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Month: May 2009

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu

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trail-of-bohuImaro: The Trail of Bohu
Charles R. Saunders
Sword & Soul Media (217 pages, $20.00, January 2009)

Fans of Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy had reason to rejoice as 2009 kicked-off with a big release from one of the genre’s master storytellers. No, it wasn’t a new Elric novel, nor a previously undiscovered Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short. And not a book by one of those other famous names, Howard, Vance, Gemmell, or Wagner, either. It was Imaro: The Trail of Bohu, the third in the Imaro series, by the best fantasy author you’ve never heard of.

Of course, many of Black Gate’s readers have heard of and are fans of Charles R. Saunders, but the world at large has been slow to catch up. The perilous journey of the Imaro series into and out of print has been related elsewhere, but finally it seems things have gotten on the right track and this previously unfinished series will at last be in the hands of fans everywhere, thanks to new imprint Sword & Soul media.

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu continues the saga of the outcast warrior Imaro in the land of Nyumbani; a rich fantasy setting based on African history and myth. But, while the first two books in the series, Imaro and Imaro: The Quest for Cush, were essentially episodic in structure (constructed as they were of Saunders’ short stories), The Trail of Bohu, the first Imaro book written as a novel from start to finish, presents us with a bigger overall story — it is, in fact, the beginning of the arc that will carry the reader through books four and five and, let’s just say, things really start to get going in this installment of the Imaro saga.

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Gulo Gulo IV

Gulo Gulo IV

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine is zapped into obscurity by the twin phaser-blasts of Trekstalgia and JJAbramitude, I would like to point out that the movie doesn’t actually suck.

I don’t know why I care. Big-budget summer blockbusters don’t weep for me; why should I weep for them? What’s Hecuba to me, or me to Hecuba?

Still, there was a lot of Wolverine hate fogging up the internet in the last week. A fair sample is the AV Club review (and the AV Talk segment that followed). If it hadn’t been for some dissenters, like the wide-ranging, always shrewd Ryan Harvey, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to see the movie at all. But I think it is worth seeing, for anyone who liked X-Men and its sequel, anyway.

More maundering, speckled with caveats and spoilers, after the jump.

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition
By Chris O’Neill and Dan Landis. Illustrated by John Kovalic. (Dork Storm Press, 2005; $14.99)

I’ve previously mentioned in a comment thread that when it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I lean toward the rules-lite side of the equation. I’d rather have a system that allows flexible play, with minimal die-rolls and looking up charts, and greater focus on the “role-playing” instead of the “game.” Given a good Game Master, rules-lite games can feel as close to realistic as any of the more simulationist systems. My favorite RPG of all time, Fudge, has managed to adapt and handle any other game system, setting, or style I’ve thrown at it. In fact, it’s almost the only system I use. Any RPG that comes out I translate into Fudge…

…with the exception of “Beer and Pretzels” RPGs, in which sheer simplicity and ludicrousness are the norm.

Most rules-lite systems are geared toward the Beer and Pretzels genre: RPGs that are played for comedy and speed and with minimum planning and plenty of bad bad bad beer. Risus is the Beer and Pretzels equivalent of Fudge, a complete generic system (six pages long!) usable for quick ‘n’ silly RPGs late at night. I might discuss Risus in another post—it’s interesting both as a rules-lite system and as a purposeful parody of all other early RPGs. Fudge also deserves a long review, because it’s so wonderful that it’s a shame it isn’t spread like a beautiful pandemic to every corner of the hobby.

But today I bring you the most popular setting-specific Beer and Pretzels game, a funny and witty spoof on the concept of “cannon fodder” in Dungeons & Dragons: Dork Storm Press’ Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition, written by Chris O’Neil and Dan Landis—and hereafter abbreviated KAMB! (The manual loves exclamation marks! With a passion! See!)

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Bill Ward reviews Black Gate 13

Bill Ward reviews Black Gate 13

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Welcome back Bill!

