Minireview: Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher
Fool Moon is the second book in Butcher’s Dresden Files series. Like the first one it’s lightweight entertainment, but as such it’s pretty good – the plot moves along, the characters are fun, and the writing is more assured than in the first book. The plot is also somewhat more complex, with slightly more page count too.
This time around it’s werewolves. This isn’t a plot spoiler as such, since everything from the title to the back cover blurb says “werewolf!”. The trick is… what sort of werewolf, and what does it (he? she?) want? As in the first book, things start out with a body, dead in a fairly gruesome manner. Seriously cash-strapped Harry Dresden is called in (despite the usual objections from the “serious” police crowd), and things go from “random weird case” to “serious threat to Harry’s life”. Amusingly enough, one of the few people on Harry’s side here is the local crime boss, something that Harry is less than thrilled about. Another “case” enters the picture, and it turns out that these events are apparently interlinked. There’s a werewolf on the prowl, but not everything seems to make sense. There is also some hint of “metaplot” here and some (more) hints towards weird events in Harry’s past.
This book has some common elements with the first book, but also contains many new twists and turns. The plotting was more complex and the whole thing was a very fun read. I liked it, even though, as noted, it’s strictly in the “light entertainment” category. There’s nothing bad in that, of course – quality “light entertainment” is often just the thing you need in order to relax.
Exhausted
Though I hadn’t planned it as such, the last few weeks have been quite a get-into-better-shape workout. First a week out on the tundra, and then this week I’ve done a whopping 13 hours of swords practice. “Normal” rapier on Wednesday, then Ilkka’s limited-run Bolognese sidesword course on Friday, then 5 hours of Bolognese sidesword + buckler yesterday and lastly 5 hours of Bolognese/Fiore pollax techniques today. I’m pretty bushed, though in a good way. Oh, and it was fun, lots of fun.
Now I need to keep my head clear (and awake) long enough to go through the Burning Wheel rules one more time, and to do some game planning for tomorrow. We’ll see… it’s a fun game system, but damn is it complex. It’s not every day that a system feels actually more complicated then Exalted. Not sure if it actually is or not, but since we’re used to Exalted and now trying out Burning Wheel, it feels extremely complicated.
Minireview: Creatures Anathema (Dark Heresy)
Creatures Anathema is a “monster manual” of sorts for the Dark Heresy game, but it’s far from being just a boring list of stat blocks. In a way it’s a continuation of the earlier Disciples of the Dark Gods book – where that book presented a large group of specific antagonist organizations and individuals, this one lists more general threats (general “monster” types and alien races). What makes it so good is the fact that each entry is shown with in-game “notes” from various parties on how the creature in question is generally viewed, and there are also plot hooks given on each one. All this makes actually using these things in a game much easier than it would be with just a “stats” book, and it also makes for a much more entertaining read.
The creature types are varied and interesting, ranging fron non-intelligent “monsters” to diabolically intelligent major threats. A lot of imagination has gone into most of these (though the “space orcs” still make me cringe a bit).
In sum, yet another quality supplement for Dark Heresy. As always, the production values are excellent, this is one good-looking book. I did spot some typoes and some missing page references, so some small bit of extra editing might have been good… but those are minor issues.
Minireview: Northern Leaguebook Three, Western Frontier Protectorate: Blood and Honor (Heavy Gear)
Reading the game line in order, by this point most of the major Terra Novan factions have already been mapped out. The Western Frontier Protectorate book fills in one of the few missing spots, detailing the least powerful Northern faction, the WFP.
Most of Heavy Gear cultures seem to be drawn and extrapolated from real, modern-day cultures and cultural trends, and the WFP is no exception. This time, it’s modelled after “outback” Mexico/Spain, and frontier life in general. Originally a disparate group of homesteads, the various clan heads at one point decided to group together for increased security against raiders and other hostiles. Much later, the official “Western Frontier Protectorate” was born. It’s a clan-based society, where the clan you belong to (or don’t) has a major impact on your life. The “clanless” have difficulty gaining any power, so their best bet is to get “adopted” into a clan – a process filled with potential hazards. There is a social movement which tries to limit the power of the clans, but as can be imagined it has a hard time of it.
There is also a major emphasis on personal and clan honor. Duels, sometimes to the death, are common. In this sense, there is similarity to the Southern Republic, but the cultural emphasis is very different here. Where Southern views are more along the lines of “personal glory”, here it’s more about survival and face.
It’s a solid book, and as all Heavy Gear supplements it’s extremely dense in information. I found this book to be a bit heavy to read at times… not sure if that was due to personal concentration at the time, or if the writing here just wasn’t quite as engaging as in previous Leaguebooks.
