other worlds, and ― just maybe ― answers to some of Vlad’s long-asked questions about his world and his place in it. If only Devera can be persuaded to stop disappearing in the middle of his conversations with her…

The entire series has been kept in print by Ace in deluxe trade paperback omnibus editions — pretty extraordinary for a series that’s over three decades old.

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September/October Analog Now on Sale

September/October Analog Now on Sale

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Analog Science Fiction September October 2017-smallThe September/October Analog has a diverse mix of tales, of time travel, uplifted animals, ghostmail, siege engines on Mars, cryo-prisons, space elevators, crash landings on hostile worlds, mysterious alien invaders, and Norman Spinrad’s tale of the Order of the Galactic Eye. Here’s Nicky Magas at Tangent Online to give us the highlights.

An exciting new world that is hostile to technology awaits Mbasi in “Orphans” by Craig DeLancey. No probes sent to the planet teeming with vegetation have survived through to their full life expectancy. It’s up to Mbasi and the rest of the research crew to figure out why. But when an unexplainable accident forces them into an emergency crash landing from their planned orbit, Mbasi finds herself a little closer to the conundrum than she first anticipated. To make matters worse, whatever has been destroying their probes is making short work of their ship as well.

The mystery in “Orphans” is what truly makes this story shine. The sense of urgency DeLancey puts into every word is palpable to the reader, making every decision seem like life or death. DeLancey cultivates a deep curiosity in readers, and though he peppers the narrative with speculation between his characters, the open ended nature of the conclusion leaves readers on the edge of the cliff of what is knowable, both satisfied and deeply wanting more.

In “The Old Man” by Rich Larsen, Ezekiel wants nothing more than to kill his father and have him know who did it. Lucky for him the Old Man escaped his cryo-prison. Luckier still, the government thawed Zeke for the task of taking him out. The Old Man has much to atone for and Zeke means to see the debt settled down to the last drop of blood.

Larson tells a fascinating story of revenge and humanity in “The Old Man.” As the narrative unravels itself in a non-linear way set to the backdrop of the swampy bayou, readers find their sympathies torn between politics, family, and human rights in a technologically advanced future. There are layers to this story that make it exquisitely complex and an ethically thoughtful read. Readers expecting a story whirling with technology might be surprised by how intricately and tragically organic it is, however this does not detract from the brilliant piece of futuristic science fiction that it is.

Read Nicky’s complete review here.

The September/October issue contains fiction by Edward M. Lerner, Lettie Prell, Jerry Oltion, Rich Larsen, Michael F. Flynn, James Van Pelt, Stanley Schmidt, Norman Spinrad, Bud Sparhawk, and many others. The cover is by Eldar Zakirov, for “My Fifth and Most Exotic Voyage,” by Edward M. Lerner.

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Self-published Book Review: A History of Magic by Scott Robinson

Self-published Book Review: A History of Magic by Scott Robinson

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I’m back from my failed Kickstarter, and I’ll be looking for more books to review soon. If you have any, send them my way.

AHistoryOfMagicA History of Magic is the second book in Scott Robinson’s series about Rawk, the last great hero. I reviewed the first novel, The Age of Heroes, two years ago here at Black Gate.

Rawk is retired, but that doesn’t stop the exots–exotic monsters from other worlds–from randomly appearing in his city of Katamood. Technically, this should be his friend Weaver’s problem, as he’s the prince of the city, but the city guard that Weaver employs can’t be everywhere at once. And if a monster appears right in front of Rawk, he has to fight it. It’s expected, to judge from the crowds that materialize whenever that happens. But Rawk is getting slower, and he can’t save everyone, not even his audience, which doesn’t always have the good sense to keep its distance.

New heroes have been showing up from all over the world to fight the monsters. But heroes are lazy sorts, and they tend to hang out in taverns waiting for word of the monsters to come to them, and only then head out to kill the beast and collect the bounty. And very few of them have any interest in finding out where the monsters are coming from and stopping it–that would cause the bounties to dry up quick.

It must be caused by sorcerers, to judge from the magical portals producing the monsters. Weaver’s solution would be to send his guards from door-to-door hunting down sorcerers–real or imagined–but Rawk would rather avoid that. So he recruits Sylvia, half-elven sorceress and former enemy, current healer, to help him out. Together, they track down various sorcerers who have little real magic between them, trying to discover who’s behind the exots. Clearly, none of these sorcerers could light a candle with magic on their own, but if enough of them worked together . . .

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Tempus Takes Manhattan: Janet and Chris Morris’ Tempus Unbound

Tempus Takes Manhattan: Janet and Chris Morris’ Tempus Unbound

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“Was this the Lemuria of antiquity, or that of times to come? Once you’d ridden the storm clouds of heaven from the edge of time, anything was possible.”

Few are the writers who can successfully take their characters out of their “ancient setting” and transplant them in a story set in modern and even futuristic times, fighting numinous enemies, inimical foes and a capricious and dangerous theomachy. In my opinion, Janet and Chris Morris have brilliantly achieved just that with Tempus Unbound. This novel takes place after the events in City on the Edge of Time, and before those of Storm Seed, and it’s quite a departure from the other novels in starring Tempus the Black, Niko, Strat and the other warriors of The Sacred Band. It’s also quite a wild ride — an adventure that never lets you pause for breath.

The story begins after Tempus leaves the City at the Edge of Time and heads for Lemuria. But is this the Lemuria before or after the Fall of Man? Is it the Past or is it the Future? As events later play out in the novel, we find that out. Tempus is on a quest to find Cime, the Mage Killer who may or may not be his sister, who was forced into a marriage to Askelon, the Lord of Dreams. Cime has gone missing from Meridian, Askelon’s dream realm, and Tempus rides to Lemuria looking to find her. He suspects she’s gone after some mage who needs killing, and hopes she has her magical diamond rods with her, for without them she’s powerless.

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