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Abney Park’s Airship Pirates: A Music-inspired Steampunk Extravaganza

Abney Park’s Airship Pirates: A Music-inspired Steampunk Extravaganza

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airship-pirates-smallLast month, Peter Cakebread of Cakebread & Walton told you about our alternate English Civil War fantasy RPG, Clockwork & Chivalry. This month, it’s Ken Walton here, and I’ll be taking a look at our music-inspired steampunk extravaganza, Abney Park’s Airship Pirates RPG.

“Abney Park?” I hear some of you say. “Isn’t that a cemetery in London?” While the rest of you are saying, “No, Abney Park is a really cool steampunk band from Seattle who play music like this.”

Most of their songs, written by lead singer “Captain” Robert Brown, tell of the fictional exploits of the band in their time-travelling steampunk airship Cordelia. On discovering their music, we quickly realised there was a really cool background here that would make a kick-ass role-playing game.

We contacted the band, thinking, “This is mad, they’ll never go for it, no-one’s ever written a RPG based on a band’s songs!” But Captain Robert thought the idea was awesome.

When we emailed our publisher, Cubicle 7, Angus Abranson (who worked at Cubicle 7 at the time) was on the phone in five minutes. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Turned out he was an Abney Park fan too. Who knew? And so, a new game was born!

Of course, then we had to sit down and design it. Cubicle 7 offered us use of the game mechanics from their Victoriana RPG, which we tweaked and simplified for a more swashbuckling feel.

Captain Robert, it turned out, was a graphic artist as well as a rock star, and he designed the look of the game, as well as recruiting a host of amazing artists to contribute the full-colour artwork for the rulebook. And we took the song lyrics and Robert’s (then unfinished) novel, The Wrath of Fate, and set about expanding them into a game world with a particular feel.

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Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

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of-blood-and-honey-by-stina-leicth-adoiOf Blood and Honey
By Stina Leicht
Night Shade Books ($14.99, trade paperback, 296 pages, January 2011)
Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon

Perhaps I’ll be accused of going below the belt by saying this, but the most damning criticism I can offer of Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey is that it took me several weeks of intermittent reading to finish.  It’s not an awful book by any means, but I never felt as though it generated enough momentum or sympathy to pull me from one reading session to another.

But let me discuss what I did like, which is quite a bit.  Although Leicht is ultimately writing a tale of faeries, demons, and inquisitors, she opts for a clean, modern style that’s well in keeping with the setting in 1970s Ireland.  The sentences flow smoothly from paragraph to paragraph and page to page.  There are some nice snatches of dialogue which, to me at least, rang as distinctly Irish: “It’s married I am, and it’s married I’ll stay.”  Leicht never resorts to spelling out accents, instead relying on vocabulary and syntax to convey dialect, which is a far higher and finer art.

The picture the book paints is rather grim, but ultimately I thought the book came through strongest on atmosphere and milieu.  I know very nearly jack-squat about the Troubles (my ancestors left Ireland much earlier, more around the time of the Potato Famine), but the sense of constant fear and persecution Leicht evokes is powerful.

She tells the story of Liam, a young man who has never known any father besides his step-father Patrick.  His mother tells him that he’s the product of her forbidden union with a Protestant, but Liam has always suspected that there’s something more alien about his origins.

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Librarians to the Rescue: Worldsoul by Liz Williams

Librarians to the Rescue: Worldsoul by Liz Williams

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1540901072Worldsoul
Liz Williams
Prime (311 pp, $14.95 in paperback, August 2012)

Reviewed by David Soyka

The stereotypical image of your local librarian is that of a dowdy, matronly spinster who is constantly telling you to “shush” while your adolescent self is trying to do something vastly more interesting (usually involving a person with whom you are sexually attracted) than figure out the Dewey Decimal system. And, these days with whatever we need to find out only a Google away, who needs librarians anyway?

Well, it would seem the preservation of the underlying fabric of the universe does.

While it’s unlikely that Liz Williams will make librarians cool the way that William Gibson made noirish anti-heroes out of computer nerds, in Worldsoul, librarians brandish magical swords that speak. Not to hush people, but to help defend ancient texts against rogue storylines amongst book stacks that date to the fabled Library of Alexandria before it burned to the ground (at least on Earth).

The novel’s title is the name of an otherworldly realm quartered into distinct cultural, climatic and political realms (and probably having something to do with maintaining the “soul” of the mundane world as we in ordinary life understand it): a hot desert land of ancient Cairo; a cold Nordica where Loki the trickster is an imprisoned nutcase, albeit not totally powerless; the Court inhabited by beings called the “disir” who take human form but aren’t; and the Citadel, the land of the library. This city of Worldsoul somehow or another connects Earth with something called the Liminality, a multi-dimensional storehouse of storylines, the integrity of which no doubt has something to do with the preservation of life as we know it here in realityland.