Minireview: Clash of the Kingslayers (S1) (Pathfinder)
Clash of the Kingslayers is written by Christine Schneider, winner of Paizo’s “RPG Superstar” contest (intended to give amateur game designers a shot at fame). While not perfect, it’s not bad – I think it has some missed opportunities, but to be fair some of that is probably due to page count restrictions.
The plot has the PCs getting semi-accidentally involved with a internal strife in the dwarven stronghold of Glimmerhold. Hailed as valued guests (or even heroes) due to an initial event, they are soon given the chance to do some (more) heroics in order to save the city. It seems that some sort of ancient evil is threatening the place… or so it seems at first, anyway. Things trace back to events in the past that some parties would much rather remained hidden. There are some quite cinematic scenes in here, though some GM embellishment may be needed in places.
The “missed opportunities” I referred to have mostly to do with the “mobile dungeon” the module throws at the players. While nifty in itself, I think more could have been done with the thing, and more emphasis placed on how movement becomes difficult and confusing. Also, I think the stock plots dumps the PCs away from the thing way too soon – I’d personally leave that detail up to PC actions and not try to force the issue. Detail given on Glimmerhold is meager at best, we’re not even given a rough map (though Paizo does provide that as a download from the module web page). This lack of detail is, of course, due to page count restrictions, so I can’t really fault the module for that.
I’d rate this one in the “pretty good” category. Not a must-buy, but reads like a fun adventure.
Back in from the cold
We’re back, more or less in one piece. Was a great trip; even though I was initially a bit sceptical of the idea of camping in subzero temperatures for a week, it turned out to be very cool (pun intended). Nice physical workout too – even though our daily distances weren’t much worth mentioning, the act of skiing with a backpack on your back is work in of itself. It was a strange and somewhat alien feeling to find out that you can both survive and be quite comfortable while camping out on an icy plain, in temperatures that would kill an unprotected person fast. As long as you have proper equipement and know what to do, you don’t have a problem.
In total, we slept 4 nights out in the wilderness in a tent and 2 in wilderness huts. The first “hut stop” wasn’t an intended one; we originally intended just to stop there for lunch and then soldier on, but then Janka’s ski binding suddenly broke (in a non-fixable fashion) and our stay became an overnighter. The hut (which thankfully was close by at that point) was out of GSM range, so we sent a written note back to Kilpisjärvi via some snowmobile-equipped visitors and hoped for the best. Lo and behold, the next morning the Border Guard guys came along and dropped off a pair of skis plus ski boots, obtained from the Kilpisjärvi Travel Center (Retkeilykeskus). Wow, that’s both “my tax dollars at work” and damn good service. A huge thanks to both parties, and also to the couple who carried our note back.
Things I learned:
- winter/arctic camping is actually quite fun, assuming you have good gear and good company
- despite what some claim, for a beginner it’s not easier to ski with a backpack as compared to a pull-along sled (“ahkio”, in Finnish). The weight of the backpack made ski control a lot more tricky than it needed to be, and during difficult descents my legs tired very fast – and the backpack wasn’t even that heavy, 18kg or so.
- always remember to check camera lens for dirt after each day of shooting. Didn’t do it this time, and as a result I have a lot of nasty splotches in the raw “footage” that ends up consuming a lot of post-processing time.
- even though it’s not a pro body, our trusty Canon 20d performs well in subzero extended stays, too. A week in arctic temperatures and 300+ pictures: no problems, and no need to swap batteries. Impressive.
- next time I’ll take along an extra pair of “technical” long underwear. Even though I did ok with just one, baing able to switch to a clean set halfway through would have increased my comfort level.
- wool-padded winter (rubber) boots plus thick wool socks rock for camp footwear.
- next time I’ll probably want to have my own set of skis, preferably with some (small) telemark-suitable site cuts. The borrowed set I had along now performed fine, so this is more of a “tweak” than anything else.
- The Kilpisjärvi area of Lapland has pretty awesome scenery.
All things considered, a huge success (cue “Portal song” here). Even though I guess it goes into the “extreme camping” category, the trip felt like a wonderful vacation and I feel mucho relaxed now. Seeing how we were all already talking about “next time” after the trip, I think everyone felt pretty much the same way.
The weather was (mostly) fantastic. Almost too hot in the beginning, it dropped to a wonderful “few degrees below zero” for the rest of the week. The coldest temperature we recorded was -16C one night just before crawling into the tent to sleep. That started to be a bit on the chilly side, but not too bad. The final day was very windy, and our last few kilometers of travel were done in the middle of a honest snow storm; visibility in the 20m department and wind howling. Fun at that point, but would have been a lot less fun further out in the field.
