Brent
The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells
There’s much to recommend curation. If you’re not familiar with H.G. Wells, by the way, he wrote The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man, amongst other classic SF novels. He also wrote dozens of short stories in his life (Wikipedia maintains a list). His last short story was published over 50 years after the first. His skills undoubtedly improved over time, which highlights the central problem of this […]
My Studio Ghibli-inspired RPG
For the past few months, I’ve been working on one of my dream games: a tabletop role-playing game that simulates the otherworldly adventure stories of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. I wanted a rule set that emulated the motivations and values of Miyazaki, that rewards co-operation and community. I’ve been playtesting it and tweaking it for months now. Today, I sent a limited release of the game, The Whispering Road, to my patrons on Patreon. The Wandering Road is ideal for introducing casual […]
Reading News From Nowhere
Like many great books, William Morris’s News From Nowhere left me with several conflicting feelings. In a sense, it’s a science fiction novel. The author awakes in a future several hundred years distant from his own time in the 1800’s. He discovers a gentle society of friendly, calm people who go about their daily lives in peace and comfort. Each pursues his or her interests in trade for daily bread. […]
The Independent Sixth Reader
(Review. Elocution. We suck at this. Perhaps it’s time.) I discovered this book in a dusty used bookstore off a major highway. The place was crammed with thousands and thousands of used books in every imaginable category, and deep in the back recesses of the store lay the gold mine: a whole case of books each over 100 years old. I picked out The Independent Sixth Reader, an instructional book published in 1868. It’s the last book in a series […]
Normal Blogging
A little social media navel-gazing: I’m sick today, and in that frustrating middle on a bunch of projects. Not that I have the energy to work on them, but at least I can stare, bleary-eyed, at my list of Projects between bathroom runs. (And I do mean runs.) I have a 40-page setting guide that I’ll release when my season 3 of the Monsters of the Shattered World podcast gets out of the editing stage, but it looks like that won’t […]
The Surprising, Incredible Burt Wonderstone (review)
This movie genuinely surprised me. Besides the characters and story, this is a movie about stage magic. Its writers did a wise thing: they wrote a movie that’s primarily about a failing magician getting back into his game. It is secondarily a comedy. This brings with it certain drawbacks. But let me get to that in a minute. The film starts with two nerdy kids who […]
Suspense! (review)
Daniel Solis is a brilliant game designer. He built one of my favorite RPGs, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, a free-wheeling story-telling game of young wuxia pilgrims flying around a fantasy world, getting into trouble and helping others. Its primary mechanic is Go stones. He recently began demoing a new game called Suspense!, a […]
The Power and the Glory (book review)
The Power and the Glory is a difficult novel. It’s easy to read. Greene writes florid, powerful prose that pulled me into memorable situations. His characters are complex and multi-dimensional (meaning they often have multiple opposing beliefs and values). This is about people caught in difficult, desperate situations. People who have made mistakes, and pay for them. People who are people. They’re not trying to be […]
Pacific Rim (review)
I’m trying to write out my thoughts on Pacific Rim without simply restating Sam Keeper’s information-dense article “The Visual Intelligence of Pacific Rim” at Storming the Ivory Tower. So maybe you want to check that out. Worse, I’m about to make many over-generalizations about things about which I know more than the average American, but I’m far from an expert in. I saw Pacific Rim. (That’s not the generalization.) Friends […]
The Fabliaux (book review)
The Fabliaux is an odd little book, which I bought on a whim because it’s an odd little book. We’ve all heard of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, those saucy stories of pilgrims in the Middle Ages. Some know that Chaucer didn’t invent these stories; he cobbled them together from various stories floating around at the time. Common folk traded these profane little tales in taverns, forming the “reality TV” of its […]