Mothership Module Review: Iron Tomb

 

For my second module review, I'm going back to the first Mothership one-shot I ever ran. It makes an instructive contrast to Orphans (subject of my first review); the latter is absolutely dripping with atmosphere and is wonderfully written, whereas Iron Tomb is less evocative and less imaginative, but benefits from a tight setup (whereas Orphans is loose to a fault). It is unfortunately not super fresh in my mind—it's been almost a year since I ran it—but I was recently making some recommendations for how to introduce people to Mothership (including players new to RPGs in general) and brought up this one (and the author's similar Year of the Rat), so I thought I should go back to my notes and dig into what I liked about it (and what I didn't) and why I think it's a great place to start.

* * *

WHAT I DON'T LIKE

My Orphans review started with the praise and eased into criticisms; I'm going the other way here, because I think the two are mirror images of each other in that sense. The premise here is not particularly creative: The PCs are boarding a derelict archaeological research vessel to recover its black box at the behest of an insurance company, and there's a revenant on board that killed the crew. The writing isn't very evocative, either. It leans hard on Egyptian imagery and language (scarabs, sarcophagi, pharaohs, “the Heket-Neph”); we're inches away from “ancient aliens built the pyramids” territory. It's a trifold pamphlet, space is at a premium, and reaching for a shorthand vocabulary of familiar “mummy's curse” stuff is efficient, I suppose, but it's still not getting high marks.

The layout of the ship, too, might be a victim of size limitations—the whole interior of the pamphlet is a keyed map, and it would've been hard to represent a more complex deck plan in that space. But, again, I just don't like it. This is by no means a shortcoming limited to this module or this author; it's pretty common in Mothership modules for a ship to be represented as a rectangular block of rooms on a single plane, with no verticality and no opportunity to do interesting stuff with zero-G movement. But yeah: A bunch of rectilinear rooms opening from a central corridor, not a lot of depth, few (and short) paths other than going left or right off the main hallway.

 

SO THEN WHY DO I LIKE IT SO MUCH?

Well, the monster's great, for one thing. Most of the pseudo-Egyptian stuff is, like I said, uncreative: alien tombs, hieroglyphs, canopic jars, etc. But in truth, it's easy to modify that kind of set dressing and it hardly matters in the game. Say “logograms” or “runes” or whatever instead of “hieroglyphs,” it all works the same, and your players probably don't even notice either way. Say the expedition was to an ice planet and the tombs were atop phallic spires. Whatever.

The monster, which the PCs are going to interact with repeatedly and consequentially, is a lot cooler than just “space mummy.” Yes, there's a classic mummy's curse situation where if you disturb the grave goods inside the sarcophagus bad things happen, but in this case, instead of the dude in the coffin getting up and lurching after you, a swarm of nanobots invades your body and turns you, from the inside out, into an implacable undead cyborg hunter–killer. Neat! It's got weird magnetic powers, strange weapons, spooky sensors. It gets tougher and tougher the more damage you do to it. It's easy to outrun but implacable. And there's a little puzzle to be solved that can neutralize it.

That might be Iron Tomb's strongest point. What makes it a great way to show new players the ropes, though, is that the PCs' goals are simple and clear, yet still challenging. Their one firm objective is to get the black box from the ship's bridge. They know exactly where it is, they just need to get in there. And they have two obstacles to deal with: First is the monster, which is slow but deadly and relentless. Having somebody lead it away from the bridge while somebody else grabs the box would be simple enough (if risky), but unfortunately there's a second obstacle—access to the bridge is blocked by some scavengers who've barricaded themselves there. They don't want to come out while the monster is stomping around, but if the PCs force entry, they'll fight.

And that's it. There's a Macguffin they need, it's in the possession of some NPCs who won't give it up without getting something in return (or fighting for it), and there's an extremely dangerous monster on patrol that they never have to stand and fight, but that will prevent them (unless they can trick it, trap it, or outright defeat it) from standing still in one place for long enough to, e.g., force open the door to the helm. There's not much else here, and some of the details are incomplete or confusing (see my nitpicks below), but you don't really need more than this. There are a bunch of different ways players can approach the situation, including plenty of interesting applications of starting gear, and the main threat is always dangerous without ever being likely to back them into a no-win situation.

