Lord Snow's page

From the store page it appears that the last volume of the latest announced AP (Curtain Call) is already here. Do we know what the next ones are? themes, number of books, level ranges, etc?

Hello fellow Paizonians!
As has been my modest, home-grown tradition this last past half decade or so, I'd like to share an overall view of the year I've just had in reading. Some basic statistics, some top lists (because resisting the urge to list things is basically a failure of the Turing test, as far as I'm concerned) and some reflections on the overall trend of things this past year.
I'd love to hear about the year that all you people had, too!

Hey all,
I've been out of the AP business for quite a while, as I was a bit burnt out from Pathfinder after a Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign (plus, I figured I'm never going to run half the APs I own already and money was somewhat tight).

I want to dip my toe back in the water by getting one of the APs that I missed in recent years.

The latest one I own is Iron Gods, so I'm looking for recommendations among all APs starting from Giantslayer and going all the way up to the current one.

My favorite past APs are Curse of the Crimson Throne, Reign of Winter and Shattered Star (I'm not the biggest fan of dungeon crawls, but the ones here are done so exceptionally well). My least favorites are Jade Regent and Kingmaker - I dislike the idea of a sandbox AP and would rather have a solid story with awesome set pieces :)

So, which AP should I get?

Is anyone here familiar with the series? I stumbled upon it while browsing Goodreads, and the mostly glowing reviews compare it favorably to Malazan (in terms of scope and depth).
Somehow, I don't recall ever seeing the series discussed in this forum.

Anyone here familiar with the series? I'm trying to decide if I want it to be my next "big reading project" (other contenders are Malazan, The Faithful and the Fallen, The Shadow Campaigns, The Lymond Chronicles and The Sword Of Shadows) and would like some input before I make my choice...

So first gameplay footage of Anthem, the newest Bioware offering, is now avilable. The snippet, which Bioware used to make a first impression with their game, focuses heavily on two elements: open world exploration and multiplayer (in the form of small group co-op).

More and more, it seems to me as if Bioware is reinventing itself in a way that alienates their traditional fanbase. I can certainly say that what I loved about their older games was the awesome focus on story, setting and characters, all told through a tight and well planned narrative with tons of dialogue and tactical combat with group management.

With every successive game they released, I watched in horror as these elements faded - sometimes to be replaced by different ones I don't like nearly as much, and sometimes simply to remain as muted versions of their former glory. In ME3 dialogue has been so overly simplified that you'll be hard pressed to differentiate conversations from slightly interactive cut-scenes. Dragon Age Inquisition did away with group management (you can still technically control your group members but the interface strongly encourages you to control a single character in each combat encounter - trying to play Inquisition like I did Origins was a complete nightmare of frustrating camera angles) and introduced a large open world instead of the well scripted and more contained areas of the good old days. Mass Effect 4 I know is mostly meh about pretty much every single element other than combat.

And now here comes Anthem. It looks to have a cool setting and some pretty fun gameplay elements, gorgeous graphics and many other likable things. But the choice to highlight multiplayer really scared me - I feel it's a safe bet that like me, a great number of Bioware friends *prefer* the solitary game experience over playing with friends, letting ourselves soak into the story and character we built for ourselves rather than being taken out of the experience by constantly chatting with troublesome *actual* humans.

Bioware is losing me here, and that is a real downer since some of their older games fit so perfectly and neatly to what I want out of a video game that they felt too good to be true.

Anyone here who feels like me? Or am I perhaps reading too much into the released Anthem footage?

Gave this one a try after having many of my friends rave about it for years.

I have to say that, even putting aside the stiff and unprofessional writing style, the first few chapters give a really unpleasant vibe. They read as a snooty nerd power trip - for a story about rationality and science, it uses a lot of purposefully obtuse language which works to prove superiority rather than to clearly communicate ideas and that's not how proper methodological thinking is practiced. The Harry Potter characters feels like a mouthpiece for an author obsessed with his own intelligence and frustrated that he is not respected enough for it.

Any fans here? I'd like to know if things change later in the story or if the current trajectory is a good indication of things to come. So far I have not merely been underwhelmed by the story, I was actually annoyed - yet so many kind and clever people I know love this.

What am I missing?

Yesterday night I set down in front of my laptop, browsed to bookdepository.com and handpicked 10 books (with a little cheating - they included 3 copies of First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and two copies of Senlin Ascends), spending about 100$ in the process. The idea is to have a big ol' stack of books ready to be handed off as presents whenever circumstances call for such.

Was kind of thrilling, just throwing my money at books like that. I mean, previously, the most I've ever spent on a single book purchase was 40$ for the entire Wheel Of Time series.

I would love to hear about other glorious spending sprees. Bought piles of books? splurged for some special edition? Let us know the gory details!

