Kevin Thorne's page

Amael wrote:

Shadowborn wrote:

A lot of great authors and books have already been mentioned, but I need to add Glen Cook's Black Company Series, and Gene Wolfe. Wonderful stuff.

I've been eyeing the Black Company series for some

time now...it sounded like something I would like
to read, didn't seem to be your typical fantasy book.
Can you describe some of it (the style/feel of the book)?

A gritty mercenary company is hired by an evil mageocracy to help forcibly put down a rebellion.

The story is told through the eyes of the chronicler of the Black Company (the company physician named Croaker).

Strong plot. Very good characters. No heroes, just shades of grey and black. Unique but maybe dry and hard to get into writing style. I think people (older than me) see a lot of vietnam war style fiction inspiration in the narrative. Cook in turn is one of the big inspirations for Erikson.

I highly recommend it, and if you have trouble getting started, push through, the entire series is good and should be dirt cheap at used bookstores.

EDIT - but don't take my word for it:

A comment on a post from the Grognardia blog quotes Gygax as saying this about the Black Company:

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/10/pulp-fantasy-library-black-company.h tml

The Gygax recommendation is in issue #96 (April 1985), on page 9.

As printed:

A good “game” book
If you haven’t read The Black Company by Glen Cook (Tor Books, Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1984), then you are missing a good book which relates closely to the AD&D® game. I can’t swear that the author plays FRP games, let alone any of TSR’s offerings, but somehow he has captured the essence of them, regardless. The Black Company reads as if it were a literary adaptation of actual adventuring, as it were, in a swords & sorcery milieu akin to that of a proper AD&D game campaign. The style of writing is neither heroic nor...

The entire series has been republished recently in the past few months as a series of 4 omnibus collections. Each is between $10-20 and well worth it. One of the best series I've ever read.

Hate to sound like a broken record, but any news on when it will ship from Paizo?

I've preordered it for awhile, and apparently other places have it in stock already.

I did find that the first adventure threw the players into the middle of things with the abrupt death of the King. I personally just extended the time after the fishery adventure by two sessions, just having them run around the city and having fun, letting them get a feel for the place with the hint that things were starting to turn into a powder keg. Then, when the King died, they felt a little bit more involved when all hell broke loose.

I think it's all a matter of timing and how you incorporate it into your own game. The setting, as is, did it fine.

I'm approximately at the same point in the campaign that Moriarty is, and having played this AP straight through to that point, I will say a few points:

- While my character is a resident of this city, and in game, she cares about it, I don't give a rat's ass about it out of game. In fact, I force Heidi to be more raa-raa than I am, simply because the game demands it. "Why should I risk catching this plague that's killing 1/2 the city?"
- Granted, point #1 is really the DM's job and not the AP's, but since the AP starts out at level 1, it should get you more ingrained into the city, not just as adventure hooks.
- The AP does seem to be very railroad-ish. Most campaigns [mostly homebrews, I'll admit] that I've played/run give us more options. Here, we pretty much have to do this, save her, find that, etc. It really reduces the chance for role-playing, IMO.

Full-disclosure: I'm MUCH more into roll-playing/power-gaming, and less on the role-playing. This path was one of the ones that I was really working on role-playing, and I dislike how little I can do in this one.

tbug wrote:

Tiger Lily wrote:

Players should not be reading these threads as it amounts to cheating.

But if you check the OP you'll see that this thread was started by a player in order to give feedback on his play experience.

...which is perfectly fine once the campaign is done, at which point the spoiler point is moot because the player isn't a player anymore. However, even some of the thread TITLES can be spoilers based on how DMs are structuring their campaigns and how close to the chest they are playing their cards. So I still say... players reading the boards are GOING to pick up information they shouldn't regardless of how liberally the spoiler button is used.

The player in question specifically SAID to limit spoilers as he's in the middle of the game!

BTW, does Paizo read all of these for feedback? That sounds like a fun job!

The cleric has the Protection & Strength domains. I strongly considered War & Weather...but I won't be using a warhammer (cleric of Thor) and thought I wanted some of the earlier domain abilities of these domains.

The sorcerer was going to use the elemental bloodline, and claim to be a descendant of Thor (lightning, eh?). Should be interesting, to say the least...