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RuneQuest: Korantia and Mythic Britain

RuneQuest: Korantia and Mythic Britain

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Shores of Korantia-smallIn 2013 I wandered over to Monster Island, one of the first journeys I’d ever made to a RuneQuest destination. I found it excellent. And recently, after I returned from GenCon2015, I  travelled once more into RuneQuest realms and learned that excellence is a standard practice in their products.

Shores of Korantia is a setting book for a bronze-age land rich in intrigue and adventure. It covers the regions of the empire in detail that’s thorough but not dry — not so much an encyclopedia entry, but a travel guide with adventure hooks, so that every page you turn sets your mind ablaze with ideas to spin adventures from. Like Monster Island before it, one doesn’t have to be at all familiar with RuneQuest in order to utilize the setting, or even a gamer to enjoy reading it. If you like reading about imaginary worlds, any of the RuneQuest Design Mechanism books I’ve read are a great time.

Korantia is a tottering empire propped up by a noble young ruler that you just can’t help but find yourself rooting for, which is pretty typical of what writer Jonathan Drake manages throughout the book — the people detailed are engaging, their situations interesting. In short, it’s chock full of the potential for story. There are fascinating places to go, engaging people to meet, and mysteries to unravel.

[Click on any of the images in this article for bigger versions.]

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The Perfect Prescription for Perdition: Doctors in Hell, edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris

The Perfect Prescription for Perdition: Doctors in Hell, edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris

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Doctors in Hell-smallDoctors in Hell
Heroes in Hell, Volume 18
Edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
Perseid Press (336 pages, $19.98 in trade paperback, $7.92 digital, June 23, 2015)
Cover: Pandemonium, John Martin (1789-1854), circa 1841, oil on canvas, from private collection. Cover design by Sonja Aghabekian

Be careful to preserve your health. It is a trick of the devil, which he employs to deceive good souls, to incite them to do more than they are able, in order that they may no longer be able to do anything.
— St. Vincent De Paul

By now, many of you no doubt know of my association with Janet Morris and Perseid Press. Maybe you’ve read the reviews of her novels that I wrote for Black Gate, including my reviews of Lawyers in Hell, Rogues in Hell, and Dreamers in Hell. In 2014 Janet and I collaborated on an article for Black Gate, in which we discussed Poets in Hell, how I came to be involved with Hell, and how she put that volume together.

Now, for 2015, Perseid Press offers you Doctors in Hell, the 18th volume in the popular and long-running Heroes in Hell saga, created by Janet Morris back in 1986 .This year I’m going to do something similar to what Janet and I did last year: presenting a brief synopsis of each story/chapter, with the diabolical assistance of my twelve fellow Hellions — the damnedest writers in perdition, to paraphrase the text on the book’s front cover. That makes 13 of us… a nice number, don’t you think?

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Road Trip from Hell: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Honour Guard

Road Trip from Hell: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Honour Guard

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Honour Guard Dan Abnett-smallHonor Guard
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 4 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (312 pages, $6.95, August 2001)
Cover by Martin McKenna

The faith of the Imperium of Man — the only faith, thanks to a massive Inquisition — is centered around the God-Emperor of Mankind, who sits upon his Golden Throne on Holy Terra. Whether he’s a divine being incarnate, or a man who somehow gained god-like powers, is a question I don’t know the Warhammer 40K lore well enough to answer, but the emperor is kept eternally alive by the arcane machinery of the Golden Throne, and his massive psychic energies provide a beacon which allows mortal pilots to navigate spacecraft through the treacherous realm of the Warp.

The Emperor stands as the sole God, but there’s room in the Imperial cult to include various other figures, “saints” who are venerated for their faith in the Emperor and their deeds in his service. Given the Imperium’s nature, and the character of the WH40K universe in general, these saints are primarily warriors. One such is Saint Sabbat, the warrior woman who originally won the Sabbat Worlds for the Imperium, and in whose name the present-day (sometime in the 41st millennium) Sabbat Worlds Crusade is being waged.

We catch up with the Ghosts as they’re locked in street-to-street combat on the Saint’s own homeworld of Hagia, fighting the Chaos fanatics who have claimed the world’s holy cities as their own. This particular band of Chaos worshippers is particularly keen on denigrating the Imperial faith, so they’ve taken on the name Infardi, formally used by pilgrims to Hagia, and are heavily tattooed with blasphemous scenes involving the Emperor and various others figures of worship.

