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A pair of government agents stalk a runaway girl armed only with a teddy bear. They are never heard from again. A psychopathic hero wields every blade that ever murdered, carving off pieces of his personality in an effort to beat back the Nightmares. A temptress lures the cruel and vile to assault her – only to trap them in a prison built from her own ribcage. Trailing ash and burning footprints with every step, a man cursed with Orpheus’ gift delves deeper into Hell each day on a quest to find the last missing puzzle-piece needed to rebuild his late girlfriend from the wreck she has become…

Don’t Lose Your Mind is a supplement for the brilliant and strange Don’t Rest Your Head game, written by Benjamin Baugh of Monsters & Other Childish Things fame. It’s basically a “madness toolkit” – since “Madness Talents” feature so heavily in DRYH, coming up with a good one can be tricky. This book leaps to the rescue, dribbling ichor and making strange noises. It’s a very good book, but (like the core game) extremely strange. We’re presented with 26 Madness Talents, each one weird and very detailed. In addition to the basic idea of the talent, the book also details how the talent is slowly tearing you apart and what sort of Nightmare you’re turning into (if you don’t keep the “talent” in check)… so the book also doubles as a book of new monsters for the game. Nifty. We’re also given some tips on how to handle madness in the game, and some general game tips to top it off.

I was very impressed with DRYH and this book just adds to the fun. Be warned, though, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. The themes go into the “mature” category, and the “talents” outlined here aren’t nice and comfortable “superpowers”. Far from it.

Added note: Fantasiapelit in Helsinki now carries a stock of IPR games (including Don’t Rest Your Head), so you no longer have to order the things from IPR unless you want to. Being able to browse the books and buy if you like them is very nice, compared to online ordering.

The first of two supplements for the brilliant Monsters and Other Childish Things, Curriculum of Conspiracy is the more “standard” one (the other one, Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, is reputedly a more radical departure from the base game and is also still in my “to buy” queue). Curriculum presents you with a campaign seed for a “Monsters” game, one with a lot of the same Buffy-esque flavor as the high-school one in the core book. It has its own twist, of course; while the locale is still a U.S. school, here some of the faculty know about monsters – and want to control and use them. In other words, some of NPCs are actively hostile to the PCs, and also know a lot about what’s going on.

It’s not bad. The NPCs are nicely detailed and have motivations that aren’t quite black/white. Full maps of the school are given, as are notes on how to run the game. If the idea of pitting the PCs (children) against an actively hostile group sounds like your thing, this book is probably what you need. It’s probably also useful in other “Monsters” games as a source of interesting NPCs. It’s a pretty thin book, with large font – there’s not a ton of content here, though the content you do get is quite good. My copy has some binding problems, not sure if this is a common problem.

Dunno, this feels like a way to run “Monsters” more like a “traditional” rpg… which may be just what some people want. I personally am more interested in the nonstandard aspects of “Monsters”, so I’d probably either use one of the settings in the core, or (more likely) go for the reputedly weird and excellent Candlewick setting. I’ll be able to comment more once I get and read that.

Alpha Complex Nights is a fairly new book for Paranoia XP. It’s a collection of three new adventures, all written by Gareth Hanrahan. I’d say it’s a very good – with some minor disclaimers.

All three adventures share two elements: they all contain a non-standard twist, and they are all quite complicated. Complicated in that they all actually have a back story, and there’s a lot to keep in mind when running them. That complexity also makes them quite interesting, so it’s a some-good-some-bad feature. The twists add to the interest factor.

The first of the bunch is Spin Control, which features the need for the Troubleshooters to control the “truth”. While always being an important survival skill in good ol’ Alpha Complex, here it becomes a mandate. There are also zombies. Yes, zombies. Lots of them. Of the brain-eating kind. Yes, that’s the twist. Sporks also feature heavily. The whole thing is insanely complex, quite funny, and very good.

Second up is My First Treason, where the Troubleshooters… aren’t. Aren’t Troubleshooters, that is. Instead, players play “junior citizens”, fresh from the creche and straight into school (or what passes for it in Alpha Complex). There’s a lot of Harry Potter spoofing going on and lots of opportunities to stab people in the back, blame others, and try to survive. Situation normal, in other words. While good fun and a nice twist, this is possibly the weakest of the three – though that is mostly due to the high quality of the other two.

Last up, there’s Sweep Of Unhistory, where (due to a fairly unlikely plot gimmick) the Troubleshooters get re-cloned time and time again… each time further in the future. While staying quite “normal” in the beginning, the whole thing degenerates into an insane version of The Time Machine, with lots of jokes and references thrown about in all appropriate directions. Alpha Complex where the Commies won (sorta)? Flying Alpha Complex sky fortress? No computer, just lots of slaves and coconuts? Giant mutant cockroaches? All here. It’s a lovely time travel spoof and great Paranoia adventure, rolled into one. Keeping up player interest through the zillion possible futures may be a challenge, of course.

All that is based on how the things read, of course – they sound like lots of fun, but the proof is in the play, as always.