 

NITPICKS

Space is limited on the pamphlet, of course, and the Warden can use their imagination, but there are some appealing but undercooked elements here. Collateral damage from the monster's attacks has busted the ship's generator, for instance, meaning that (until repairs are made) only one of several secondary systems can be powered: cryogenics, remote door controls, life support, and lighting. It seems from context that cryogenics is functioning—the food in the freezer hasn't melted, and Captain Carvington hasn't died. No lights and manual function only for the doors makes sense, but if the life support isn't working…how long hasn't it been working? How close are the scavengers trapped on the bridge to suffocating?

Similarly left ambiguous is the purpose of the captain's keycard. Is it needed to get into the captain's quarters? Can it open the door to the helm? Is it just a bit of fluff that serves no purpose now that the ship's controls are inoperable?

While those items go underexplaioned, a few other things get more of the limited pamphlet space than they need. We have no idea what the PCs will be paid for the job (just salvage rights, I guess, which are contested by the scavengers), but we are told that they must recover the black box within 72 hours or face a 500mcr fee. What's that about? Why would they ever be tempted to spend three whole days on this ship, even if the life support weren't failing?

Likewise, a fair amount of space is devoted to a detailed description of what will happen, over the course of three months, to anybody who opens another sarcophagus (there are five total; the research ship's crew opened only one). This is 1) beyond the scope of the module; 2) really unlikely to happen, given that opening a giant stone sarcophagus can't be done casually, there isn't any incentive to do it, and the disincentive has been telegraphed very strongly; and 3) not all that interesting to play out if it does — it's basically “can you get to and pay for a doctor, or do you want to roll a new character?” (Now, if there were two open sarcophagi—or some infection vector less telegraphed than “whoever opens the sarcophagus gets cursed”—Captain Carvington could also be infected, and we might have an interesting follow-up incident, or news item, after returning to port.)

 

SUGGESTIONS

You may or may not want to tweak the Egyptian stuff and prep a little more background info (the identities of the original crew, what's in the captain's log, what the dig site and tomb look like in the recordings you can find in the lab, etc.). You might also want to prep some contingency plans for certain character-creation outcomes; it's likely your PCs will have no obvious way to get into the bridge without the scavengers' help (in which case you might want the captain's keycard to be capable of overriding the interior lock once the doors are powered), and on the other end of things, a smart rifle will make the monster much, much easier to dispatch (so maybe house-rule some magnetic technobabble interference that screws up the rifle's targeting systems and diminishes or eliminates its anti-armor property against this enemy).

What you'll definitely want to do is come up with a more strictly defined situation for the generator. I decided that cryogenics and gravity (undefined in the pamphlet) were fully powered by the damaged generator and that the lights and life support were running on dwindling battery power: The ship's interior is dim and flickering, the air already stale and thin, when the PCs arrive; it just gets worse from there. Turning off cryogenics condemns the captain to death; turning off gravity puts everybody without zero-G training in a bind (while the magnetic monster just stomps around unbothered). If they don't want to do either of those things, the PCs have a few hours to repair the generator or cut a deal with the scavengers. (Or they can wait until they all pass out and then force their way in if they happen to have a laser cutter or explosives. And are really cold-blooded.)

 

Backgrounds for Early Modern Cairn, Part 2

More backgrounds for a Cairn campaign set, like Beyond the Pale, in something very much like early modern Europe. We are now two-thirds of the way to the full set of 20, and I promise the next and last bunch won't take another half a year! As before, the object here is fun and a bit of verisimilitude, not any kind of balance. Some of these are definitely more powerful than others, but maybe the weaker ones will be more entertaining, who knows. None of these characters is going to last more than a few sessions before they get possessed by a dybbuk or drowned by a bukavac anyway.

