Advanced Readings in Dungeons and Dragons


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It is all of those things and more.

Back on topic, Black Amazon of Mars is available for nowt here, should anyone want a read. If only I could get it to display on my phone... :(


Limeylongears wrote:

It is all of those things and more.

My kind of thread. But all Leigh Brackett-y, I picked up two books by her on a recent trip to Boston that are so obscure that don't even have pictures of them on Goodreads: The Halfling and Other Stories and The Starmen of Llyrdis. They sure do look cool.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Zeugma wrote:
Is this thread even about books anymore?

Some of it is, along with teasing Kirth and making snarky comments about the Tor reviews (and reviewers). They all deserve it, after all.


Limeylongears wrote:

In other news, Eric John Stark has Dickie Davies Eyes

Re-watched this and was saddened to see copies of The Sword and the Stallion and The Oak and the Ram so prominently featured after my editions were stolen at Socialist Summer Camp.

Was only mollified by discovering the hippie protagonist studying the back of The Cramps' Psychedelic Jungle.

In other news, more Bette Davis.

Fun fact: If you read a book about All About Eve on public transportation, you will be propositioned by gay men.


DA, I have copies of both of those books (plus Phoenix In Obsidian) which, in the spirit of crushed moths and worldwide proletarian unity, you can have if the logistics can be worked out.

I read 'Black Amazons of Mars' on the train down South, and it was pretty much perfect. 'REH does Barsoom' is right on the money


Thank you very much! comrade, for the kind offer, but I must decline.

I am a servant of the gods of ye olde usede booke stores, and I am a slave to the thrill of the hunt!

(Otoh, if you ever come across any badass Trotskyist shiznit--like, say, Harold Isaacs' The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution or Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business--let me know!)


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And it looks like, with a final post about Kirth's all-time favorite fantasy professor, the series is done. :(

Now where am I going to post scenes from Bette Davis movies and albums by The Cramps?


The only thing more dreary than Tolkien are the puerile mouthings of his endless legions of self-righteous fanboys.


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I liked it when Callahan said he read LotR in fourth grade with a kind of passion he never had for other books, and then, two sentences later, explained that he never finished The Two Towers; that's some passionate reading!


hah...I do think it's interesting that a lot of hardcore fans of Tolkien/modern fantasy tend to have quite different tastes than gygax and people of similar interests. It would be interesting to do a survey and see what the overlap of fans of different appendix N books was.


MMCJawa wrote:
hah...I do think it's interesting that a lot of hardcore fans of Tolkien/modern fantasy tend to have quite different tastes than gygax and people of similar interests. It would be interesting to do a survey and see what the overlap of fans of different appendix N books was.

Well, I'm a big Tolkein fan, but I liked a lot of the other stuff too.

Let's see.
I've read a good deal of Poul Anderson, but tend to like his SF better than his fantasy. The listed works were good, but not outstanding.

I really need to read Bellairs Face in the Frost.

Haven't read anything but short stories from Leigh Brackett or Fredric Brown and few/none of them were really fantasy adventure. Some really good shorts, particularly from Brown.

ERB is an old favorite. I reread the first few John Carter books when the movie came out and was surprised at how well they held up.

Haven't read World's End. And it's been a long time since I read anything else by Lin Carter.

Haven't read the listed de Camp books, but loved the Harold Shea stories.

Derleth I'm not fond of, but I'm a Lovecraft fan and don't like his take on the mythos.

Dunsany is wonderful. In the most literal sense of the word.

I've read and enjoyed some Farmer, but not the World of Tiers.

Don't know the Gardner Fox books.

Howard's Conan is the best.

Don't know Lanier.

I need to reread the Fafhred and the Gray Mouser stuff systematically. I remember liking what I read though.

Merritt's familiar, but I don't remember specifics.

Moorcock was great favorite of mine in my teens/twenties. Not as much now, though I've read more of his more serious work. Still love the old stuff, but it's more nostalgia now.

Bored now, skimming the rest: Don't know St Clair, Weinbaum or Wellman or Williamson. Never really impressed by Norton. Offut's pretty good. Pratt, Saberhagen and Vance are all good.
Zelazny's an all time favorite.

Of the 6 he lists as "the most immediate influences", Merrit I don't recall. Vance was good, but not a favorite. de Camp & Pratt, REH, Lieber and HPL are all near my top.