Continuing on with my project to read the entire Heavy Gear line, we now have the Southern Republic Leaguebook. In an entirely unsurprising turn of events, it covers “the Land of the Snakes”: the Southern Republic, the biggest member of the AST and the most powerful single nation on the planet.

The AST has a stereotype of being expansionist and militaristic, with citizens having very little political freedom. This is based firmly in truth. However, the other side of the coin is the fact that citizens enjoy vast amounts of non-political freedom; as long as they don’t try to attack the state or criticize how it’s run (too openly), they have almost total personal freedoms as compared to many of their Northern counterparts. Attitudes are generally liberal and art flourishes. It’s a study in contrasts, and part of what makes Heavy Gear so cool: the writers go out of their way to make their societies complex, living things instead of stereotypes.

The book covers all the general bases. We have chapters on history, social norms, general lifestyles, etc, followed by brief 2-3 page writeups of the major cities with some barebones maps. The land area involved is huge, so this book can’t help being a bit sketchy in some details. What it does detail is interesting. The cities are quite distinct from each other, with each one having a very specific “feel”. For a GM setting up a game in the South, there’s a lot here to help him/her get started even if the fine details would have to be generated separately.

Not much else to say here. The book does what it sets out to do, with the only complaint being the sketchy level of detail in many places; something that is mandated by page count.

Here we go again. Shadow in the Sky (written by Greg A. Vaughan) kicks off Paizo’s third adventure path, Second Darkness. As always, there’s an ancient evil awakening and the PCs are initially small fry who are (probably) expected to save things. Skipping that cliche, things do look quite interesting – there is a science fiction-ish twist and the promise of lots of drow as the bad guys. Not “misunderstood angsty dark-skinned folk”, but “evil, murderous bastards”. All this is tied to a big chunk of elven history and politics.

This first installment places the PCs in Riddleport, a Freeport-style wild and rowdy seaside town. After participating in a gambling tournament the players get the chance to get a slice of the business for themselves, with all sorts of potential problems. The big plot is mostly in the background, in the form of a weird phenomenon in the sky and some dark rumors. The action here revolves mostly around small-time crime and lots of shady dealings, which in fun in itself; it’s quite workable to have the PCs all be small-time crooks, for example.

Paizo has again tweaked the format a bit. The main adventure is a bit shorter, but that’s compensated by a bonus standalone adventure that can easily be plugged into the “main” adventure. The practical reason for this is resourcing: this format lets Paizo divide the adventure writing between more authors, and the small “standalone” adventure bit is a good place for new authors to try their legs (so to speak). I like it.

Hard to say much about the whole thing yet, but the setup seems pretty cool. Waiting with interest to see where this one goes.

Books of Sorcery, Vol. V - The Roll of Glorious Divinity II is, besides a tongue-twister title, a book of demons and ghosts for Exalted. It updates info about demons from the old Games of Divinity book into 2nd edition stats and adds the Abscissic demon summoning method (also updated) from Savant and Sorcerer. The second half of the book contains new rules and stats for ghosts, including rules for “Heroic” ghosts (though, bizarrely, it omits xp costs for those).

It’s a welcome update; I immediately included the new demon summoning rules into my own game (as of yesterday) – now those damn Blood Apes have to be kept entertained or they go…. apeshit. Or something. The writing is quite clear, though as always this 2nd edition lacks some of the fun flavor from the 1st edition books. Some of this may be due to reduced available word count per subject, which (while helping keep things clear) I feel is also one of the main problems with this book: there’s just too much crammed into here. I would much rather have seen the whole book devoted to the care and feeding of demons, since they are such a cornerstone of Exalted sorcery. Ghosts we’ve already had elsewhere, I would have stuck the text now found in this book somewhere else.

So… a good book, with welcome (and long-overdue) updates of 1st edition material to 2nd edition, but marred a bit by cramming a bit too much into one book and by having most of the book be just a repeat of material from older books. I’m hoping to see some more demon stats in other books down the line, now the book just gives the same list of demons that 1st edition had, with updated stats. Would be good to get some actually new stuff.

One new detail liked a lot: the “obscurity” rules for figuring out if a sorcerer has heard (enough) about a given demon type. Handy.

This is a bit more like it. While still staying very far away from high art, at least A Shadow Over Heaven’s Eye is a pretty good read. Set in the horoscope-obsessed Varangian city-states, it has a young girl rebelling against her destiny, Swan as a visiting diplomat, and an interesting Sidereal-fueled main plot. The writing is good enough and the book has some nice details and flavor on this region of Creation. Swan is himself, trying to be the perfect diplomat while dodging assassins and the Wyld Hunt. I’d rank this among the best of the Exalted novels – nothing spectacular, but good entertainment and useful potential world flavor for GMs.

Like all the Exalted novels, it’s a very quick read; large font and not that many pages.

Books based on roleplaying games (and, well, games in general) have a reputation of being crap. This is, sadly, due to most of them actually being crap, so the reputation is well-deserved. However, every now and then you run into a book which ignores that reputation and actually manages to be pretty damn good.