* * *

Background 3:

Chiliast

You belong to a millenarian sect like the Khlysty, Skoptsy, Dukhobors, Molokans, Kartanoists, Frankists, or Sabbateans—or maybe some group even more obscure than those. You have, or at least your leader has, inside knowledge of God's plans for this misbegotten universe, and an inside track on getting into Heaven, surviving the apocalypse, or whatever it is you people believe in. Or believed in, at any rate—you seem to have strayed from your flock.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Sackcloth Robes
• Gourd

d6: What are you doing on the road?

1. Hunting for an apostate. You don't seem to be trying very hard.
2. Seeking a holy relic to bring back to the leader of your sect. Maybe you already found it. Maybe you should keep it for yourself?
3. Given a task so vague and obscure by the leader of your sect that you wonder whether they just wanted to get you out of their hair.
4. Looking to slay a demon, or chastise an unbeliever, or accomplish some other heroic deed of that nature.
5. Sneaked away to visit family, friends, or a lover outside the sect. It's probably past time you returned. Or is it?
6. Absent without leave. Having second thoughts about the whole “end of the world” thing.

d6: What eccentric beliefs does your sect hold to?

1. Iconoclasm. Take a Mallet (d6) and be sure to smash any ungodly icons you see.
2. Polygamy. Take a Wedding Ring (petty). Take several!
3. Strict celibacy. Take a Leather Scourge (d6) with which to mortify your sinful flesh.
4. Vegetarianism. Take a Wheel of Unusually Tasty Cheese.
5. Feminism. Take a Pamphlet on the Rights of Woman (petty).
6. Abolition of private property. Take only your unshakeable Confidence in the Perfectibility of the World (intangible).

Background 5:

Dragoman

You are, or were, a translator, interpreter, and mediator. You have a gift for tongues; you speak the languages of the great empires (German, Russian, Turkish, Persian) at least passably, and are perfectly fluent in French and two others, in addition to your unfortunately totally irrelevant native dialect.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Book of Court Etiquette
• Quill & Ink
• Sheaf of Paper

d6: Why aren't you in the employ of a baron or a government minister or some other bigwig?

1. Your employer died of dysentery while on a tour of the provinces.
2. You were outmaneuvered by rivals at court and sacked unceremoniously.
3. You were chronically insubordinate and were sacked unceremoniously.
4. You took a leave of absence to come study an obscure local dialect.
5. You undertook a wildly inappropriate tryst and are waiting for the outrage to die down.
6. You learned of opportunities more lucrative than any minor court could offer.

d6: What exotic gift did you receive in the course of your service?

1. A Pouch of Spices (petty) from the Indies, which enlivens your food.
2. A Silk Scarf (petty) from Cathay, which keeps your neck warm and looks rather dashing.
3. A Hamsa Pendant (petty) from the Holy Land, which wards off the evil eye.
4. An Anatolian Meerschaum Pipe (petty), with which one might smoke tobacco or the like. (You have no tobacco.)
5. Leather Moccasins (petty) from the Americas, in which you can walk quietly and comfortably.
6. An elaborately carved Walrus Ivory Comb (petty) from the Arctic, the better to comb your hair.

 

Background 7:

Estafette

You are a courier, probably in some official capacity (a military messenger or a postal relay courier), although you may be a freelance rider. You've come out here to the hinterlands to deliver or receive letters; maybe your work is done already, or maybe you're dawdling. Perhaps something out of your control has gotten in the way—the post you're meant to pick up hasn't been penned yet, or a bridge is out, or there's bandit activity in the region. Why not look for a little extra work on the side?

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Overcoat Pistol (d8)
• Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds)
• Letter-Case

d6: What was your proudest professional accomplishment?

1. Braved the worst storm of the winter to bring a plea for aid from an avalanche-devastated village.
2. Dashed through enemy lines to deliver orders to the general commanding a besieged city's defense.
3. Bluffed your way past mercenaries sent to intercept you and seize the maps you carried.
4. Galloped all the way from Sambor to Mährisch-Ostrau in just two days. You changed horses a dozen times!
5. Chosen to deliver engagement announcements on the occasion of the imperial heir's betrothal.
6. Rode all night through mud and thunder to warn the crown of the revolutionary army's approach. Or was it to warn the revolutionaries the imperial army was on the march?

d6: What breed of horse do you ride?