Since Trump won the presidency, I've been hearing a lot of people terrified of the rollback he might do on any or all of the liberal rulings and changes the Obama presidency performed. They imagine the unpleasant near future, the tens of thousands of policemen raiding homes and workplaces, rounding up illegal immigrants and sending them off on overcrowded trains and buses. They look at the grim statistics and know exactly what it means that 87% of Trump supporters are white.

And yet, what I hear little mention of is what I perceive as the true danger in our new reality. The possibility - the real, looming, numbing possibility - of the western civilization breaking apart and collapsing.

I'm 24 years old. I have had the absolute luck to have been alive during what must be the most safe and prosperous, least violent and least hateful three decades of human existence. During my entire as of yet short life I could lean on a certainty that things are just going to keep on getting better, and the only question is the pace. All we humans had to do was try to keep a semblance of order while scientists slowly but surely march us closer and closer to a technological utopia.

This certainty is gone. The world is holding it's breath. What used to seem like an unshakable status quo now reveals itself as the house of cards that it is. It takes quite a powerful blow to knock down one of the foundations of this structure, but once a single card is misplaced, the entire thing could collapse at once.

Trump, as president of the united states, is the single most powerful person in the world. He is positioned to knock down a foundation, if he is so inclined. It truly is anyone's guess if he would or wouldn't, and what would happen if he would. If Trump pulls U.S forces out of Asia and Europe and refuses to have America continue to act as global cop, nations that didn't need an army for decades will suddenly have to decide if they want to rebuild their military might. A South Korea without American backing may decide it needs a nuclear arsenal, prompting a mad scramble for nuclear armament across Asia. A Russia that does not fear American intervention can become more aggressive in it's effort to reassert control over former Soviet Union territories. A Middle East where Putin has a free reign to act could become a bloodbath or a huge dictatorship. A Europe shaken to it's core with newfound instability could turn to right wing extremists - Brexit may have been a start to a crumbling European Union. A world where global trade agreements are broken or revoked may experience a great recession, and billions could find they have less now than they used to - and lack of resources could easily lead to wars.

I'm not saying this apocalyptic scenario is going to happen, or even likely to happen in any way resembling how I lay it out. But my point, my fear, is that these things are now possible. I think like a mountaineer who discovered that the path ahead no longer has a safety rail - all of a sudden, any slip in his footing may lead to a tumbling fall.

With all due respect and empathy to the citizens of America who worry about gay marriage and the rights of women over their own body, Trump is not a local problem. He's a global menace. The world has been all but dormant for a while now, and I am greatly troubled to think that this period came to an end this week.

A while back, when Age Of Ultron came out in theatres, one of these storm-in-a-tea-cup controversies happened, and a group of internet people (including some I otherwise respect) attacked the movie as being sexist because of a single scene that had to do with Black Widow.

Now, I thought at the time that the outcry was completely unjustified and that you pretty much had to deliberately misinterpret that scene to view it as sexist. But, in a discussion in these forums, I tried my hand at an argument that attacked the issue from an altogether different angle. I asked people to imagine a situation where Black Widow is a man, but one of the other Avengers is a woman. I claimed that never matter which of the avengers is a female in this thought exercise, you can find a way to interpret the movie as being sexist and relegating the character to a gender role (The Hulk is the embodiment of mockery to a woman in a period, or Hawkeye is obviously hiding "her" nurturing side with a hidden family, or "Ironwoman" is slutty and insecure and hides inside her shell when she fights, etc.). I argued back then that the actual problem, the real gender bias in the movie, was a question of numbers. One female Avengers, five male.

The idea kicked around in my head ever since. Essentially, what I believe is that merely by having *enough* female characters, or minority characters, you can actually afford to do what you want with these characters without being insensitive. It's not that every female in a movie needs to be strong, or that every movie needs a well spoken and well educated black person - it's that the movie needs to have more than a token of any one gender or race. Obviously not every movie, no need for absurdism - but if the norm is that there simply are enough of these characters around, then each of them can be viewed just like a white male character would, and not as a representation of the creator's politics or opinions about whatever sector the character belongs to.

If there are three female characters in a movie, and one of them is a sexy thing that uses sex as a weapon against men - that's completely fine, because there are two other women who aren't like that. It's even OK if every single one of your female characters fall under some gender stereotype, if they are all different stereotypes - because almost every male character from every movie falls under some male gender stereotype or another. That's fine - stereotypes are the basis upon which most characters are built (that's the literal meaning of the word) and for most real people their gender plays some role in who they are.