Of course a good part of the difference in general may just be time. There are a lot of authors who have come onto the scene since 1979 (or earlier when Gygax first came across them) and
some of those have faded into obsurity. Not necessarily due to different tastes, but just lack of publicity. Some of those authors are pretty hard to find today.

The Exchange

I really do need to find that book by St. Clair. I was totally blown away the first time I read about the "Shaver mysteries" (without taking them seriously, of course) and am someone who likes Lucius Shepard's Griaule stories. So, yeah. I like a little Weird in my fantasy. Despite all the ragging on the Tor critics, I think it has been a worthy series of critiques, and I've gotten to add to my ever-growing "To Read" list.


Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:


(Otoh, if you ever come across any badass Trotskyist shiznit--like, say, Harold Isaacs' The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution or Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business--let me know!)

Don't know about the Isaacs, but AK Press has Fascism and Big Business

The list was kind of Sword and Sorcery heavy, which suits me down to the ground. Loads of stuff there to investigate - I'll have to copy it and carry it around with me whenever I go after books, which might be a tiny bit too keen, thinking about it...


Oh yeah, I forgot the American SWP still publishes that one...

The Exchange

Found a new/old Weird/Proto-Sci-fi pulp author (Francis Stevens) on the Kirkus Reviews website.

I am inclined to ask, if Francis Stevens were so influential, why have I never heard of her? But why ask why when she had a story about

Andrew Liptak wrote:
a would-be rescuer caught in a deadly labyrinth run by a madman.

I think I have some New Years reading ahead of me!


Zeugma, do you have a review of Stevens for us? Please do share!


I'd like to throw Charles deLint into the mix of what you can steal from for game stuff; just read Moonheart and its sequel, Spiritwalk, and Jack, The Giant-Killer and am halfway through its sequel, Drink Down the Moon. It's all "invisible world of faerie co-existing in modern Ottawa," which is sort of a played-out thing by now, but back in the '80s when deLint was pioneering it I guess it was a big deal.

For the former pair, I like all the druid stuff and the biker guy and the woodwife witch and her servants, and the primaeval forest that gets angry at interlopers. I really cringe at all the "Indians are so perfect!" stuff.

For the second pair, I like how he's managed to seamlessly blend gnomes and halflings into a single race ("hobs") who are cool and have a specific magic if their own (their "skillymen" can stitch small spells into boots, coats, etc.). I don't like how giants apparently automatically die if you trip them.

Anyway, the whole bunch have got more game ideas than you can shake a stick at, so even if they're not really great literature (they're not), they're still worth a look.


I have no idea who Charles deLint is, but I had to buy a book of his for my sister for Xmas.


Zeugma wrote:

Found a new/old Weird/Proto-Sci-fi pulp author (Francis Stevens) on the Kirkus Reviews website.

I am inclined to ask, if Francis Stevens were so influential, why have I never heard of her? But why ask why when she had a story about

Andrew Liptak wrote:
a would-be rescuer caught in a deadly labyrinth run by a madman.
I think I have some New Years reading ahead of me!

I read The Citadel of Fear a couple of months ago - can't be any more specific about it other than that

Spoilers and one good reason why you should wait for Zeugma to get around to reviewing it:

it had to do with some explorers who found a mysterious city in Mexico, something happened and the pleasant Irish explorer went back to civilisation with an equally mysterious idol; the unpleasant, greedy explorer returned incognito, bought a big house and started crafting abominations using the hellish powers he'd discovered in the mysterious city. Some beasts stole the mysterious idol and nearly killed the pleasant Irish explorer's fiancee; eventually, with the help of an old man and the police, the big house was burnt down, the abominations were destroyed and the otherworldly powers who had made such a thing possible were safely laid to rest.

it was pretty good, and I suppose it could be bracketed along with Machen or A. Blackwood and the like - turn of the (20th) century occult horror, I suppose.

The Exchange

Kirth Gersen wrote:
Zeugma, do you have a review of Stevens for us? Please do share!

Not yet. I actually haven't gotten around to looking because I have a tower of to-be-read books on my nightstand and it's starting to look like a Jenga game.

Edit: And now I have 3 more books (all Francis Stevens) added to my lengthy "holds" queue in my library account. Thanks, Kirth! [/sarcasm]


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Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:

Oooh, finally, something that I've read.

Of Human Bondage is about a poor lisper and the slatternly hussy who torments him!

Belated thanks for the movie, Zeugma, and woops! Carey had a clubfoot; Maugham was a stammerer (not a lisper).