1. A dainty Arab, swift as lightning.
2. A doughty Turkoman, famed for its endurance.
3. A lively Holsteiner, strong and agile.
4. A beautiful Mérens from the faraway Pyrenees, bred for mountain service.
5. A hardy Vyatka, fast and sure-footed in wintry conditions.
6. A refined Trakehner, with a hearty constitution and a cool head.

 Note: All firearms require a full round to reload, unless noted otherwise.

 

Background 10:

Hayduk

You are the moon to the armatole's sun, or the sun to their moon—a member, or ex-member, of an armed band who operate just outside the reach of the tsar's, kaiser's, or sultan's law. You may be called batiar, klepht, or opryshok. You may be hailed as a hero or rebel; you may be derided as a bandit, brigand, or outlaw. It's all a matter of perspective.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Flintlock Musket (d12, bulky)
• Cartridge Box with 20 Rounds
• Stylish Cape (petty)

d6: Which of your very heroic and not at all exaggerated deeds is most celebrated in song?

1. Robbed a tax collector in broad daylight. Returned the money to the local peasants. Well, most of the money.
2. Challenged the captain of the guard to a drinking contest. Put him under the table.
3. Evaded an effort at capture by plastering on a fake mustache and offering to join the hunt for yourself.
4. Eluded a month-long campaign to root you out from the hills, using your knowledge of the terrain to humiliate your pursuers.
5. Caught in bed with the local lord's heir. Made a spectacular leap from the balcony to effect your escape.
6. Used to be an armatole; betrayed the empire rather than massacre innocent villagers.

d6: What treasured loot do you still carry with you?

1. A gorgeous Illuminated Manuscript. You can't make heads or tails of the peculiar writing inside, but it sure looks nice.
2. Romantic Letters (petty) from your highborn lover. They keep you warm on lonely nights, and also make valuable blackmail material.
3. A random Spellbook, liberated from the clutches of a wicked sorcerer. Or a book collector, maybe—a wicked book collector!
4. A Bejeweled Pendant (petty) that you're certain protects you from harm. Sure, it didn't protect the previous owner very well, but he was using it wrong.
5. The Fingerbone of a Saint (petty) encased in an elaborate little reliquary. Only apostates (or infidels) venerate this particular saint, so you don't feel guilty about toting it around as a good luck charm.
6. A Flask of Perfume just waiting for the right occasion. Which will hopefully be immediately preceded by an opportunity to take a bath.

 

Background 11:

Lectour

You may have been born into a society in which few can read at all, in which case your literacy alone is a blessing, or one where lettered people are more common, but either way, you were blessed with unusual fluency, and a pleasant voice besides. You might be a meddah, performing morality plays for coffeehouse audiences; a maggid, lecturing on the Torah; a storyteller hired by business owners to entertain their employees while they work; or an itinerant poet reciting your own work and others' for a little coin.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Leather Haversack (stuffed with books)

d6: What great personage once heard you speak?

1. The Man of Destiny! Yes, the Emperor Napoleon himself. Or was it Napoleon III? Or Louis? One of those Bonapartes, certainly.
2. The Kaiser! Well, it was before his coronation. He was a young cavalry officer at the time, quite incognito.
3. The Tsarina! She was in disguise, naturally, but you recognized her—she looked right at you and winked!
4. The Sovereign of the Sublime House of Osman, the Sultan of Sultans! Well, his carriage rolled by while you were speaking, anyway.
5. Lord Byron, the infamous poet! He was rather rude, truth be told.
6. One of those notorious socialist rabble-rousers…Blanqui, was it? Or maybe it was Blanc. Or Buonarroti. Something with a B, surely. Or maybe Lassalle…

d6: What props or accoutrements do you carry with you?

1. Puppets to act out parts of your storytelling.
2. A foldable Painted Backdrop (bulky) to transport your audience into another world.
3. A Small Drum to add a little rhythm to the proceedings.
4. A handsome pleated Hand Fan (petty) with which to cool yourself. Some of these places get quite hot!
5. Spectacles (petty), the better to see what you're reading.
6. A Tin of Ground Coffee—this newfangled brew gives you tremendous energy.