Our librarian heroine, Mercy Fane, is struggling to counteract strange beings that have escaped from primeval manuscripts and the boundaries of their original storylines. And which take on a female personality that seems to have an agenda to fix some longstanding wrong:

[Mercy] thought of the thing she had seen; the thing that, mentally, she had started calling “the female.” Part of a story from so long ago that any humanity had surely been leached from her, if indeed she had ever possessed any. Something forgotten, that raged, like so many forgotten things. Something that wanted to be known.

And something that, now, would be.

p. 35

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Sax Rohmer’s The Adventures of Nayland Smith

Sax Rohmer’s The Adventures of Nayland Smith

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rohmer-the-green-spider-231x350the-haunting-of-low-fennel21Sir Denis Nayland Smith is the largely unsung protagonist of all of Sax Rohmer’s novels and stories featuring the notorious Dr. Fu Manchu. The brilliant Chinese criminal genius constantly overshadowed the stalwart British subject who did his best to route his megalomaniacal schemes over the course of thirteen novels and four shorter works published between 1912 and 1959. The legendary villain overshadowed Sir Denis to such a degree that many readers were unaware that the author showcased Smith without his customary nemesis in three short stories published between 1920 and 1932.

When Rohmer created the character a century ago, Smith was depicted as a colonial administrator, stationed in Burma and granted a roving commission by the Home Office to bring Dr. Fu Manchu to justice. His childhood friend, Dr. Petrie, played Watson to Smith’s Holmes, chronicling his adventures for posterity and ably assisting him wherever possible. Petrie’s job was made easy in as much as Smith rarely did any actual detecting. The duo generally reacted to Fu Manchu’s latest atrocity and then spent the rest of the book trying to anticipate his next move, check him, be captured, escape, and inevitably lead a daring raid that would end in something less than a complete success. Despite it all, Smith and Petrie persevered and when Rohmer ended the initial run of the series in 1917, readers likely expected they had heard the last of Nayland Smith’s exploits. Rohmer, however, was too fond of the character to let him retire peacefully.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 9: Synthetic Men of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 9: Synthetic Men of Mars

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1st-edtion-synthetic-men-of-marsGreetings, late 1930s ERB! How have you been? Oh, not that great? Yes, I know how it is. I’ve read enough of your output from these days.

In this long trip across Burroughs’s Mars, I have now reached the conclusion of Phase #3 of the Barsoom books, with the last work of the 1930s. Synthetic Men of Mars is also the last novel Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote in the series. He turned to novellas after this, resulting in two collections, one posthumous. So the ninth book of Barsoom is a eulogy of sorts.

And “eulogy” is the appropriate word: let’s pause to remember the good times, because the good times are gone.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: Synthetic Men of Mars (1939)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (191314), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1927), A Fighting Man of Mars (1930), Swords of Mars (1934–35)

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It Came From GenCon 2012: Young Kid Edition

It Came From GenCon 2012: Young Kid Edition

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Magician's Kitchen
In Magician's Kitchen, players try to get the potions in the correct cauldron, then to light the fireplace. Beware the tripping stones!

GenCon is fun for gamers of all ages, but now that I have young children, I always have a special place in my heart for games that I can play with one or both of them. Given that my oldest is currently 7, though, this puts some pretty massive restrictions on what I can actually play. It has to be age-appropriate in both content level and rule complexity.

This year saw a number of games that caught my fancy in this regard. The charming Magician’s Kitchen, the enchanting Dixit, and, last but certainly not least, the upcoming game Mice and Mystics, which is available now for online pre-order with a significant discount.

Magician’s Kitchen

This is a fun little game where you’re playing a magician’s apprentice who is running around, trying to get potions in the cauldrons and then starting a fire. The trick to this game is that there are hidden magnets that cause your piece to drop the potions. For a more detailed description of Magician’s Kitchen, I recommend my review over at the About.com Physics site, where I even proposed some ideas about how you could use this fantasy game to teach some cool scientific ideas to the young ones.

Magician’s Kitchen is designed for up to 4 players, aged 5 to 15. My youngest son (age 2) really gets enjoyment out of making the apprentices drop their potions. The game is available from Amazon.com and other retailers nationwide, with a retail cost of $29.99.

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Michaele Jordan Reviews Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations

Michaele Jordan Reviews Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations

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dark_tales_artDark Tales of Lost Civilizations: An Anthology of Horror and Speculative Fiction Stories Unearthing our Forgotten Worlds and Societies
Edited by Eric J. Guignard
Dark Moon Books (pp 241, 25 stories, $14.37 trade paperback, February 2012)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

Many readers might think they knew what to expect from this book, just from the title. They would be wrong. Mr. Guignard does an astonishing job of expanding the apparent range of his title into a varied and colorful collection of almost everything under the sun, or rather, everything hidden away from the sun.

Who knew there were so many kinds of lost civilizations? The civilizations visited in these stories range from historically documented civilizations—either trampled under the march of history, as in Jamie Lackey’s story, “Quetzalcoatl’s Conquistador,” or active participants in the trampling, as in “The Funeral Procession” by Jay R. Thurston—to the entirely mythical, like that of “Gilgamesh and the Mountain” by Bruce L. Priddy. In between these two extremes, we find an intriguing half historical, half legendary lost society in Jackson Kuhl’s “Quivira”.

