Another set of books I recently read, courtesy again of the Los Angeles Public Library, are the The Chronicles of Elantra by Michelle Sagara West. The series, currently six books, with a seventh planned, follow the story of Kaylin Nera, a police officer (although that term isn’t used) in the fantasy city of Elantra. These aren’t high fantasy novels – more urban fantasy along the lines of the Dresden Files or the Jhereg novels. Suffice it to say that I have another story addiction to feed and my next fix (Book 7 – Cast In Ruin) isn’t out until next year.
The author has posted the first chapter of each novel on-line:
No commentsCourtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library, I came across Neil Shusterman’s Skinjacker Trilogy. The first two books (Everlost and Everwild) are quite good. The third book, Everfound, hasn’t been released yet – it is out in June 2011. While they are not post-apocalyptic stories, they remind me of John Christopher’s novels – aimed at teenagers, but they don’t talk down to them and are enjoyable for adults to read as well.
Quick summary – a couple of dead children find themselves in a limbo (the Everlost) between life and death. A lot of adventures occur while exploring the nature of the Everlost, themselves and looking for a way out. Kind of a "coming-of-age" series about dead kids.
P.S. Apparently Everlost is being made into a movie by Universal Pictures.
No commentsRedletterMedia has another wonderful 9-part review of a Star War prequel – this one being Part II – Attack of the Clones.
All 9 parts are on YouTube. Linked here, as he hasn’t put a playlist together yet.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9
No commentsFound via GayPatriot, this speech by former Ohio Representative Bob McEwen at CPAC 2010 is probably the best speech on effective economic policy I have ever seen.
No commentsI played PFS #3 – Murder On The Silken Caravan last Saturday and PFS #12 – Stay of Execution yesterday. Both were with the same DM and used OpenRPG, so I think I have a decent basis for comparison. About 1/2 the players were the same as well.
PFS #3 – Murder On The Silken Caravan took much, much longer. We started at 9 AM last and finished up a little after 5 PM (without any breaks). One of the players had to drop out a little after noon, because it was taking too long. The last combat was just a number crunching exercise. The big bad would knock a character into negatives, we would heal that person while doing a little bit of damage to him, and then repeat. We also had a new character (a first level druid) who didn’t take any weapons so after his big snake got put down, he wasn’t a whole lot of use, other than for some healing. Despite the length, and the fact that my character can’t seem to make any Will saves, I did have fun with the adventure. I think it was the better of the two overall.
PFS #12 – Stay of Execution went a whole lot faster. We started at 3 PM and were done by about 7 PM. However, it seemed little more than a series of semi-related encounters. While I was playing, the following picture and the words "railroad plot" kept popping into my head:
That isn’t really fair to the DM, though. As I normally do, I bought the module afterwards and any railroading is kind of baked-in. We actually managed to role-play through some of the encounters, despite the module seeming to assume that we would just fight our way through. After reading the module, I was impressed at how flexible the DM had been. My character’s faction missions were laughable. If you had all of the encounters, they would be completed. It was a fun adventure, but that was due more to the role-playing skills of the other players and DM than due to the module design.
In prepping for the adventure, I did learn a bit more about OpenRPG. Some of the plug-ins often some nice features (global variables, et. al.) but I definitely think TTopRPG is a better program.
No commentsI have been playing around with OpenRPG, and have one real annoyance. The Status Bar Toolbar keeps getting larger (when docked and then undocked), and there is no way I can find to resize it. Vertically it is too large, and horizontally too small.
On the plus side, it can be turned off and seems to be mostly useless, anyway.
11/28/2009 Update:
Somehow, I managed to turn off the Game Server window and couldn’t get it back; the menu command and Ctrl-B didn’t work. I finally managed to restore it by replacing layout.xml in the myfiles folder with a copy from a fresh install of OpenRPG. Not only did this restore the ability to pop up the Game Server window, it reset the Status Bar Toolbar.
I played my fourth Pathfinder Society Game on Saturday, PFS #2 – The Hydra’s Fang Incident. This was with a different GM and different gaming software.
The software used was OpenRPG. This is a cross-platform maptable and chat system. It was an ok program, but I must admit that I prefer TTopRPG. Part of my preference is due to the fact that TTopRPG has more complete documentation. It looks like OpenRPG has gone through some cycles of development, then near-abandonment and the documentation is fragmented or non-existent.
The game itself was fun. It was interesting using the same character, but with a different DM. One interesting thing is that the DM didn’t bother to specify the faction missions. He just said (paraphrasing) that if he finished the adventure, we would finish all of the missions. After I bought the module, I looked at them and he was essentially correct.
No commentsLast night was my third Pathfinder Society Game. Ithuriel, ran PFS #17 – Perils of The Pirate Pact.
It was another fun session. A little longer than the first one, but not nearly as long as the second. The length was important, as this was another “red-eye” adventure, starting as Midnight Eastern Time.
We had six PCs again. There were supposed to be seven, but two were no shows and we had a last minute addition. From my limited experience, six seems to be the perfect table size.
The plot behind the story was pretty blatant, even though the DM toned down some of the hints. The combat was the easiest of the three adventures so far. Only one PC went into negative hit points. The plot was a little more complicated than PFS #7 – Among The Living, but not nearly as much as #10 – Blood At Dralkard Manor. This was more linear – go to one area, have a combat, go to the next area area, have another.
My character’s faction quest actually seemed a little meaningful, in that it really did promote the goals of my faction, albeit in a very minor way. It was interesting that there were two other Osirion faction members present, so we were all doing the same quest. That made it really easy, because if any one of us succeeded, we all did. This morning I bought the module, as usual, and four of the five faction quests seemed like they would be useful to the faction. Only one (Taldor) seemed like it was really a stretch.
We also used Skype again. I think I prefer the games with a voice chat to those without.
The most important thing is that this was my character’s third adventure, so he leveled 
. Korvan Winterlight is now Level 2.