My perfect example of this is the movie Chicago. It's a story so female-centric that it actually fails the reverse bachdel test. In that movie, just about every female character behaves in a way that in a male dominated movie would surely be considered a display of the sexism of the screen writers - the main character most of all - and yet nobody in their right mind would blame the movie of any such thing. That's because when watching the movie it is clear that every character is just that. A person, a human, not a mascot.

This brings to mind a different application of the word "diversity". The way the word is used in public today seems to me to encourage a daredevil competition to get the most types of humanity into your story, as divided by the lowest common denominator type of identity. Get as many genders and races and ages and socio-economic backgrounds and physical/mental disabilities represented, make sure everyone is included. But in this idea of mine, of representation as a numbers game, diversity means something else - get as many different types of actual identities into your movie. Put in people who are lazy, people who are inventive. Include the brave and the curious and the greedy and the attractive, the self confident and the hateful, the friendly and the thrill seekers, the shameless and the overtly sexual, the calm and the weird. Then all you have to do is to make sure no one group of people in your story is represented by a single set of characteristics that they all share - and there you have a it. A diverse movie where all people involved are well represented. Even if some or all of their members are shown in a negative way. Even if some or all of their members are to some extent defined by their gender/race/whatever. Because once no character has to bear the weight of representing the essence of an entire huge group of real humans, each character can become a representation of a single made up human - just like story telling is supposed to work.

Thoughts?

Any other fans of him around these parts? I somehow never knew he exists until a couple weeks ago, but once I did I was quickly converted.

For those as blind now as I used to be, Elon Musk is a man hellbent on making science fiction become a reality. Or, in slightly more grounded terms (it's not going to sound grounded at all, but there it is), he is forcing our society to start taking giant leaps towards a future defined by groundbreaking technologies.

He is CEO of two companies: Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla's stated goal is to accelerate the worldwide transition from gas-powered cars to electric cars, while the stated goal of SpaceX is to boost space exploration and colonization forward, to the point of having a million humans living on Mars in our life times. On the side he also oversees Solarcity, a world leader in the installation of solar panels to make homes and facilities energetically self sufficient, and has instigated the idea of the Hyperloop - an incredibly futuristic method of transportation that could take passengers as quickly as 1000 kilometers per hour, without taking a flight.

The kicker is, that all of these grand ideas seem to be working great so far. Spacex completely shook up the space industry - not only by being the fourth entity ever to send a shuttle to space ( the other three entities being the U.S, China and Russia) and breaking several other records along the way - but by managing to land back components of a space launch that traditionally were one-use affairs. This is expected to cut the price of space travel by orders of magnitude, and accelerate greatly the process of iteration and improvement on related technologies. Spacex now has a long term contract with Nasa for several launches.
Tesla completely shook up the car industry - not only by creating a car with the highest ever consumer report ever or by building the Gigafactory - but by giving the word an electric car that could outperform it's gas-based counterparts in every meaningful way. The "model 3", Tesla's newest product, is an affordably costed car that can go over 200 miles before needing a recharge, can accelerate to 60 mph in 6 seconds, and can be recharged on the road quickly in one of hundreds of recharge stations erected around the U.S (Asia and Europe are getting covered too, but not as thoroughly). The model 3 broke records recently as it had the single biggest opening week in history, with about 330,000 people placing in early order, by far exceeding expectations and straining the pace at which Tesla can make those cars.

And the hyperloop? Well, several countries and cities are now in talks with a company named "Hyperloop One" to be the first place where a real hyperloop is built, even as Spacex hosted a competition between universities around the world to design the best capsule for such a system.

I cannot think of any single other person alive today who is doing so much for humanity as Elon Musk is doing right now. What's so amazing is that the changes his companies vowed to bring are really happening, and I expect by 2030 they'll have had a profound and meaningful positive impact on the world. For more details, you can check out this wonderful blog post by waitbutwhy. It's about a million words long but honestly the subject matter demands close attention.

is anyone else nearly as awed and excited as I am?

The Big One is supposed to start at some point in the next few hours, and as always, I'm super excited!

Everybody, share your catches and shopping adventures!

My wish list for this year:
Arkham Knight
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Darkest Dungeon
Pillars of Eternity
XCOM2
Banner Saga 2
War Total Hammer War Hammer Total (I always forget the exact phrasing they chose for this game's title)
Bioshock 2 : Burial At Sea

Of course, I'm unlikely to get all of these for a price I'm willing to pay (and almost certainly getting all of them will go over budget) and I always discover cool games I never heard of and buy those.

More and more, it feels to me like this is one of the biggest questions regarding the future of this gigantic project. Every indication we have in the way they set things up so far is that almost no character ever dies, and when one does it is always either a villain or an extremely minor one. However, by this point the thinking tanks up at Disney/Marvel must already be pondering the continuation of their franchise past the original phases that were planned. The question of what could or should come after the infinity gems storyline is an interesting one, but has a different scope than the discussion I hope to have here. Will the post-Thanos storylines allow character death?

