Recent Reading

Recently, I have read:

Dead But Dreaming, an anthology of stories inspired by and building on Lovecraft's mythos. I haven't yet figured out what makes this so solid. I think the stories I like best are the ones that assume the reader is already familiar with Lovecraft's work and build on them, and I'm trying to verbalize how they do this.

Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente, about a sexually transmitted city. What makes this one click for me is the prose. It took me a couple of weeks to read this book because I insisted on reading it all aloud.

Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory. I don't even want to say what this book is about, because anything I could say is a spoiler. I just finished it today, and I always knew that the author knew where he was going -- but I could not predict it.

Panel Write Up From Boskone

This is a straightforward transcription of my notes. I also have notes on "The Evil Temptress", "The Destruction of Hope", and a few notes on the last half of the Roger Zelazny panel. I haven't yet written up my notes on the "First Aid For Fen" hands on discussion.

( Notes from How Not To Edit Yourself )

Feeding the Manga Habit

Thanks to the Queens and NYP Library systems, I have read volumes 1, 3, 4, and 5 of After School Nightmare and am pondering using the premise for a short rpg campaign.

The premise is that students take a special class before graduation, involving a shared dream that has some specific rules, but also strong elements of dream logic. The students need to deal with the various issues while competing for the key that will allow them to pass the class and graduate.

Those who fail simply take the class again the following week until they pass. This does mean that if I used the premise without modfication, I'd have to figure out what players with PCs who have passed do until the rest of the players' PCs pass. Passing takes the PC out of the game.

The characters in the manga learn or decide what is most important to them, making ethical decisions or trying to avoid them.

( Spoiler Alert )