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Out of the Mouth of Madness

Out of the Mouth of Madness

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Derleth MythosI spent the past year in the frozen tundra on a quest not for gold or oil, but rather that elusive will o’ the wisp men call Ha of Saskatoon. I barely escaped with my life, a sad and broken man. Over the course of many months, I poured through John D. Haefele’s exhaustive tome, A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos which the redoubtable Don Herron bequeathed to me in an effort to restore my shattered mind. Having recently closed the book for the final time, I come forth with this my 250th article. A mere trifle for the more prolific blogger, but a milestone for this shadow of a man who once was.

Now in absolute fairness I should disclose a few facts before continuing. First off, I am not an H. P. Lovecraft cultist. I like aspects of the Mythos more than I do his actual fiction. This will be heretical to many, but I did not come upon his prose until later in life – long after Roy Thomas introduced me to his work in various comics he authored for Marvel in the 1970s and well after the time I had absorbed bits and pieces of the Mythos unknowingly while devouring Robert E. Howard’s stories in the pages of the Lancer or Ace Conan paperbacks with their stunning Frazetta cover art which, like that of Boris Vallejo and Neal Adams, frequently displayed brazen muscular buttocks in a fashion that touched something primal and possibly even impolite in my already warped adolescent brain.

I must also refrain from joshing my readers that a particular Lovecraftian scholar earned my enmity like no one since S. J. Perelman when I purchased a pricey, but beautifully bound and illustrated Sax Rohmer collection that was published in recent years only to find said literary critic’s introduction to the same was dismissive, condescending, and pompous in the extreme. It took much restraint not to craft an analogue for this bloated windbag in my third Fu Manchu book and allow the Devil Doctor to feed this bleating goat’s delicate parts to starving centipedes. Despite the appeal of such a notion, I chose instead to let karma find him and that it may have done with Haefele’s scholarly work.

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Diablo 3: Fourth (Season)’s the Charm

Diablo 3: Fourth (Season)’s the Charm

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Screenshot093Diablo 3 has gone through a lot since its release in 2012: From the lead designer moving on, to patch after patch after patch attempting to address complaints about the design. Of course, we can’t forget about the Auction House system that left a major black stain on the game until its removal.

Flash forward to today. Diablo 3 has come a long way, as we just entered the fourth season of ladder play. Normally I don’t take a look at games I’ve already reviewed, but given everything that’s happened and the latest patch, today I’m making an exception.

Tormented

Before we talk about the latest patch, I want to bring everyone up to speed on what’s happened since Diablo 3 was released. For the first few years of its life, Diablo 3 was marked by polarizing reviews; many people loved the game’s streamlined design, but the poor loot distribution and auction system made the endgame a nightmare.

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For Gonji Lovers: A Hungering of Wolves by T.C. Rypel

For Gonji Lovers: A Hungering of Wolves by T.C. Rypel

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oie_6235149uAZhq0luI’ve finally read A Hungering of Wolves, the last published volume of T.C. Rypel’s dimension-spanning swords & sorcery epic series about Gonji, the half Japanese, half Norwegian samurai, fighting his way across Renaissance Europe in hopes of discovering his destiny. It shouldn’t be the last book, but as of now, sadly, it is. While there is a collection of shorter tales scheduled for the near future, the sequel to this book is not.

It was orginally published as Knights of Wonder by Zebra Books way back in 1986. Rypel and his books fell victim to the whims of the publishing industry and an agent who wasn’t a big heroic fantasy fan. My earlier review of the first three Gonji books, collectively called the The Deathwind Trilogy, contains a more detailed account of Gonji’s publishing history.

I tend to avoid series that haven’t been finished because I fear they never will be. My dad went to his grave never seeing the end of Roland Green’s Wandor series. I dread the screams that will pierce the heavens if A Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t reach its end. So when I tell you that I read A Hungering of Wolves knowing it sets up a story that remains unfinished, that should tell you something about how much I like Rypel’s books.

If you have any love for swords & sorcery then you should read the Gonji books. Though thirty years old, Rypel’s books don’t feel dated and avoid the cliches that infect the worst heroic fantasy. Gonji, his associates, and opponents react like real humans, not puppet characters moved about in service to some pre-ordained plot.