Background 16:

Shaman

You are a conduit between the mundane human world and the realm of spirits. If you live among Christians, Jews, or Muslims, you might incorporate their faith into your practices, or pass yourself off as a humble healer, a znakhar, one of the “clever folk.” In pagan lands, you might be recognized for your power and called noaidi, gonagas, volve, vluxvu, or bakshi. As long as you treat the spirits with respect, the rest is your own business.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses) 
• Ritual Knife (d6)
• Staff (d8, bulky)
• Drum

d6: What magical practice do you most confidently command?

1. The healing arts. As Cure Wounds in the Warden's Guide.
2. Shapeshifting. As Beast Form in the Warden's Guide (but specifically into your totem animal; see next table).
3. Laying curses upon your foes. As Befuddle in the Warden's Guide.
4. Seeing the true nature of things. As Detect Magic in the Warden's Guide.
5. Enchanting the weak-minded. As Vision in the Warden's Guide.
6. Protecting yourself and your people from harm. As Ward in the Warden's Guide.

d6: What animal spirit shares the strongest connection with you?

1. The Bear.
2. The Eagle.
3. The Raven.
4. The Snake.
5. The Swan.
6. The Wolf.

Background 17:

Surveyor

You're an educated person, wise in all manner of natural philosophy, from geometry and trigonometry to physics and engineering. You were surely sent here by an employer or patron—a nobleman, a private company, the crown itself. Perhaps you have encountered intractable obstacles in your work, or perhaps your work went smoothly, but you see other opportunities.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Overcoat Pistol (d8)
• Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds)
• Theodolite

d6: What youthful foolishness did you indulge in during your university days?

1. Dueling. Take a Rapier (d8) and some impressive facial scars.
2. Seduction. Take a Vial of Mercury (petty) and a nasty rash.
3. Freemasonry. Take a whole repertoire of Secret Handshakes (intangible). Who knows what doors they might unlock?
4. Radicalism. Take an Urgent Missive (petty) intended for a local republican thinker.
5. Literature. Take three Dog-Eared Volumes of Poetry. Memorize a few of your favorites.
6. Occultism. Take a random Spellbook and some arcane tattoos, and keep them well hidden.

d6: What business opportunities does your highly trained mind detect in this godforsaken hinterland?

1. Timber. It doesn't take a genius to see it, but your genius might smooth out the logistics.
2. Mining. There's iron here. There's salt. Maybe there's gold!
3. Furs. Ships go all the way to Hudson's Bay in Canada for beaver pelts, and here there are beavers in droves, so much closer to home.
4. Cattle. Once some enterprising lumbermen knock all the trees down, this could be prime grazeland.
5. Textiles. Some of these rivers could support enormous mills.
6. Railroads. Whatever goods other businesses wring from this landscape, they'll need a way to move them back to civilization.

Warped Beyond Intuition

Like myriad unfortunates before me, I find myself compelled to jam the square peg of Mothership's loosely sketched economy into the round hole of a persistent campaign played by bean-counting nerds. And there's one particular thing that, like many before me, I got stubbornly snagged on: Warp cores are really, really expensive. So expensive that the vast majority of work in published materials, often including a job that comprises an entire module, won't even cover a one-way trip from the next system over. (I've touched on this before!)

Now, if you go to Reddit or Discord to search for other people's thoughts about this, you're likely to encounter the observation that, in A Pound of Flesh, there's a Warp Core Vault on Prospero's Dream where it's possible to score cores for a mere 50kcr a pop (APOF p. 43). Most people seem to dismiss this as an unreconciled holdover from 0e; warp cores used to be cheaper, and now they're prohibitively expensive to make interstellar travel an enormous undertaking and emphasize how small and economically powerless the PCs are in the big scheme of things.

But what if neither the 50kcr price on the Dream nor the 1mcr cost in the base 1e rules is “wrong,” and they don't need to be reconciled? I've been warming to the idea that they simply represent extreme possibilities: If you're at a major, densely populated economic hub (e.g., the Dream) that either produces warp cores or is a major transshipment point where a lot of commercial ship traffic (some with warp cores as cargo) passes through; there's a substantial gray or black market at that location; and you have strong connections to whatever group controls access to the cores (perhaps they owe you favors, even), you can score warp cores for as little as 50kcr a pop—maybe even less.

