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My first ten rpgs: 1

1 Jun, 2020

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. You might expect my first to have been the then-ubiquitous AD&D--the Windows 95 of roleplaying!--but it was not. Instead, it was John M. Ford's science fantasy Starquest, an extremely simple, four characteristic, class-based RPG that as far as I know was only ever published once, in the pages of the July 1979 Asimov's. It didn't have a cover as such but it did have a George Barr illustration.



Like most good-hearted people, I preferred well delineated borders between my SF and F. This "role-playing" sounded pretty silly to me. I didn't expect the idea to thrive and I certainly did not foresee spending time on it.

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RPG WTF 1: D&D

1 Jun, 2020

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By popular demand1, ten WTF were they thinking moments from classic RPGs, which I admit is something of a target-rich environment. I will limit myself to games I've actually seen, which means I get to skip past _that_ one.

The 1977 edition of D&D added an orthagonal good vs evil to the law vs chaos morality axis. While humans got freedom of choice regarding where on either axis characters fell, this was not true of some non-human races, which in turn means there are whole races good people are morally obligated to kill when possible. This is by no means unique to D&D but it gets special credit for being the one to establish it as a trope in table-top roleplaying games.

1: Well, a couple of people, anyway.

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RPG WTF 2: Cyberpunk 2020

1 Jun, 2020

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This may be a misnamed series, because in this case the detail I am very sure I know exactly what the company was thinking.

R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk (later Cyberpunk 2020) adapted the cyberpunk genre to gaming (and did it without getting the FBI coming down on them like a ton of technically illiterate bricks). As far as the game itself goes, it’s about what one would expect: lots of focus on the surface details of cyberpunk1, not much awareness of any depth in the fiction. Ah, well. Nothing stopping players from adding layers to their game.

The reason I single R. Tal out is because their cover art inspired me to think about how I shelved games. A large fraction of my clientele were women and I didn’t want the first thing they saw when they came in to be something like this. 



I’d like to think this was because I was a particularly insightful but really, it only occurred to me after I overheard two customers complaining about the porn comics another store kept near the register to reduce shrinkage. Cue a bit of reshelving, with the R Tal moved to a side room, and companies like White Wolf and Dreampod 9 in the front.

The reason for the soft core porn art seems pretty obvious: the company thought it would help sell their books, which paints an interesting image of their customer base’s demographics. Sure, the art may potentially alienate a fair swath of the people who see it but that’s really only an issue if you thought the people it puts off were going to buy it in the first place.

1: And made up slang, which happens to be one of those details that grate on me.

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May 2020 in Review

31 May, 2020

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May 2020

21 books read. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by a non-binary author (5%), and 9 works by POC (43%)

Year to Date

106 books read. 56.5 by women (53%), 42 by men (40%), 4 by non-binary authors (4%), 3.5 by unknown (3%), 41 works by POC (39%)

Charts below cut


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Books Received, May 23 — May 29

30 May, 2020

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They’ll call her a bad mother. Cole can live with that. Because when she breaks her son Miles out of the Male Protection Facility — designed to prevent him joining the 99% of men wiped off the face of the Earth — she’s not just taking him back. She’s setting him free. Leaving Miles in America would leave him as a lab experiment; a pawn in the hands of people who now see him as a treasure to be guarded, traded, and used. What kind of mother would stand by and watch her child suffer? But as their journey to freedom takes them across a hostile and changed country, freedom seems ever more impossible. It’s time for Cole to prove just how far she’ll go to protect her son. 

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Books Received, May 16 — May 22

23 May, 2020

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In the final instalment of the influential Machine Dynasty series, the rapture for which the self-replicating humanoids were engineered finally comes to pass. 

Now that the failsafe that once kept synthetic beings from harming humans has been hacked, all vNare discovering the promise – and the peril –of free will. Her consciousness unleashed across computer systems all across the world, the vicious vN Portia stands poised to finally achieve her lifelong dream of bringing feeble, fleshy humanity to its knees. 

The battle between Portia and granddaughter Amy comes to its ultimate conclusion. Can Amy get her family to the stars before Portia destroys every opportunity for escape and freedom? 

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Books Received, May 9 — May 15

16 May, 2020

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When a mysterious plague breaks out in the army fort guarding Vilnoc, the port capital of the duchy of Orbas, Temple sorcerer Penric and his demon Desdemona are called upon by General Arisaydia to resurrect Penric’s medical skills and solve its lethal riddle. In the grueling days that follow, Pen will find that even his magic is not enough to meet the challenges without help from dedicated new colleagues — and the god of mischance. 

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Books Received, May 2 — May 8

9 May, 2020

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A breathtaking geopolitical epic fantasy, The Monster Baru Cormorant is the sequel to Seth Dickinson’s fascinating tale” ( The Washington Post ), The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Her world was shattered by the Empire of Masks.
For the power to shatter the Masquerade,
She betrayed everyone she loved. The traitor Baru Cormorant is now the cryptarch Agonist — a secret lord of the empire she’s vowed to destroy. Hunted by a mutinous admiral, haunted by the wound which has split her mind in two, Baru leads her dearest foes on an expedition for the secret of immortality. It’s her chance to trigger a war that will consume the Masquerade. But Baru’s heart is broken, and she fears she can no longer tell justice from revenge…or her own desires from the will of the man who remade her.

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Books Received, April 25 — May 1

2 May, 2020

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Writing as A. Deborah Baker, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of talking trees and sarcastic owls, of dangerous mermaids and captivating queens in Over the Woodward Wall, an exceptional tale for readers who are young at heart.

* If you trust her you’ll never make it home… Avery is an exceptional child. Everything he does is precise, from the way he washes his face in the morning, to the way he completes his homework – without complaint, without fuss, without prompt. Zib is also an exceptional child, because all children are, in their own way. But where everything Avery does and is can be measured, nothing Zib does can possibly be predicted, except for the fact that she can always be relied upon to be unpredictable. They live on the same street.
They live in different worlds. On an unplanned detour from home to school one morning, Avery and Zib find themselves climbing over a stone wall into the Up and Under – an impossible land filled with mystery, adventure and the strangest creatures. And they must find themselves and each other if they are to also find their way out and back to their own lives. 

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April 2020 in Review

1 May, 2020

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April 2020

21 books read. 12 by women (57%), 7 by men (33%), 1 by a non-binary author (5%), 1 by authors whose gender is unknown (5%), and 7 works by POC (33%)

Year to Date

85 books read. 45.5 by women (54%), 33 by men (39%), 3 by non-binary authors (4%), 3.5 by unknown (4%), 32 works by POC (38%)

Charts below cut

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