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New Treasures: Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue

New Treasures: Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue

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menzoberranzan-city-of-intrigue2One of my favorite RPG settings of all time is Menzoberranzan, the 1992 boxed set from TSR that drew liberally from R.A. Salvatore’s best-selling Drizzt Do’Urden novels. Written by Ed Greenwood, Salvatore, and Douglas Niles, the box detailed the famous City of Spiders, the subterranean birthplace of the drow ranger, in three thick books and a set of gorgeous maps. Packed with 20,000 drow inhabitants, hundreds of thousands of humanoid slaves, and countless secrets and simmering rivalries, the home of the drow was an ideal adventure site for intrepid (and suitably high level) players.

Released nearly 20 years ago for second edition AD&D, Menzoberranzan has not seen an update since and has been out of print for over 15 years. It was featured in the popular Menzoberranzan PC game from SSI/DreamForge, part of their Forgotten Realms product line, in 1994, and very prominently in the six volume War of the Spider Queen novels, but it’s been far too long since my favorite underdark city-state appeared in a new edition.

The wait is finally over. Wizards of the Coast has released an updated version in Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue, now available in hardcover:

The profane beauty of Menzoberranzan reflects the true nature of the drow and Lolth, their vile spider queen. Within sculpted palaces, factions vie for dominion, spin webs of conspiracy, wage war on the surface realms, and spread poisonous rumors. Meanwhile, predator stalk the twisted streets, plotting murder and mayhem. The city has no pity for fools and weaklings.

Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue breathes new life into the fabled home of Drizzt Do’Urden and leaves no stone unturned. This book explores the city, tells the stories behind important drow houses and factions, and peeks at the mysteries waiting to unfold in the deadliest city of the Forgotten Realms world. This product is compatible with all editions of the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game and features a poster map of the city.

Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue is 128 pages in hardcover, heavily illustrated in full color. The poster map is rather colorless, but large and extremely detailed. It was released on August 21 for $29.95.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures here.

Helen Killer

Helen Killer

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helen-killerYou know the prologue. Contracting an illness (possibly scarlet fever or meningitis) at the age of nineteen months, Helen Adams Keller survived, but was left both deaf and blind. Keller’s parents would eventually contact Anne Sullivan, herself blind, to tutor their daughter (who, at the age of six, still had not grasped the concept of words representing things).  By pressing her hand into the girl’s palm, Sullivan was able to teach the girl to read sign language through touch.  After that breakthrough, Helen Keller went on to write twelve books, meet thirteen U.S. Presidents, help found the American Civil Liberties Union, and introduce the Akita breed of dog to the United States.

Wow.

So when Andrew Kreisberg decided to write about the further adventures of Helen Keller, he had his work cut out for him, since Keller’s real life adventures would certainly put any fiction to shame. What he opted for is a crazy mash-up of Daredevil and steampunk that somehow manages to remain consistently respectful to the real-life men and women upon whom the characters are based.  The basic premise is that Alexander Graham Bell (who in real life had indirectly referred the Kellers to Anne Sullivan in the first place) has developed a pair of miracle eyeglasses called an omnicle.  When Keller wears the omnicle, the device hotwires through her dead nerve endings and allows her to both see and hear. Further, the omnicle allows her to see into the auras of those around her, revealing their spiritual purity or corruption. Unfortunately, the omnicle also reconnects her with the long-supressed rage she felt when living in quiet darkness.  This rage manifests as increased agility, accelerated healing, and a desire to kill. Of course, someone has the idea of hiring Helen Keller as a federal agent to protect the life of President William McKinley. Things go wrong.

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Goth Chick News: Knocking (Tentatively) on the Devil’s Gate

Goth Chick News: Knocking (Tentatively) on the Devil’s Gate

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devils-gate2Devil’s Gate: A Kane Pryce Novel
F. J. Lennon
Atria/Emily Bestler Books (400 pp, $15 in paperback, $9.99 eBook, August 7, 2012)
Reviewed by Goth Chick

First, a disclaimer.

I began reading an advanced copy of Devil’s Gate on August 5th, a full two weeks before the tragic news that Hollywood director Tony Scott took his own life by jumping from the Vincent Thomas suspension bridge in San Pedro.

Devi’s Gate could be about this bridge, but it isn’t.

Still, the creepiness factor remains.

Devil’s Gate, in which a “suicide bridge” plays a pivotal role, is actually the second in F. J. Lennon’s series which kicked off in 2011 with Soul Trapper and follows the turbulent life of rogue ghost hunter Kane Pryce. Without having read the first installment, I was initially concerned Devil’s Gate would seem diminished without the knowledge of Soul Trapper’s back story.

I am as excited as a goth chick ever gets, to report this is entirely not the case.

Here’s the low down…

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