Book 17: Pirates of the Levant by Arturo Perez-Reverte: This is the 6th Captain Alatriste novel, and a bit of a disappointment. That's mostly because it's a bridge novel - he spent books 1-4 alluding to the events in book 5, setting things up over the long haul. Apparently having finished that are Perez-Reverte decided he wanted to write more Alatrist stories, so this book changes the locale from Spain and Flanders to the Mediterranean sea and starts laying references to another, years distant event. I don't mind, but it made this very much a bridging book. It also felt a little darker than the others, of course since this is the Spanish Empire very much in decay nothing is particularly bright.

Book 18: Book of Ballads by Charles Vess and others: this is a collection of Vess' collaborations with authors to illustrate stories based on English and Scottish Ballads. It's lovely and creepy, and full of the things Vess likes to draw (and draws very well). 

16) Rasl pocket book 1, by Jeff Smith: Smith, much better known for his bestselling, award winning Bone series, has chosen pretty much the anti-Bone for his second project - it's a Science Fiction Crime Noir, following the life of an on the run physicist who uses his experimental dimension shifting suit to perform art thefts, while being on the run from, well, someone, for having done, well, something. OK, I know more than that, but I'm not sharing, as the book is a long slow unfolding of events. Smith is clearly in for the long haul here, as he was with Bone, and is more than willing to use silence, extended panel sequences, repeating images and various other comic visual mechanisms to set the mood and tone. It's very good - so good that you're not thinking "yeah, you're just doing this to show that you can do more than Bone." Smith can do more than Bone, and he's proving it to you without 'proving it to you'. 

sites.google.com/site/kudzugames/home 

I've built a Googlesites page as somewhere to house campaign write ups and longer essays from Alarums & Excursions and here on LJ in an easier to search format. I've now loaded enough content onto it to feel comfortable sharing it.

So the Disney "Fairy" franchise has decided that a) the murderously psychotic Tinkerbell is the heroine of the Pixie Hollow stories and that b) she's a Tinker fairy who builds new time saving devices and other technology for the Fairy community. Being me, that makes me wonder if Tinkerbell is actually a Technocracy plant, part of their long term plan to subvert the Fair Folk's operating paradigm and ultimately destroy them. 

Personally, I think that would make the whole thing much more palatable. 

12) Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos: Bogdanos was the marine colonel working in a counter-smuggling/border securing role in Iraq who took it upon himself to defend the Iraqi museum from further looting and to recover the lost artifacts. This is his first person account of that activity, from his working the chain of command to get even nominal permission to the assignment to trying to figure out the multiple crimes that occurred to his final position as the head of New York's task force against antiquities smuggling upon his leaving active duty. It was very enjoyable, with lots of bits one could steal for caper/high end theft games as he works through how people managed to use the chaos of the war to perform some high end robberies in the museum amongst the looting. 

By happenstance we got two copies of this classic kids game for Christmas - one published in '04 prior to the Hasbro buy-out of Milton Bradly, and one from '10 after the buy out. The strange thing is that the boards are different. Markedly so.

The '10 Hasbro board is, oddly enough, edgier. The color palette is a marginally darker, and Lord Licorice's domain is a swampy cave rather than a lighter forest. Aside from he and King Candy all of the locational characters are different, with the '10 updated characters being more action-oriented, with an ice cream downhill skier, for example. 

However, the '10 Hasbro board is also less challenging. Because of layout differences, laziness and the migration of the '04 board to a grandparent's house I can't do an actual space count, but even if the two boards are the same size the '10 board has one fewer licorice trap (two rather than three) and one more random movement space (for those not familiar Candyland movement is card driven, where you move forward to closest space of the same color you drew from the non-refreshing deck; however, there are a handful of single location cards where the drawer is moved ahead or backward to the corresponding random movement space) that deposits the player very near to the end of the board. 

As someone interested in game design I wonder why the changes were made. OK, so the graphical changes are odd but not illogical:  I expect the artwork has actually changed dozens of times in the games history. But the changes to the actual board design strike me as odd. Are they the result of rigorous play testing? feedback from the purchasers? Given the age demographic and the game's longevity I wonder why such a thing would be necessary. Anyone have any opinions?

 7) Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts: This is the second of the Bride Quartet - I read the fourth a couple weeks back, and the basic premise is the same. This was easily the least satisfying of the lot: very little time was spent on the target (1) character's reason for being reluctant. It was there, but so understated that we got no sense of the character's conflict so the required... um, what's the romance fiction equivalent to anagnorisis? ... about needing to open his life to true love. Instead the entire conflict was inside the pursuer's head - when to push, when to fall back - so as to not spook the target. This made her come across as very passive aggressive when the pursuer flips out because the target failed to have the desired if unstated response to a sudden massive relationship shift. Worse, said sudden massive shift felt very much driven by the author's imposed rules of pairing off one of the four core characters each season, so a relationship that would have very comfortably and naturally played out over a year turned into a forced mess at 3 months. 

8) Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin Laws: this is brilliant, and every GM, even those who don't approach gaming as a narrative form, should give it a read. Laws provides a theory of narrative beats - procedural and dramatic, questions and reveals and so on - and then applies it to three classic works of fiction: Hamlet, Dr. No and Casablanca. The results are not only fun to read but illuminating on how narratives get their power through the building up and reversals of up and down beats, the separation of questions/anticipations and reveals and so on. While this is difficult to apply in a hard and fast way to the free form narrative construction of gaming the ideas inside it can easily be internalized and applied (something I think I may already do on an uninformed level) to improve the emotional power of game sessions. I will definitely be doing this analysis of Pride & Prejudice before embarking on Mech & Matrimony next year. 

