I’ve been on a history of role-playing run recently.
I’ve finished Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards and volume 1 of the second edition of Playing at the world.
I also got through Gary Allen Fine’s Shared Fantasy, which is an anthropological take on his gaming in the Minneapolis area 1977 to 1979. I’d run into it in a college library while working on other papers in high school and paged it but hadn’t gotten to read it. I hope his original notes are still extant because something tells me a detailed review of his time at MAR Barker’s Tekumel table likely would be of even more useful context now.
Alongside this I’ve been going through the essays in Lawrence Schick’s Heroic Worlds and consulting back to Shannon Appelcline’s Designers and Dragons set.
It’s always a joy to me to dig in on the material facts of the pop culture that occupied my attention as a kid.
Have you read things like ‘The Elfish Gene’ and ‘Of Dice and Men’? Perhaps not quite as scholarly as Jon Petersen (and the Elfish Gene is memoir rather than a ‘history’ book) but well worth reading
I also enjoyed ‘Slaying the Dragon’ recently. Not nearly as scholarly or frankly as well-written as Jon Peterson’s books but some lovely gossip and it covers the period where I was growing up with DnD i.e. the end of 1st edition into 2nd edition and the takeover of TSR by WotC.
I have finished Yumi and the Nightmare Painter yesterday. I’m still a puddle today. Haven’t read the rest but I have a strong feeling that this is my fave Novella from Sanderson. And it’s been years since I’ve read Mistborn but this MIIIIIGHT become my fave Sanderson.
I really like the density of it. As a novella, way shorter than his epic series, I feel more invested on the duo MCs. I feel really invested on them. With a single character focus like, say, Tress and the Emerald Sea: the focus is Tress and it’s Tress bouncing off with multiple characters. With multi-characters, you have multiple characters bouncing off each other, which is fine. But here, the duo are tied to the hip and are “semi-isolated” from the world, which puts a more extreme focus on them as a duo that constantly bounces off each other the whole time.
Their dynamics is very engaging - although I often felt at the beginning that Yumi is the focus on both worlds - Yumi the Yoki-Hijo in her world and Yumi the person in his world - while Painter is a closed person trying to hide things but it end up well as we focus more on Painter.
The standard Sanderson worldbuilding is always interesting, and by being a novella, it has to be simple and it worked well for me as it is simple but still wonderful and complements the duo dynamic.
Also, this is one where the love story feels more organic and “believable”. It’s a glacial approach which were pushed by their interactions, since they are “semi-isolated” from the world, until it reaches a tipping point
English magic my Aunt Fanny. A lot of this is about Scotland, Ireland, Wales and a bit of France.
The Book of British Magic maybe.
Still it is quite interesting.
I really like it. It can be a bit blunt at times, which sometimes works well and sometimes doesn’t, but it’s a well-crafted story. This volume wasn’t the best as it suffers the kind of mid-trilogy problem (books 1 and 2 are one arc and 3-5 are another) where it’s kinda split between filling time and setting up the final book.
The anime is very good, but it only covers the first book and chapter 1 of the second and I doubt there’ll be more. But it’s a good way to see if the books would interest you.
I haven’t read the manga adaptation, but it’s apparently very good. Though it’s currently ongoing and not much further than where the anime ends.
After years of dipping in and out of it I finally finished a cover-to-cover read through of Robert Tombs The English and Their History.
Good survey but could benefit from a bit more editing as some conclusion material gets buried inside the chapters. Don’t know that I’d recommend it as an initial text and it cutting off at 2014 seems unusually precipitous in hindsight and somehow leaves the final chapters feeling both rushed and meandering at the same time.
On totally different tack my daughter has asked me to read the Percy Jackson series behind her and I’m through two books. It’s light and I found the first one pretty difficult to get into. My trick to surviving it has been looking back over Rifts Conversion book 2 “Pantheons of the Megaverse” and accepting that if I’d really dove into a campaign based on that book at age 13 the results, if not similar, would have rhymed.
Gods I loved that book when I got it back when I was… 16? Musta been.
The Greek pantheon has THREE different iterations in the book! One as approximately historically accurate Gods, one as evil alien intelligences mascarading at Greek gods, and one as interplanetary mercenaries pretending to be gods by using high tech toys and weapons! And you can play with all three, or just pick one or two… man, half of my mythological understanding of other pantheons throughout human history started with that stupid book.
That book, and the “Three Galaxies” were formative pieces of bad fiction. Not “bad,” but like… schlock fiction. I love them so much.
You know what I’ll say it - The Hobbit is better than The Lord of the Rings. I love it a heck of a lot more. The other way round with the films though…
