SF Signal on Liar’s Blade: “Fafhrd-and-Grey-Mouser-style Sword and Sorcery”

SF Signal on Liar’s Blade: “Fafhrd-and-Grey-Mouser-style Sword and Sorcery”

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Pathfinder Liar’s BladeSF Signal‘s Karen Burnham gives a big thumbs-up to Tim Pratt’s latest Pathfinder novel, Liar’s Blade, with the kind of review that sends me scrambling to find a copy:

The Pathfinder line of RPG novels is doing a lot of things right. They’ve been publishing intelligent adventure novels that showcase their gaming system and their campaign setting in lush detail. They’ve hired a variety of solid, professional authors, and they’ve spread their tales among a wide variety of heroes instead of following one party for multiple books. The one thing that they had been missing – until now – was the particular brand of [charm] that I have recently come to love in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series. Tim Pratt has done an excellent job of capturing that spirit in this Pathfinder outing.

Fafhrd-and-Grey-Mouser-style Sword and Sorcery in a Pathfinder setting? Sign me up!

Tim’s first Pathfinder Tales novel was City of the Fallen Sky (June, 2012), which seems to be unrelated to this one. But maybe not; I’ll have to read them both to be sure. The “variety of solid, professional authors” Karen mentions include Howard Andrew Jones, Richard Lee Byers, Dave Gross, Robin D. Laws, Elaine Cunningham, Ed Greenwood, James L. Sutter, and many others.

We’ve been telling you about Paizo’s premiere fiction line for a while; don’t pretend we haven’t. We presented an exclusive excerpt from Dave Gross’s new Pathfinder Tales novel, Queen of Thorns, in October; we also covered the release of Howard Andrew Jones’s Plague of Shadows in October 2011. Bill Ward’s four-part Pathfinder Tales story “The Box” was published online back in October 2011, and Howard had his own Pathfinder Tales piece, “The Walkers from the Crypt,” a 4-part mini-epic, published free online in March 2011.

Liar’s Blade was published March 12, 2013 by Paizo Publishing. It is 400 pages in paperback, priced at $9.99. You can download a free sample chapter or purchase the digital edition for $6.99 directly from Paizo.com, or read Karen’s complete review at SF Signal.

If, July 1961: A Retro-Review

If, July 1961: A Retro-Review

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Worlds of If July 1961-smallI’ll get back to Cele Goldsmith’s magazines soon enough, but I happened to grab this issue of If, so it’s up next. This issue comes from very late in H. L. Gold’s official tenure as editor – Frederik Pohl became editor (officially) with the first issue of 1962. (I believe it’s generally regarded that Pohl was editor in all but name for some time prior.) During this period, the cover and spine read only If Science Fiction, though the title page still had “Worlds of” ambiguously placed, so that one could read it either If: Worlds of Science Fiction or Worlds of If Science Fiction.

The cover is by Dember, called “Operation Overlook,” not illustrating any story. (It’s a depiction of a manned satellite orbiting Earth, apparently watching for rocket launches and the like.) Interiors were by Wood, Larry Ivie, and West, and someone unidentified in one case. (Sometimes the illustrator was credited, sometimes I could read the signature, and in one case there was no signature and no credit.) There’s also a page called IFun, with two single panel comics, by Wagner.

Advertisements include the ubiquitous Rosicruans, U. S. Savings Bonds, and some in-house ads. Other features include Science Briefs, a puzzle, and a brief article about the Wendigo, by Theodore Sturgeon (on the masthead as “Feature Editor.”) There is also an attempt to start (restart?) a letter column, to be called Hue and Cry, though this single page only briefly quotes a letter from one Lawrence Crilly, requesting a lettercol.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Sealord’s Successor,” Part II, by Aaron Bradford Starr

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Sealord’s Successor,” Part II, by Aaron Bradford Starr

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The Sealord's Successor Part One-smallToday we are proud to present the second and final installment in “The Sealord’s Successor,” a complete 35,000-word novella of fantasy mystery, and the third tale of Gallery Hunters Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh.

Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh find themselves drawn into a deadly conspiracy involving a powerful kingdom, ancient secrets… and a very peculiar painting.

Our perilous, mad descent began in the middle of a raging storm. The runners bore us along a mountain path lit only by flashes of blinding lightning, tromping at speed down water-washed trails alongside deep chasms and sheer drop-offs, bearing us in pursuit of those who had left the citadel.

Dressed as we still were for a coronation feast, neither Gloren nor I were prepared for this sudden chase. But Gloren leaned far out into the night, regarding the winding road below us with visible distress. Crossing close below us was the carriage of Baron Lurec, and ahead of him that of the Countess Therissa and her companion Velice. Further on still, but lost from view in the night’s inclement weather, Garder Jho’s medical team was surely nearing Landing Port, the primary harbor.

I glanced back up toward the citadel, visible only as a dark patch against flickering skies, and noted the beacon. This signal, a red circle encompassed by a green ring, was a sign the harbor should be sealed, forbidding passage into or out of Landing Port.

I had asked Gloren who, exactly, we were chasing after a particularly harrowing turn.

“Everyone,” he replied.

Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh were last seen in “The Tea-Maker’s Task” (published here on December 30th) and “The Daughter’s Dowry” (October 14). Of “The Daughter’s Dowry,” Tangent Online said, “A story such as this deserves a world of its own and more adventures from its hero,” and it called “The Tea-Maker’s Task” “an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek fantasy… I wanted more.” We’re more than happy to oblige with this third exciting installment of the adventures of Gallery Hunter Gloren and his cat companion, Yr Neh.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“The Sealord’s Successor”  is a complete 35,000-word novella of fantasy mystery presented in two parts, with original art by Aaron Bradford Starr. It is offered at no cost. Part I is here.

Read Part II here.

Weird of Oz: Scooby Meets Buffy (a Postscript)

Weird of Oz: Scooby Meets Buffy (a Postscript)

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scooby-dooLast week’s post was prompted by a term I used fleetingly in my review of the new Scooby-Doo series two weeks ago: “post-Buffy.” Rather than go off on a tangent explaining what I meant by that in the midst of discussing Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, I promised any interested readers that I would devote a whole column to this concept of “post-Buffy” in my next installment.

So last Sunday I posted “Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism,” primarily to reflect on how Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) influenced later television.

Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_CoverartWhat caught me off guard was the pushback I got to my assessment of Buffy and its significance in television history. Of course, one or two people questioned the merits of the series itself — that’s okay; some people just don’t dig Buffy. Others asserted there were earlier series already using narrative innovations to weave multiple plot threads over several seasons, which I did acknowledge — my premise was not that Buffy was the first, only that it generally has been one of the most influential.

But then one commenter brought up a series that gave me pause: The X-Files. Here was a series to which much of what I said regarding Buffy could also apply, and which has arguably been as influential on genre television. This prompted me to formulate a response that itself grew into a post-script or a sequel to the original post, but before I get to that I’d like to take a moment to tie the last two posts more closely together: to explain why the new Scooby-Doo series got me to thinking about Buffy in the first place.

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Vintage Treasures: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

Vintage Treasures: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

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Shadows of Yog SothothLast week I wrote about the death of Lynn Willis, the legendary editor at Chaosium, who gradually became the mastermind behind Call of Cthulhu, one of the finest RPGs ever made. While at Chaosium Lynn helped write and edit no less than 54 Call of Cthulhu books and supplements like Cthulhu by Gaslight, as well as a host of other board games and products, including Arkham Horror, RuneQuest, Thieves’ World, King Arthur Companion, Stormbringer Companion, Carse, Tulan of the Isles, Atlas of the Young Kingdoms, and dozens more.

In honor of Lynn, I dug around this week to find those products that first captured my attention all those years ago. They weren’t hard to find, as they still occupy a place of pride in my collection.