Huge thanks to Timo for both the initial idea and for being the “winter camping expert” of the expedition – and for being a great field chef, as always. Our pizza and lasagne (made in a camp cooker oven thingy) in the middle of the wilderness raised more than a few eyebrows and got us some envy points.
I’m still working of doing post-processing for the pictures, but a small selection from the first 3 days is available now. I took a lot of handheld HDR pictures, using the 20d’s auto-bracket feature (+/-2 EV). Some pretty nice results, though the dirt on the lens I mentioned forced me to do a lot of post-proc work – and some of those still need more tweaking later on, you can still see artifacts here and there that I want to clean away at some point. Still, for handheld HDRs I though some of the results were quite acceptable.
Minireview: Pathfinder #17, A Memory of Darkness
Ok, we’re nearing the end of the Second Darkness adventure path here. A Memory of Darkness (by J.D. Wiker) is the next-to-last episode… and unfortunately, it’s also easily the weakest so far.
Now, while I like the general idea of “adventure paths” (i.e. a set of linked adventures telling a bigger story), they have always had one big problem: they need to railroad quite a bit, due to the need of moving a plot along with a limited page count allocated for it. This is usually manageable, and can work fine with a good playgroup that understands that derailing the story “just because” isn’t cool. However, it remains a problem that the writers of these things often seem to assume the PCs will do some fairly unlikely and/or suicidal thing based on extremely flimsy clues. So… quite a bit of GM prepwork usually needed, to handle the “you want to do what?!?” scenarios.
Railroads can be fun, of course, if everyone is on the same map (so to speak). As the saying goes, “nobody minds a railroad as long as the scenery is interesting and the destination is Awesome City”.
Well, this thing is railroad-tastic, and not in any good way either. After having (somehow) survived their visit to Drow Town, the PCs find themselves disbelieved and sort-of betrayed by the guys who put them up to the whole thing: the damn pointy-eared elves. Now, at this point I can easily see the PCs doing a Cartman-style “screw you guys, we’re going home!”. They’ve just risked their lives to help the elven nation… and they get disdain and imprisonment as a reward? And it gets better… they get secretly manipulated by an uber-powerful NPC to “escape”, and to go on a senseless tour of Golarion (via elf gates) to look for some group of elven “bad guys”. Player choice in the matter? None, really, it’s just assumed they go for it, and assumed that they realize it’s all a clever double-think by aforesaid uber-NPC. The “elf gate” tour serves little purpose in the story. Then they meet the “bad guys”… who turn out to be pathetic losers. With one real “bad guy”, who is illustrated in such a cartoon “I’m evil!” fashion that he might as well wear a “League of Evil” t-shirt. This makes the illustrations of the Council members useless, since anyone seeing all the pictures will figure out who the bad guy is in under 3 seconds. Sigh.
It’s a mess. It’s one big railroad, with an untouchable uber-NPC running the train engine, waving happily. The scenery is mostly pointless, and the destination is not Awesome CIty. It’s not even the suburbs.
Oh, there are some cool bits here and there. The elven “prison” thingy is cool, and there are some fun encounters. But on the whole, this thing needs a lot of work in order to be usable. Or some extremely understanding players (bordering on the “saintly”).
Minireview: Storm Front, by Jim Butcher
Storm Front is the first book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. I only heard about this series a bit over a year(?) ago, when the short-lived TV series came out. Watched it, found it fun enough but nothing all that special. After that, I heard that Fred Hicks (of Spirit of the Century fame, among other things) had started work on a Dresden Files roleplaying game. So the series apparently has its fans. I resolved to check the books out at some point.
Well, “at some point” is now, I got the first two books and just read the first. It’s pretty fun, and much what I expected to find: fairly lightweight but entertaining “modern occult/fantasy” stuff, a mix of “film noir” cliches and modern magic. The books feature Harry Dresden, a modern-day wizard trying to make a living as a private investigator. The world in the book has lots of occult elements and supernatural creatures (World of Darkness -style), but most people are unaware of them (also like WoD). Most of the “supernaturals” prefer to stay out of sight, and Harry gets no bonus points from them for advertising that he’s a wizard – of course, few believe him, and as a result his cash flow is… limited. Oh, and the local cabal of magic users, “The While Council”, has a death penalty hanging over Harry’s head, due to a death Harry apparently caused via magic when we was younger.
In true film noir fashion, the book starts with a lady in distress coming to Harry for some help. He is reluctant (for various reasons), but the fact that the rent is overdue helps tip his mind. In quick succession, a murder gets added into the mix, along with a local mobster and a vampiric brothel owner. Oh, and when more bodies start turning up, the White Council becomes convinced Harry himself is behind the murders.
It’s a fun mix of WoD and film noir detective stories. Pretty lightweight and a quick read, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Good “brain candy” reading.