On the other hand, if you're at the only inhabited station in some bumfuck system at the ass end of the Rim, where the few hundreds, or few dozen, permanent residents keep a few warp cores on hand to sell to ships passing through, but have no local access to more, and you're a stranger whom none of the locals know from Adam, you pay full freight. Maybe more, if you seem desperate, or if they're down to the very last of their inventory (or both).

We could cook up a table for prices, something like (and probably derived from) the trade tables in the Stars Without Number supplement Suns of Gold—roll 2d10, “subtract X for each of the following conditions” and “add Y for each of the following conditions,” get a percentile modifier to apply to a base price somewhere in the vicinity of 200kcr or 250kcr—and if I ever published a campaign setting or something that really needed to formalize this, I probably would. For the campaign I'm now running, though, I feel pretty comfortable just spitballing.

* * * 

What does need to be defined more carefully, of course, is what happens when players do the obvious, smart thing and jump at the first chance to hoard warp cores. The low-end price is still far too spendy for starting characters, and even many sessions down the road, modestly successful owner–operators are never more than a few months away from crushing debt and will probably think twice before dumping six-figure sums into speculative stockpiles…but after thinking twice, they'll probably do it. Hell, they'll probably want to look for profit-turning opportunities the next time they meet another crew at some backwater station where cores cost a fortune. So I want some kind of soft cap on how many cores they can just shove into the reactor component.

The description of warp cores in the 1e rules leaves a lot to the imagination, but it does emphasize that cores are dangerously radioactive, and of course we know that hyperspace travel is weird and scary. Warp cores should have a touch of the weird and scary about them too—maybe they come from hyperspace, somehow. Maybe they contain malign hyperspace energies. Maybe they're made of condensed hyperspace ghosts! Who knows. In any event, if you put too many of them in the same place, bad things happen.

When you jump, roll d10 + the number of extra cores the ship is carrying:

1–10: The jump proceeds as normal (or at least as normal as a hyperspace jump ever is).

11: The ship sustains minor damage. Roll once on the Maintenance Issues table (SBT p. 39); reroll Major Repairs.

12: Upon awakening from cryo, the crew are afflicted with persistent disturbing hallucinations (sanity save every day for 1d5 days).

13: The jump consumes one of the stored cores.

14: The ship sustains major damage. Roll twice on the Maintenance Issues table. If your first roll results in Major Repairs, do not make a second roll.

15: The jump consumes two of the stored cores.

16+: Warp core containment failure. As radiation leak from Maintenance Issues table, and the damaged core must be ejected unused. 

This probably needs some tweaking and playtesting—the step up from faintly dangerous nuisance results on 10 and 11 to economically disastrous ones on 12+ is pretty steep, and the ~50% risk of needing Major Repairs on a 13 is a pretty harsh disincentive to ever carry more than four cores at a time—but it'll do for a start. (How do freighters move large quantities of warp cores for wholesale purposes? Special containment fields, of course. Very expensive, very bulky, can only be fitted on enormous supertanker-like ships far beyond the PCs' means.)

Proof of Life

 

I've been doing some backpacking too. Here's Mt. Baker!

 

Back in March, the Reddit account I was using to share these blog posts got banished to the shadow realm after I posted something about the No ICE in Minnesota bundle on itch. Nobody at Reddit ever responded to my appeals or explained exactly why I'd been shadowbanned. But all my posts (and all my many comments, the dumb and the brilliant alike) have been forevermore invisible and unsearchable.

And, annoyingly, I got super discouraged by this! Even at my most active, the posts here that I didn't share anywhere else got maybe 70 or 80 views; the ones that got a good response on Reddit got hundreds, sometimes thousands. When I started the blog, I was sick of social media, sick of the grind of holding people's attention and the Skinner-box fugue state of scrolling. I'm gonna blog, I said! I'm just gonna put my thoughts out into the world a couple times a month and hope that people find them, and I'll be content with that. But, oops, I was not content with that. I went to Reddit to get people's eyes on my posts, and it totally worked and was very satisfying, and then a big dumb bully of a corporation took it away from me and I got all bummed out about it and spent months sulking and not posting. How embarrassing!