When Sandy Peterson’s Call of Cthulhu was first released as a boxed set in 1981, the entire industry took notice. Here was the first truly appealing contemporary (or, at least, semi-contemporary) role playing game, which drew on the horrifying cosmic milieu and fabulous bestiary of none other than H.P. Lovecraft. It was an instant hit. But by itself, Call of Cthulhu was just a fascinating oddity. It wasn’t until Chaosium released Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, A Global Campaign to Save Mankind a year later that we realized what the game was truly capable of.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is an epic, self-contained campaign which first introduced role players to the kind of play demanded by CoC. Players who treated Cthulhu and his minions as simply big D&D monsters, chubby creatures ready to be harvested for their experience point value, were in for a rude awakening.

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New Treasures: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts

New Treasures: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts

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AppleMarkYesterday, I spent the day at the Spring Auction at Games Plus, which I’ve taken to calling the Paris Fashion Week of Games. It was a very successful outing — so successful that I knew I had some explaining to do to Alice, who balances the family finances.

While I was waiting to settle up with the cashier, my eyes fell on a curious artifact in the tiny books section at Games Plus: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts. Roberts was a Canadian pulp author whose tales of Sir Dinadan, whom Mallory called “the merriest knight,” appeared in the pulp magazine Blue Book in the 50s. Sir Dinadan was known as the most practical of the Knights of the Round Table, and Roberts’s stories differed from many of the Arthurian tales of the era in their warmth and wit.

Late in his career, Roberts wrote a final entry in the Dinadan saga, “Quest’s End,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Rumor had it he’d also begun collecting all the tales with an eye towards publishing a book, but the project remained unfinished when he died.

Now the peerless Mike Ashley, who’s edited countless anthologies — including 32 books in The Mammoth Book Of... series, and five other Arthurian Anthologies, such as The Pendragon Chronicles and Chronicles of the Holy Grail — has finished what Roberts began with The Merriest Knight, a beautiful collection of the complete tales of Sir Dinadan:

Under the guidance of editor Mike Ashley, The Merriest Knight gathers for the first time all of Roberts’ tales of Sir Dinadan — including the previously unpublished “Quest’s End” — and several other long lost Arthurian works by this master of the stylish adventure yarn and the historical romance. Within these pages, readers will find a collection of Arthurian tales that are sometimes poignant, often humorous, and always ingenious, as well as a Camelot made fresh by the wry and often scathing eye of Sir Dinadan, who never rushes into battle without first being certain of the need to fight at all.

Why is The Merriest Knight for sale in a games store? Ah, that’s an entirely different tale.

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Caitlin R. Kiernan and Kiini Ibura Salaam, Joint Recipients of the 2012 Tiptree Award

Caitlin R. Kiernan and Kiini Ibura Salaam, Joint Recipients of the 2012 Tiptree Award

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Kiini Ibura Salaam

It’s with a nod to the many diverse readers of Black Gate that I begin with some explanation of who James Tiptree, Jr. was. Science fiction and fantasy veterans will know her well, but many avid readers do not know this important figure in the history of speculative fiction. My referring to Tiptree as a “her” is not a slip; Tiptree was the pen name for Alice Bradley Sheldon, a prominent speculative fiction writer who took on a masculine pseudonym because:

A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.

(That quote is from her profile in the April, 1983 issue of Asimov’s.) She also had a female pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, and even won one of her Nebulas with that name.

Caitlyn R. Keirnan
Caitlyn R. Keirnan

Her choice to write under pen names in the first place stemmed from the fact that as Alice Sheldon, she had built up a respectable reputation for herself in academia. She was a military veteran (the U.S. Army Air Forces) and had a doctorate in experimental psychology.

She chose the name Tiptree off a marmalade label and added the “Jr.” at her husband’s suggestion, then with this moniker blazed new trails in the genre, challenging concepts of gender, gender roles, stereotypes, and gender and gendered identity.

I could go on at length about this, but will refer readers interested in more on to Tiptree.org at this point while I move on to the prize she inspired.

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The Battle of the Three Kings, 1578, in Miniature

The Battle of the Three Kings, 1578, in Miniature

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On a recent trip to Tangier, I visited the old American Legation, now a museum. In a dusty back room, I discovered two remarkable dioramas of Moroccan battles — the Battle of the Three Kings and the Battle of Tondibi. Today I’m presenting some images of the diorama of the Battle of the Three Kings.