The Carnelian Flame is not one of those. If you want good rpg-related books, read the Delta Green novels and short stories, Greg Stolze’s Godwalker, Robin D. Laws’ Pierced Heart, etc. Avoid this book like the plague. Avoid it even if you’ve sortof liked the other Exalted novels, this is easily the worst of them I’ve read.

The problem isn’t the plot, as such; while not being amazingly innovative, it’s quite ok. There’s an up-and-coming Deathknight with a plan to Kill Lots of People (tm), a newly-exalted bandit, Arianna in the role of the required signature character wandering mage… nothing spectacular, but you can build a decent Exalted book from that. The problem is the writing. It’s klunky, and at times feels like it’s aimed at 10yr olds. The characters apparently have a competition regarding who can say the most spectacularly corny lines, with everybody doing their best to out-corny eat other. The plot develoment is painfully connect-the-dots. The ending reveals no surprises whatsoever.

Waste of time.

Oh, there were a few fun points. I liked the version of Shoat of the Mire presented here, the personality fits pretty well with the…. upbriging that the Shoats receive. I would have preferred a bit more “crazy” in there, but… it was ok. Likewise, the demon tree thingy was a fun idea. Not worth the book, though.

I have to admit I like Peter Hamilton’s books. Sure, his characters tends to be more of the 2d variety, and (as a friend noted) his characters experience sex in a way that sounds quite alien to us normal human beings. I still remember first hearing about the guy at the Jersey science fiction worldcon all too many years back, where I attended a publishing “party” at which his first book (Mindstar Rising) was released. I remember us reading some excerpts from that book (out of context) and going “whoah, this stuff is crap!”. So no, I don’t consider him to be a literary giant… but damn it, he does write some good books. Years and years after the Worldcon, I heard praise for his (then new) “Night’s Dawn” series, so I picked that up and was immediately hooked. While his characterization is a bit on the flimsy side, he does know how to spin a tale, and he has lots of really nifty ideas. Even though Night’s Dawn didn’t quite deliver in the end, it was one hell of a ride and packed full of weird and new ideas.

Fast forward to today, where I’ve read most of his work and also liked most of it. I recently picked up the debut Mindstar Rising at a used book sale and finally got around to reading it… with conflicing expectations, really.

Well, it’s not his best work, but neither is it his worst. The writing is a bit unpolished, especially in the beginning, but it either gets better or one gets used to the style – take your pick. The plot is a mix of the cliche and the interesting. We have the semi-retired ex-military hero (cliche) living in a dystopian world (cliche), which happens to be the U.K. (not quite cliche) wrecked by a combo of environmental disaster (maybe a cliche now, but not when the book was written) and years under an extremist hardliner left-wing government (fun twist). There’s a company with a new discovery, a young girl scrambling to run aforesaid company, shadowy powers trying to ruin it, and lots of other post-cyberpunk-suitable motifs.

I quite enjoyed it, to tell the truth, especially since I read it as a travel book while in Prague. It’s pretty lightweight, but it’s not totally brainless. There are some quite clever bits; for example, the book opens up with a scene which makes the protagonist to be… well, not a good guy, and a walking cliche besides. The scene is (obliquely) explained much, much later in the book, at which point you realize that the first impression was quite wrong and things were quite different than what they seemed to be. I’m pretty sure that twist was deliberate, so points for that.

I might even pick up the rest of the “Greg Mandel” books (of which this is the first).

John Varley is a slightly uneven writer. His short stories are fantastic, but his novels are all over the place. They are rarely bad, but neither do they always have the “wow!” factor of his short stories. That said, his “Gaia” trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon) still ranks among my all-time favorites.

The Golden Globe is in the “pretty good, not fantastic” category. It starts up really slow and picks up pace gradually; by the time it really gets into swing it’s all over. That’s not to say that it’s bad, quite the opposite; it’s a very entertaining read. It just has some pacing problems.

The story is a bit weird, here. It’s set in the same future as Steel Beach, where aliens have invaded Earth & Jupiter, with manking continuing to exist elsewhere in the solar system. The protagonist is “Sparky” Valentine, an ex-actor-now-con-man on the run from both his past and the law. Raised by a control-freak father to be a theatrical actor like himself, Sparky lands a child actor job for a schlock kids’ TV series and slowly manages to gain independence. All this is told in retrospect by an adult Sparky, hitching rides like a hobo from planet to planet, trying to evade killers sent after him.

It’s a road trip, in a way, and as such works pretty well other than the dead-slow pacing and buildup. The revelation about what actually happened in his childhood is left for the end of the book and it provides some nice twists… but as noted, at that point the story is almost over. The tone is a weird mix of space opera and old-fashioned “young kid makes it good” storytelling, it felt very old-fashioned and modern at the same time. Part of this is due to the “Shakespeare in space” story theme, which is anachronistic to begin with.

Like Steel Beach, this book contains lots of Heinlein homages. I’m sure I missed more than a few, even though I’ve read all of Heinlein’s books over the years.