Anyway, I live. I breathe. I'm still doing lots of fun game stuff (and reading, and writing, and watching lots of Tony Leung movies, and cooking my way through all of Hetty Lui McKinnon's recipes, and so on and so forth). I've been running a Black Sword Hack game, sporadically, for my old Stars Without Number group (you truly don't appreciate the pandemic-spawned miracle of a game that meets nearly every week for almost five years until it's gone) and Tales of Argosa and Mothership in person with some local friends. I've even been playing D&D 5e again! (But not GMing, thank God.) Gonna post some Mothership stuff, and some Cairn stuff, and probably some Black Sword Hack stuff, and some book reviews, and undoubtedly some political screeds, and I will be happy to have 70 to 80 people stumble across them and read them, goddamnit. (But maybe I'll be more active on Bluesky too. Who knows.)

Bookpost #5

Yes, it's (past) that time again. And again, we're just going to skip over the stuff I don't have anything positive to say about. Being catty and trashing other people's work may be fun, but it's not nice. Life is short. We're all trying our best.

* * * 

Tokyo Ueno Station (Miri Yu)

Beautiful and oddly lively, for all that it's a profoundly sad novel about a dead homeless guy and the crushing weight of class and caste in Japanese society. I find it really interesting how much contemporary(-ish) Japanese art, like the films of Juzo Itami and Satoshi Kon, prominently features, or even (as in this novel and Kon's Tokyo Godfathers) focuses directly on the homeless, a population that, by official measures, scarcely exists in the country.

HHhH (Laurent Binet)

A fascinating blend of gripping true story and dizzying metafiction account of trying to write a gripping true story. Not as confident as Binet's Civilizations, which I read first, and less enjoyable overall, but the lack of confidence is part of the point, and how much are you supposed to enjoy learning about the rise of the Nazis and how they strangled the life out of Europe, even if a few of them do get theirs in the end?

Severance (Ling Ma)

For all that this was prescient about what a disastrous pandemic originating from China would look like (Ma predicted the ubiquity of KN95 masks and remote work, among other things, well before COVID arrived), I think it's been unfairly pigeonholed as “a pandemic novel,” when it's really much more about The Way We Life Now. The real pandemic was capitalism! (But seriously, a beautiful, provocative, hilariously funny novel, one of the best I've read in recent years.)

Short Letter, Long Farewell (Peter Handke)

A weird, endlessly digressive little novel that I didn't tremendously enjoy as I was reading it, but that has stuck with me more than I expected it to. Handke had a way of conjuring up powerfully vivid little scenes and communicating the disjointed, discursive thinking of his oddball narrator (which is to say, probably, himself) such that you can really get into the head of a guy you have very little reason to relate to.

Plague Ship, Ordeal in Otherwhere, and Garan the Eternal (Andre Norton)

Found these last summer in the same used-books section where I snapped up Moorcock's Runestaff books—same yellow and yellowing little old 1970s paperbacks (somebody in Hot Springs, Montana, was plugged into exactly the same influences as Gygax and company). I'd never read any Norton, one of the most prolific SFF authors of the 20th century and, right alongside Moorcock, one of the chief influences on D&D (and thus on pretty much all genre media of the past 50 years). I grabbed one from the '50s, one from the '60s, and one that was started in the '40s and finished in the '70s, and they're all delightfully representative of their time periods, going from the hypermasculine star-trader heroics of Plague Ship (which is basically just a short Traveller campaign) to the psychedelic quasi-feminist zaniness of Ordeal in Otherwhere and then Garan lurching from baroque Sky Captain silliness in his postwar debut to apocalyptic drear (and also trippy past-lives Eternal Champion stuff) in the Nixon-era conclusion. Definitely going to be on the lookout for more Norton in my used-books beachcombing.

