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Board Games Don’t Have to be Boring

Board Games Don’t Have to be Boring

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dominant-speciesWhile my last few columns have focused on solitaire games, I thought I’d take a look at some relatively new boardgames with surprising themes and game play.

In the first, Defenders of the Realm, you and your fellow players cooperatively work to defeat evils invading your kingdom.

The second, Dominant Species, is set in the moments before the ice age and enables you and your fellow players to jockey for position to see who will best weather the coming climate change.

Though you may not find either game in your local Target or Walmart, they are beautiful, professional products. Neither’s as straightforward as, say, Monopoly or Scrabble, where you can get a feel for what to do after a brief tutorial, but for the family or game group willing to invest a little bit of time, they’re sure to provide years of entertaining play.

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Rich Horton Reviews Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way

Rich Horton Reviews Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way

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World Fantasy Award Nominee

Blood of Ambrose
James Enge
Pyr (416 pp, $15.98, April 2009)

This Crooked Way
James Enge
Pyr (414 pp, $16.00, October 2009)
Reviewed by Rich Horton

A few years ago Black Gate featured the first published story from James Enge, “Turn Up This Crooked Way” (in BG 8). I admit I regard first stories with skepticism – but despite limited expectations I was entirely delighted, and at the end of the year it made my “Virtual Best of the Year” list. Enge continued to place stories in the pages of Black Gate, all featuring the main character from “Turn Up This Crooked Way,” a rather dour magician named Morlock Ambrosius. Morlock’s reputation is bad, but, perhaps predictably, he is actually on the side of good. There were some hints of a tortured history for him in those initial stories, but little real details about his past.

Now we have two novels from Enge, each also about Morlock. The first, Blood of Ambrose, is more conventionally a novel – though quite episodic in structure – and while Morlock is a major character, he shares the stage with another protagonist. But we are vouchsafed some revelations about Morlock’s back story. As for the second book, This Crooked Way, it is straightforwardly a fix-up of several of the Black Gate stories, as well as some new episodes and linking material. For all that, it does feature an overarching narrative arc, so it ends up working effectively enough as a novel.

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Not So Short Fiction Review: The River of Shadows

Not So Short Fiction Review: The River of Shadows

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96714827The River of Shadows (Book III of the Chathrand Voyage Series)
Robert V.S. Redick
Del Ray (592 pages,$16.00, April 2011)
Reviewed by David Soyka

My purpose here is simply a warning. If you are part of that infinitesimally small [and ever smaller] band of dissidents with the wealth, time and inclination to set your hands on the printed word, I suggest you consider the arguments against the current volume.  To wit: the tale is morbid, the persons depicted are clumsy when they are not evil, the world is inconvenient to visit and quite changed from what is here described, the plot at this early juncture is already complex beyond all reason, the moral cannot be stated, and the editor is intrusive.  The story most obviously imperils the young.

p. 107-108

There are various reasons for such “editorial” intrusions into a narrative rolling along quite nicely seemingly without need for meta-fictional comment.  One is in fact to be meta-fictional, to purposely draw attention to the illusion of storytelling.  But, another, opposite tact, is to give the text the illusion of legitimacy, that what we’re reading, however improbable, is an actual historical document.  The latter is the approach of the modern über-fantasy, Lord of the Rings, in which the tale  is presented as an ancient manuscript edited for a contemporary audience by a medieval scholar.

Given that this was J.R.R. Tolkien’s day-job, this might have been intended as a kind of inside joke, albeit from a guy who wasn’t particularly jokey.  In the case of Robert V.S. Redick, whose The River of Shadows, the penultimate volume in the Chathrand Voyage Series, is a sort of Tolkien at sea, he pointedly wants us to be in on the joke.

There are a lot of “paint by the numbers” Tolkien clones for the simple reason that there is a market for people who want more of the same.  They’ll probably enjoy this series.  But while Redick may be guilty of a little too slavish attention to both fantasy cliché and Perils of Pauline dilemmas resolved by convenient magical cavalry to the rescue, it’s all in good fun. Not the sort of fun that’s saying, “Ew, how stupid all this heroic questing stuff is.” Rather, it’s the sort of fun that’s saying, well, isn’t this all great fun?