In 1578, the 24 year-old king of Portugal, Don Sebastian, decided to prove himself. His predecessors had lost most of the Portuguese possessions in Morocco to the Saadians, who untied the various North African tribes against them. Don Sebastian burned with desire to reconquer the region. He got his chance when a dynastic struggle led to the Sultan Abu Abdallah Mohammad II being deposed by his uncle Abd Al-Malik. Sebastian agreed to help Mohammad II regain his throne in exchange for territorial concessions. Sebastian gathered an army of 17,000 men, including Portuguese, volunteers from Castile, Flemish and German mercenaries, and Moroccans loyal to Mohammad II.

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Oz Fluxx – A Great and Powerful Card Game

Oz Fluxx – A Great and Powerful Card Game

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ozfluxxA while back, the classic card game Fluxx got a makeover in an edition that merges the game with a classic film. This certainly isn’t its first makeover for Fluxx, nor even the first time it’s merged with a classic film (there is a Monty Python Fluxx, for example), but given that Oz: The Great and Powerful is hitting theaters today, the version of Fluxx I’m going to talk about is Oz Fluxx (Amazon).

If you’ve never played Fluxx, here are the basics:

  • The game continually changes, as players use Rule and Goal cards to modify every aspect of the game.
  • Rule cards can modify the number of cards drawn, number of cards played in a turn, overall hand size, and pretty much any other asp
  • Goal cards redefine the objectives needed to win.
  • Keepers are cards you keep in front of you. Most Goals involve getting a certain combination of Keepers in play to win. Examples from this game include “The Artificial Heart” and “The Cowardly Lion.”
  • Creepers (which are a type of card not in the original edition of Fluxx) are sort of negative Keepers, which get stuck in front of you and prevent you from winning … unless the Goal in play requires the Creeper as a condition of victory. Examples include “The Wicked Witch of the East” and “Angry Trees.”
  • Action cards allow other actions, such as drawing extra cards, getting cards out of the discard pile, stealing or trading Keepers and Creepers, and so on.
  • Surprise cards can be played either during your turn or on your opponents’ turn, to throw an even bigger wrench in your opponents’ expectations.

Probably the best way to get a feel for the game play is to watch this episode of Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop game on the YouTube channel Geek and Sundry, in which Wheaton and his friends play Star Fluxx. This edition of the game is based upon science fiction classics, most notably (and unofficially) Star Trek, although I believe there are some non-copyright-infringing shout-outs to Doctor Who and other classics as well.

But, back to Oz Fluxx …

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The Paris Fashion Week of Games, Spring Edition

The Paris Fashion Week of Games, Spring Edition

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Cyclades by AsmodeeYou know what happens tomorrow? Think hard.

That’s right! The Spring Auction at Games Plus here in Chicago — only the best auction in the entire country for dedicated game collectors of all stripes. I reported on the Fall Auction here, and confessed to a painful bout of auction fever at last year’s Spring Auction here.

I used to attend these as part of a constant quest for rare science fiction and fantasy collectibles — things like Judge’s Guilds epic Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Task Force Games’ colorful Swordquest, SSI’s wonderous Swords & Sorcery, and of course the most eagerly sought artifiact in Western Civilization, an intact copy of Barbarian Prince.

These days, my interests have changed. It’s not that I’m not constantly on the lookout for Barbarian Prince — who isn’t? — but I gradually realized that an obsession with older games was blinding me to the golden age of adventure gaming we’re living Right Now.

So my trip to Mount Prospect, Illinois tomorrow to take part in the auction will be with an open mind. And a lengthy list of recently-published games I’m seeking — including Cyclades by Asmodee, Mansions of Madness by Fantasy Flight, the second edition of Descent: Journeys in The Dark, Alien Frontiers from Clever Mojo Games, Mice and Mystics by Plaid Hat, Cosmic Patrol by Catalyst, and many others.

Wish me luck. I’ll report back here with all my treasures next week.