While the books have more blood and thunder than even I can handle at times, they also have detailed and nuanced character development contemporary readers expect. For every loud and explosive scene the books have calmer moments that create atmosphere and a believable world. Just enough time is spent with secondary characters to make you care when something happens to them or buy their motives when they act.

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Little Green Men, Couriers of Chaos, and Miners on Uranus: Things, edited by Ivan Howard

Little Green Men, Couriers of Chaos, and Miners on Uranus: Things, edited by Ivan Howard

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Things Ivan Howard-smallThings
Edited by Ivan Howard
Belmont (157 pages, $0.50, February 1964)

Belmont Books, publisher of this anthology, apparently thrived throughout the Sixties. Early on it looks like many of their books leaned toward horror, with SF being sprinkled into the mix more as time went on. Things presents itself more as horror (the subtitle is Stories of Terror and Shock by six SCIENCE-FICTION greats) but there’s not much horror content. It’s a short volume that collects six fairly uninspired novelettes and short stories first published in SF magazines in the early Fifties.

Thumbs Up

“The Gift of the Gods,” by Raymond F. Jones

An interesting take on aliens landing on Earth, as the whole affair is somewhat derailed by bureaucracy and pettiness. It could have been a lot shorter and it was a bit preachy in spots but not bad overall.

“Little Green Man,” by Noel Loomis

I like pulp as much as the next guy and maybe a bit more — although it’s best taken in moderate doses. This one’s pretty pulpy, with the LGM of the title beseeching a mining engineer from Earth to evacuate from his home planet of Uranus. Entertaining but not particularly exceptional.

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The Growing Pains of Renner & Quist

The Growing Pains of Renner & Quist

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BonesyCheck Out TimeSamhain Publishing has just unearthed Bonesy, their fourth Renner and Quist occult mystery from one of my very favorite authors (and a regular contributor at Black Gate) magazine, Mark Rigney.

The idea of returning from a ten-month hiatus has me a bit nervous, but longtime readers may recall my heaping praise on Rigney’s earlier titles in the series: The Skates, Sleeping Bear, and Check-Out Time. Renner and Quist are an oddball double act in the classic tradition. Renner is a persnickety Unitarian minister, while Quist is a boorish ex-linebacker. Together, this unlikely duo team to solve occult mysteries.

This latest addition to the quirky and delightful series picks up where the last episode left off with Renner and Quist dramatically changed by their experiences. This time out, Renner’s mentor, Iris Buckhalter turns up needing his help.

She has developed an obsession with a brass rubbing of a strangely sexless 16th Century human skeleton she calls “Bonesy.” Her unhealthy obsession seems to have triggered premonitions of her death and she wants Renner, with his obvious occult abilities, to become Bonesy’s caretaker.

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Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: An Apt Description of the Heroine in Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: An Apt Description of the Heroine in Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

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Twelve Kings in Sharakhai-smallTwelve Kings in Sharakhai: The Song of Shattered Sands: Book One
By Bradley P. Beaulieu
DAW Books (592 pages, $24.95 in hardcover, $9.99 digital, September 1, 2015)
Cover by Adam Paquette

Eleven years ago, Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala’s mother was killed by the immortal Twelve Kings that rule the desert city of Sharakhai. Çeda — as she’s known to a few close friends — doesn’t know why her mother was killed. She only has three clues: the Kings carved strange symbols into her mother’s skin before they killed her; a book of poems that belonged to her mother; and the fact that she can never reveal she was her mother’s daughter.

Along with her friend Emre — one of only a handful of people who know her true identity — Çeda earns money on the streets of Sharakhai by delivering messages and cutting the occasional purse. By the time she is a young adult, she earns money with a new identity: the White Wolf, one of the most feared and respected hand warriors in the fighting pits.

Only Emre knows the secret deep within her heart: she means to avenge her mother’s death by killing the immortal Kings that rule the city. But in order to do so, she has to face her fears, make allies out of enemies, and risk losing everything she cherishes.

The world building here is robust yet deft. There are several elements in play, such as the mythology that governs the Kings, the magic of the forbidden forest on the outskirts of the city, and the creatures called the asirim that roam Sharakhai every six weeks to prey upon the city’s inhabitants.

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