We’ve missed Bill during his sabbatical from the BG blog. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy. On Sunday he posted another in his regular series of Black Gate magazine reviews. Here’s what he said about our latest issue, in part:

One look at Black Gate and you understand what makes it the leader in this field. Gorgeous cover and interior art, a huge amount of content including short stories and novellas, non-fiction, and an extensive reviews section that takes on both gaming and current fiction offerings, makes Black Gate a magazine that delivers on all cylinders…

Fans of John C. Hocking’s story in Lords of the Swords, ‘Vali’s Wound,’ will be excited to see the precursor story to that tale of vikings, ‘The Face in the Sea.’ Peadar Ó Guilín returns to Black Gate with another weird tale, ‘The Evil Eater,’ a contemporary fantasy in which a forbidden food leads to an underworld of horror. And John R. Fultz offers another strong fantasy, one of the best in the issue, with a tale of wizards and rebels in a most compellingly drawn setting in ‘Return of the Quill.’

You can find the full review here .

Targetted Book Recommendations for Non-Existent Readers

Targetted Book Recommendations for Non-Existent Readers

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You and Me

Once upon a time, I met a guy who only ever ate fries*. Anything else, it was claimed, would make him violently ill. Now, he looked healthy enough and suffered no heart attacks while I was watching him, so who knows? Maybe it worked out well for him. But it’s rare in life to find an adult whose belly is so cantankerous that it rejects even pizza with such colourful speed. And it is equally rare to meet an adult reader who only wants Sword and Sorcery, or Flying Carpet Wonder tales. Or whatever.

Most people, enjoy a bit of variety. Personally, I feast at many tables — historical fiction, mysteries, SF hard and soft; fantasy high, low, light and dark. I love it all depending on my mood, and I imagine that most of you will have similar lists, maybe replacing the SF with Romance, or the mysteries with Great American Novels. The only thing we can be sure of having in common, is a penchant for character-driven SFF adventure stories — i.e. the type of thing that BG does best. You probably wouldn’t be reading this otherwise.

Targeted Book Recommendations

Recommending books, as we all know, is a bit like giving presents to a loved one. You can give something that you would like, or, if you’re feeling more generous, you can take their tastes into consideration too.

I remember one particular disaster when a friend of mine suggested George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones to One-Footed Jimmy, even though everybody knew poor Jimmy has had an aversion to swords since that time the display came loose during his visit to a museum… OFJ wouldn’t touch Black Gate with a barge-pole, but imagine, if you will, that you had to buy a book for somebody who loved the magazine. What would you pick? You’re not trying to educate this person, you’re not allowed to show-off. The one thing you know about your victim’s diet is that he or she drools twice a year over the brown envelope that Mr. O’Neill sends from Chicago.

What would you choose? Why?

I’ll be putting up my answers to these questions some time next week.

* In Ireland, we refer to them as “chips”. Do NOT be confused.

Finding a cure…

Finding a cure…

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While public health officials and the vice president fear for the worst, I haven’t started wearing a face mask. If there’s anything that looks to me like something out of a sci-fi movie, it’s people going about their daily business with those things on. Can designer face masks be far behind, maybe just the sort of thing to stimulate consumer spending and get the economy going again?

In any event, Steve Carper has devised a particularly ironic solution to the problem in A Kiss is Just a Kiss, which is a sample of his tales collected in Tyrannosaur Faire. You can buy his book here as either a downloadable PDF or good-old fashioned print. The collection includes Steve’s “Pity the Poor Dybbuk,” which first appeared in Black Gate’s second issue, back in the Summer of 2001, when everyone was breathing easier.

A Life of Ideas

A Life of Ideas

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idea-bulbIn brainstorming topics for my ‘getting back on the horse’ return post here at Black Gate after my absence of a few months — I’ve come up with a few mildly interesting ideas. Firstly, I thought about looking at the nature of escapism, how it shouldn’t have the unfair pejorative connotation it does, and how it certainly isn’t limited to works of prose or film or video games designed solely to entertain. Then too I was considering a weird phenomenon I’ve only really just been made conscious of, that of how utterly mainstream fantasy, or, let’s say ‘the fantastic,’ has become just in the last few decades — and I mean aside from the obvious stuff like the popularity of fantasy and science fiction books and movies, but everything from television commercials and product packaging to childrens’ toys and popular expressions bear out the reality that the once distant worlds of speculative fiction are now familiar place names in the cultural atlas of modern life.

But then it struck me that what I was doing, actively ransacking my mind for ideas, has to be a fairly unusual practice, all things considered. And one worthy of a blog post, at least.

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