Which, it is.

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A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

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curse-necrarchCurse of the Necrarch
Steven Savile
BL Publishing (410 pages, $7.99, 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of Warhammer Fantasy borrows heavily from many sources, everything from Tolkienesque dwarves and Da Vinci-inspired machines, to Moorcockian chaos creatures, a Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire, and monsters straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. But, maybe because it’s been around for so long or because it’s been so successfully added to over the years, the Warhammer world blends all these outwardly derivative elements into a setting that works very well — both as the backdrop for their fantasy game and as a surprisingly rich source of sword & sorcery and heroic adventure style dark fantasy fiction.

Steven Savile is one of the most skilled writers working in the Warhammer stables, and showcases his abilities nicely. Savile is primarily a horror writer, and his Warhammer fiction is imbued with a healthy dose of the morbid and the dreadful without ever forsaking the golden rule of Warhammer fiction – namely, putting the action first. Curse of the Necrarch is a standalone novel, but it matches nicely with Savile’s other Warhammer books in that its all about vampires and their undead minions.

But these vampires are not Bela Lugosi in a tuxedo, nor are they the sexy-chic goths of today’s urban fantasy. Instead they are withered, rotting, monstrous things, more akin to Murnau’s Nosferatu than Rice’s Lestat. Curse of the Necrarch opens with a confrontation with one such powerful Necrarch vampire, as Felix Metzger, hereditary Lord of Kastell Metz, meets his doom while defending his lands from an invading force of undead.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Season 6 Finale!

Supernatural Spotlight – Season 6 Finale!

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SUPERNATURALIn this double episode finale, we get to the end of one of the best seasons. It started out a little rocky, but had some of the series’ best episodes, I think. The finale happened while I was a on a plane to Arizona for vacation, so I wasn’t able to review it until I got back this week. (Gotta love DVR!)

Things start out at a rapid clip, with a man at a typewriter in 1937. Shortly after finishing a manuscript, he is murdered. His blood splattered across the manuscript, revealing the man’s name: H.P. Lovecraft.

In the present, Bobby discovers that Castiel has stolen one of the Campbell family journals, by Moisha Campbell (of the New York Campbells). Fortunately, the paranoid Bobby had already made copies, so they’re able to figure out that Moisha Campbell had interviewed Lovecraft, who (as they explain to Dean) had a tendency to write stories about portals opening up and nasty stuff coming out.

Things change tack as demons break into Lisa and Ben’s house, killing Lisa’s boyfriend and capturing her. Ben is hiding in his room and calls Dean, but is caught. Crowley picks up the phone and demands a meeting with Dean. Dean goes to the meeting with Sam, but tells Bobby to keep looking into the Lovecraft connection.

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E.E. Knight Reviews Flesh and Fire

E.E. Knight Reviews Flesh and Fire

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fleshandfire-vineart-war-lauraannegilmanFlesh and Fire
Laura Anne Gilman
Simon & Schuster Adult (496 pp, $9.99, September 2010 (originally October 2009))
Reviewed by E.E. Knight

Laura Anne Gilman is a fantasy author I not only read, but teach. The reason is simple: when I’m giving a class in the writing of science fiction and fantasy, I rarely know what to say about magic. I point the students toward authors who handle it better than I ever could, and try to explain why I think it works for an audience in those books.

Maybe I’m just reading the wrong fantasists, but I find only a few authors whose use of magic interests and pleases me. One of those is Gilman. In her urban fantasy Retrievers series, her heroine used something called “Current” – more or less the ability to manipulate electricity to get it to win items and influence people. But it was a quirky power and her heroine could accidentally get into difficulty if she wasn’t very careful with how she used it (blowing out airport x-ray scanners and such). Creative, intriguing, and just plausible enough for me to suspend disbelief, something that rarely happens when the hero just fires off a few latinesque magic words and points his finger.

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Entering the Lists in Defense of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe

Entering the Lists in Defense of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe

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ivanhoe-coverThere’s a school of thought that views the Middle Ages as a dark gulf between the Classical Age and the rebirth of reason known as the Renaissance. The Middle Ages were, to paraphrase science fiction author David Brin, an unhappy time of small-mindedness and fear, marked by the squabbles of petty nobles, ignorance, superstition, and religious persecution.