Creative Surgery (Clelia Farris)

I was put onto Farris by Lavie Tidhar, who included her story “The Substance of Ideas” in Best of World SF: Volume 2. For better and worse, I think he chose well — that story, which is included in this collection, remains my favorite. They're mostly great, though (I also liked “Gabola” and “Secret Enemy” quite a bit), and every single one has something arrestingly memorable going on.

Fire to Fire (Mark Doty)

Another book, albeit an almost entirely different one, where my point of entry (in this case, “Messiah: Christmas Portions”) remains my favorite of the author's work, but I'm not the least bit disappointed. Many beautiful poems here; Doty is an observer of the minutiae of life, particularly urban life, with few equals. Love “Chanteuse,” and not just because it's about, and so vividly evokes, Boston.

Broken Stars (ed. Ken Liu)

Another one that I found my way to via Tidhar's Best of World SF series, and as much as anything I've tracked down following the spoor of one of those stories, this reinforces my belief that all the best, most interesting stuff happening in SFF is happening outside the United States, if not outside the Anglosphere entirely (although, in fairness, a couple of these were originally written in English). “Moonlight,” “The Snow of Jinyang,” and “The First Emperor's Games” are all fun little confections, playing with genre tropes or mashing up short fiction with other media (“Moonlight” is by Cixin Liu; I was not a fan of The Three-Body Problem, but I think his style is very well suited to this sort of wry short fiction). The best of the book, and one of the most affecting, thought-provoking stories I've read in a long time, is “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appeal,” which like many (most?) of the works in this collection concerns travel through time and our perception thereof.

Delicious in Dungeon, Vols. 1–4 (Ryoko Kui)

Super fun stuff, can't wait to read more. Incredibly good about taking a lot of what's weird and irrational about D&D and digging into it, spinning out rationales for it and deriving all kinds of fun little plots from it. The whole dungeon ecosystem is a great idea, but all the individual parts of it are particularly wonderful fuel for game writing.

The Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd)

Strange and beautiful. Some of the best work I've ever read not so much about nature but about being in nature, being embodied in the natural environment—the sensory experience, and not just the sights and sounds (although she has keen and unusual observations about how the mountain atmosphere plays tricks on the eyes) but the touch and taste of it too, the sensations of walking barefoot, napping under the sky, drinking spring water straight from the creek. Also a good reminder that you might write something truly great and not be able to find a publisher for it, not be able to find an audience for it, and that doesn't diminish its greatness. Shepherd had the pleasure of seeing it published (and become beloved and influential) late in life, after it'd sat in a desk drawer for 30 years. Not all artists are so lucky!

The Vanished Birds (Simon Jimenez)

Didn't love the story or setting, but still found a lot to like. Strong, well drawn characters, some arresting imagery, good writing throughout. The first shift of perspective is extremely powerful, a wonderfully lived-in illustration of the effects of time dilation, of what it's like to live, travel, and love in an interstellar society. The second shift in perspective, and the subsequent elaboration of one character's backstory, is much weaker, and the novel never finds it way back to the heights of the first two chapters.

Radical Warrior: August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General (David Dixon)

It's not perfect (like almost everything published these days, it could've really used more and better editing) but I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth when the universe hands me a full-length biography of my favorite, and heretofore criminally obscure, Civil War general. The full story of Willich's life is even more delightful than what I knew from Wikipedia and anecdotal scraps from other histories. A truly modern man, two centuries ahead of his life, and deeply flawed in ways that only make him more relatable to me. It is crazy what posters dudes like Willich, Marx, and Engels were. People joke about like, “Oh, imagine if they'd had Twitter!” but no, I don't think that would've actually changed much. They were tweeting at each other in the broadsheets and in handbills, and exactly the same dumbass ways leftist bros snipe at each other online today, right down to accusing each other of being both gay and cucked. It's magnificent. And also, for all that he was a temperamental egotist with a death wish, for as much as he enjoyed the sound of his own voice and was a political naïf, Willich was truly heroic. Not just a brilliant, and appallingly physically courageous, military officer, but a courageous thinker, a courageous ally to oppressed and marginalized people (particularly Black Americans), and somebody who sought—for all that he enjoyed fame, acclaim, and the perks of leadership—not to command but to empower others, to give them the tools to defend and perfect a people's republic.