The Exchange

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The Francis Steven books came! I got "The Citadel of Fear", but, more excitingly: "The Heads of Cerberus" in a 1st edition library binding, with illustrations and a foreword by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach! He describes THoC:

Eshbach wrote:
Of her works, only The Heads of Cerberus can be called science fiction -- though even in this story a strong inclination toward a wilder fantasy is evident.

More review will be forthcoming, once the novel is read.

The Exchange

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Okay! I read "The Heads of Cerberus"! Time for a review.

My preliminary thoughts, which I wrote on a secret map made of moonlight:
Weird/occult/sci-fi written in 1918. Definitely has some Gygax-like flourishes: A bit of astral-plane hopping; an alternate-history time-line; Star Trek-like explanations for said time-line ("as you know, Scotty..."), adventure (fights! romance!) with a dash of "1984" and/or "Gulliver's Travels" dystopian satire. Also: bad Irish stereotypes and accents (see: 1918).

A more involved review to follow (spoilered for length/and-or you really want to be surprised!)

The Exchange

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A review of Francis Stevens' The Heads of Cerberus:

Spoiler:

The plot may be a bit hard to summarize so please bear with me. The premise of the book is that three normal people from 1918 (the modern day when the story was serialized) accidentally snort the "Dust of Purgatory" and travel to an astral-plane called Ulithia, where time flows backwards & forwards. The lady in charge there (The White Weaver) tells them to pass through the moon-gate, and when they do, they think they've returned home to 1918 Philadelphia...it looks just like the normal world they left! Almost...
It turns out the moon-gate leads them to another dimension, an alternate-dimension future (the year 2118) where they're stuck in a dystopian society, where the lower classes are known by numbers, not names and all knowledge is controlled by a corrupt elite. Because they're outsiders and ignorant of alt-Philly's laws, the good-guys are to be put to death! But! There's a chance for them to escape death by competing in a "Hunger Games"-like contest (only less "Hunger Games," more...Gulliver's Travels meets Star-Search). Action and adventure ensue. Guns and fist-fights are involved; two of the adventurers fall in love with each other in the course of fighting for their lives (hetero-style, because 1918).
Finally, at the very last minute, they manage to escape by ringing the big red Bell of Doom that EVERYONE says they Should. Not. Ring. (that part really does remind me of some D&D games I've played in). The alt-Philly timeline dissolves and they find themselves in the "real" Philadelphia they left, and discover that only several hours had passed in their world, while many days had passed in alt-Philly world.

The sci-fi part comes in when the guy who was trying to steal the "Dust of Purgatory" in the first place explains Star-Trek style that the dust is really a strange alchemical substance that allows people's "sympathetic vibrations" to vibrate in a pattern that leads them to become out-of-phase with the atomic structure of this world, and helps them visit the astral plane of Ulithia; that there are other worlds "within worlds" through the moon-gate and infinite-timelines, that they just visited one of them. The explanation reminded me of that episode of ST:NG when Ensign Ro Laren and Geordi LaForge are "out of phase" with normal matter because of a cloaking-device malfunction (ep: "The Next Phase"); only in this case, instead of the protagonists being able to see-and-hear the "real" Philadelphia, they're totally phased into alt-Philadelphia. When the Bell of Doom gets rung, the "sympathetic vibrations" of the bell knock their molecules back into alignment with the world they came from and they return home.

The Exchange

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Some further thoughts on THoC:

The aspects of the novel that seem most D&D-like are:
-"magic" dust that lets people travel to an astral plane.
-a gate-way into another dimension that the heroes HAVE to go through.
-a big THINGY OF DOOM that Thou Shalt Not Touch, and someone touches it anyway.

Oh, and the contest the heroes are forced to compete in is a bit like some contest-based modules where the PCs need to use their own particular skills to succeed.

Spoiler:

There's even a Thief character in the story who uses his pick-pocket skills to get around in alt-Philly, and is forced to compete against the Chief of Police in the "Hunger Games"-like contest.

If I were to borrow from THoC for my own role-playing game, I'd probably have Ulithia be a place, because the White Weaver is certainly cool, but the more satiric-alt-timeline stuff I likely wouldn't use. However, I could see someone else using it, especially if they like mixing in "real world" stuff with their fantasy, like the "Reign of Winter" Pathfinder book where the PCs get to kill Rasputin.


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Zeugma,

Thanks for the review and commentary! Now you've got me looking to see if I can find a copy of Heads of Cerburus somewhere and add it to my reading backlog... (grumble, grumble).

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