Thus, any historical fiction that dares emit a whiff of romanticism of the age is viewed by some as anathema, a whitewashed but corrupted view of “reality”.

But as time marches on and new discoveries and scholarship come to light, we’ve realized that these times weren’t quite as dark and backwards as we once believed. And that allows us to revisit old works of art like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with a fresh perspective. My recent re-read of Scott’s 1819 classic of historical fiction reminded me of the following reasons why it’s still relevant and worth re-reading.

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A Review of Warhammer: Knight of the Realm

A Review of Warhammer: Knight of the Realm

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knight-of-the-realm-reynoldsKnight of the Realm
Anthony Reynolds
BL Publishing (410 pp, $7.99, 2009)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

A sequel to last year’s Knight Errant, Anthony Reynolds’ Knight of the Realm continues the story of the young Bretonnian knight Calard and his adventures in the grim world of Warhammer. If you are not familiar with the Warhammer setting – a world based on a very popular gaming franchise from Games Workshop – it is essentially a mash-up of very familiar fantasy elements such as orcs, elves, and dwarves with a decidedly dark edge. It is a bleak, violent place, a place always in the midst of war and in danger of being overrun by the insane worshippers of Chaos.

Chaos has proven to be this series’ primary antagonist, as Calard and his half-brother, Bertelis, earned their knightly spurs in the first book fighting against tides of goat-headed beastmen. In Knight of the Realm, an army of Chaos-worshipping Norscans – think seven-foot-tall black magic Vikings – are raiding the length and breadth of Bretonnia and the combined armies of the land must ride out to defeat them. Bretonnia is a region modeled on an idealized medieval France replete with chivalry, knightly contests, and a rigid feudal hierarchy, but infused with a strong Arthurian flavor in the form of a cult of the Lady of the Lake and saint-like Grail knights.

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Vincent N. Darlage Reviews Blackdirge’s Dungeon Denizens

Vincent N. Darlage Reviews Blackdirge’s Dungeon Denizens

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blackdirge1I’ve had the privilege of reviewing several excellent supplements from Goodman Games over the years, but this particular one somehow slipped by me. Fortunately, Vincent N. Darlage provided a wonderful review of it in Black Gate #14, making the case that this supplement is superior to the official D&D 4th edition Monster Manual:

Blackdirge’s Dungeon Denizens

Aeryn Rudel
Goodman Games (144 pages, hardcover, $24.99)
Reviewed by Vincent N. Darlage

Laid out in easy to read black and white, this book was reminiscent of old school 1st edition AD&D. The artwork was evocative and not overblown like so much modern role-playing art. Dungeon Denizens is well- organized and easier to use than the 4th edition core monster book. The fonts are easier to read, the artwork more interesting, and the monsters are easier to find and understand. In the front, a list of different ways to look up the monsters is offered, giving lists of monsters by origin, type, and by keyword.

The book’s full of good stuff. The monsters are interesting and come with more background and information than the core monster book offers. One of my biggest complaints about the core book is the lack of information – this book has information in spades and is a real top notch effort. I could see these monsters in games I might run.

Aside from not knowing (or really caring) who or what Blackdirge is, I found this a superior monster volume. If I were to stick with 4th Edition, I would probably use this book more often than the core book. It has my unqualified recommendation.

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Intelligent Design

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Intelligent Design

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intellignet-designIntelligent Design
Edited by Denise Little
DAW books (307 pp, $7.99, September 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Intelligent Design collects eleven stories focused on the theme of the creation of life. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but I was impressed by the stories presented. This is a thinking person’s collection, an idea-driven romp through one of the most contentious topics in modern society.

One of my favorites was the final story, Laura Resnick’s engaging creation retelling “Project: Creation,” which actually made me laugh out loud. It reminded me of a mix between the Book of Genesis and The Office. What impressed me most was that it seemed like it could be read and appreciated by people on both sides of the debate. It leaves the basic tenets of creationism and religion intact, while providing a context where those who are less mystical can still appreciate the story. Each side could think, if only for a moment, “Yeah, maybe it could have sort of happened like that,” and at least see a glimpse of the other side’s point of view.

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