9) Idiot America by Charles Pierce: when you're trapped in an airport for 9 hours you run through what you bought to read. So you try to find something light to keep you going. This worked. I know Pierce as a frequent guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the title caught my attention. Pierce's accurate dissection of the difference between cranks - valuable forces in civil society who can push the social boundaries, or not, without care of what society thinks of their ideas - and the charlatans and frauds who resemble them but are paid, and for some unguessable reason respected, members of the central debate is helpful. As are his three rules of Idiot America: any theory is valid if it moves units; fact is that which enough people believe, trust is determined by how fervently they believe it; anything can be true if said loudly enough. Just because you really fervently believe that dinosaurs interacted with Adam and Even doesn't make it true, and if you believe it but don't care if anyone else does you're just a crank. When you demand that your fervent belief means that people have to take your stance seriously and teach as if it were true you're part of a problem in American discourse.

5) Seaworthy, by Linda Greenlaw:  For those not familiar with Ms. Greenlaw, she America's only female swordfishing captain, and moved to a modest degree of fame after her appearances in the book and movie The Perfect Storm.  Since then she stopped captaining to write three highly enjoyable books on commercial fishing, co-authored a cookbook with her mom and produced two atrociously derivative mystery novels. In 2008 she accepted an offer to go back out to sea at very short notice, in part because she just wants to see if she, once the best in her field, can still cut it after a decade on land. Alas, she is stuck scraping together a highly unusual crew and discovers that her new boat is, ahem, not up to standards. Seaworthy is her memoir of that trip, and I enjoyed it. Not as strong as Hungry Ocean, but on par with Lobster Chronicles. 

What most struck me, however, was how much this was a Traveller or similar semi-hard SF campaign. Make her and her crew belters rather than swordfishers and everything maps perfectly: her boat is in bad shape, requires constant jury rigging, has life threatening technical challenges, and is actually owned by someone far away whose support and advice is less than helpful; the captain has a backstory and something to prove; the crew are highly atypical for a swordboat but nicely iconic - from the new guy who proves his worth to the avuncular sixty-six (!) year old guy whose additional duties are cooking, ad hoc medicine and crew morale to the clown who skirts with insubordination but with an indispensable skill set to the huge steadfast mechanic. If I do end up running a belter game at some point I'll definitely revisit Greenlaw's books to see how much of swordboating culture I can port into the asteroids. 

4) Savage Species: I got a copy of the out of print 3E rulebook for handling Monster characters and I am _very_ impressed. It takes the concept and approaches it three different ways in the rules, giving step by step instruction and fleshing each of them out with extensive worked examples. This was a solid addition to the 3E cannon and I'm kind of bummed that I hadn't picked it up sooner. Personally I'll be instituting parts of this into my next Fasaad expedition at the very least, but clearly any new campaign I put together will be influenced by these options. If I have any complaints it's the silly inclusion of new magic spells in it (apparently a requirement for each sourcebook) that, as usual, range from the useless to the OK for this specific text to the neat general things that I hesitate to add because they're in an unusual place. 

 Trying to get back in the habit of this. 

1) _Trail of Cthulhu_ by Kenneth Hite: This was very good - a clear but complex discussion of the Mythos, a solid setting shift from the 20's to the 30s to differentiate it from _Call_ and a nice introduction to the Gumshoe mechanic. I obviously need to run a one or two shot game in the near future to wrap my brain around the resource management aspects of the mechanics, but the Gumshoe system plays nicely into my genre-drive narrativist GMing style. 

2) _Happy Every After_ by Nora Roberts: This is the 4th book in the 'bride quartet' and I'd read nos 1 and 3 last year in the pre-and-post baby haze. Romance isn't my favorite genre but I have to give Roberts props - she's been doing this for 30 years and she's got her craft down. The series as a whole avoids some of the insane aspects of the genre in that the manditory bumps in the road to true love all make sense within the characters she's crafted, and when people are acting stupid they generally either know it and are working to get over it or realize it and resolve it quickly. This book has an advantage in that the the couple did not include one character who had secretly been in love with the other for years - instead they'd met 10 months ago, hung out for a few months, dated for a few months and got engaged. a quick romance, but refreshingly normal. 

3) _Naked Heat_ by "Richard Castle": Rachel and I are fans of the TV show _Castle_, which has the premise of bestselling crime novelist Richard Castle tagging along with NYPD detective Kate Beckett to get inspiration for his series of novels about his new heroine, 'Nikki Heat'. So naturally ABC is releasing some ghost written _Heat_ novels to capitalize on the show's success. In the _Heat_ novels Nikki is followed around by superstar journalist Jameson Rook for a series of articles on her. While this allows the dynamic of the book to match the dynamic of the show without actually being a novel about Castle and Beckett, it does make me wish that they'd release the Jameson Rook stories about Nikki heat so the writers could grab their own navels and yank themselves into the 11th dimension.

Alas, while the book is amusing it's also a muddled mess. _Naked Heat_ contains scenes/elements/characters of virtually every episode of _Castle_'s 2nd season, which plays nicely to the conceit of the show but makes the book too overstuffed with disparate elements. I don't mind the idea - it's cute and popcorny - but the execution is overdone in a way that other TV tie-in books aren't.