There are two approaches I can see here.

1) Character death is the only sane way forward. The number of characters in the MCU is only increasing with time, and rather rapidly. Even worse, actors get older or become fatigued with their roles. But death in the main cast serves as more than just a convenient logistical solution that helps smooth the engines of a movie franchise that we can expect to stretch over decades and include hundreds of characters. It also increases the stakes and keeps he audience engaged. With the last few Marvel movies it was pretty obvious to almost everyone watching them that no established characters were going to be killed, and by this time people are starting to feel the effect of this choice. Several scenes that were powerful and memorable in The Winter Soldier, for example, just don't work if nobody in the audience is buying it for a second that even remotely important good guys will ever die. The Marvel movies are about conflict and fighting that level cities and scatters armies - at some point characters are going to have to soak up some of the damage too, or the movies will lose a lot of their edge.

2) The MCU is the mythology of the 21st century. It's less about telling a coherent story and more about establishing a pantheon of larger than life heroes and villains, and watching them interact. Nobody is complaining that all the Greek Gods always seem to make it out of any tight corner - they are gods, their existence is a cornerstone of reality. Stories about superheroes do not even need to be encountered in a particular order, let alone have consequences. The value these characters have as legends is far greater than the value of any individual story they participate in. Thus permanently wiping any of them out of the mythology is a fundamental mistake. It goes against what the series is trying to achieve.

To be entirely frank, I'm not even sure which of these approaches is better than the other, which is a problem because they are both direct opposites. I would really be interested to see what people here can bring to this discussion.

Sparked by an offhanded comment in another thread, I thought this could be a fun one.

You get to choose one book or series that was never adapted and isn't currently in development, and explain why you are right and everybody else is wrong and that book needs a TV adaptation.

I'm going to start out of left field here, and go with Pushing Ice (by Alistair Reynolds), to be adapted as a high budget miniseries. The book is great, and also very episodic in nature, and could easily be told in say 6 episodes, each two of them covering one of the sections in the book. It will be nothing like any TV show I ever heard of, vast in scope (the story sprawls across decades) and with strong elements of humans drama and SF over-the-top Big Ideas, incorporating many smaller stories. I think this will not merely be awesome to watch, but also could show the general public a kind of science fiction they've almost never encountered.

My interest was sparked by a discussion of the narrator of the Amber series (by Roger Zelazny), who may or may not be an unreliable narrator .

I find the subject of unreliable narration to be enticing and dangerous in the same time (Great to date in high school, but not really marriage material). It could add a lot to a story, but done wrong, it could also just make everything confusing and annoying. It also raises some meta-questions about the entire concept of first person writing - most people use it as just a stylistic choice,but then some other people expect you to start suspecting everything their characters say when they tell the story in first person.

So I'm curious - what interesting and remarkable SFF books use the unreliable narrator? I know Kvothe is one in The Name Of The Wind, and so is the doctor from Black Company. Anyone else?

2015 is being wrapped up at these very moment, and we are mere hours away from 2016. A good time, I figure, to look back at the reading we did this year. I decided to give this a thread apart from the "what books are you currently reading" behemoth, since this is more about reflection and summarization then it is about some regular update. So here are some stats and notes and lists about my year in reading:

I'll be looking forward to see how other people faired with their reading this year, if any are willing to share!

I've only done three so far, but I am completely and thoroughly hooked.

For those not in the know, real life escape rooms are small games that emulate classic "point and click adventure" type video games, where you go through some environment gathering item and solving deranged riddles, except for real. You enter a room with a few other friends, and get locked inside. You have 60 minutes to figure a way out, only finding the key for the door after you work through a succession of various puzzles, each one of them unlocking (often literally but sometimes figuratively, which is way cooler) new riddles and parts of the room as you progress.

The really cool part is that this awesome concept I described is really only the jumping point. Much of the value of these rooms comes not only from the creative puzzles and awesome game aspect, but also from the increasingly elaborate themes for the rooms. Early versions had mostly some sort of vague backstory for the room that explained why you're in it, but the fun ended there. More recent rooms come with great stories and great new looks. As an example, I just recently did a room called Horrors Of Trenton, modeled after the asylum in New Jersey where horrific experiments were performed on the inmates. The room was completely believable and slowly ramped up the horror - at first we were locked in the office of the manager, we then unlocked our way into the cell of an inmate, and finally found a secret passage into a secret laboratory populated with blood filler syringes, vicious looking medical tools, and even a refrigerator containing chopped off body parts (not real ones, obviously, but props). Needless to say each step of this journey involved some original and twistes puzzles that made heavy use of electronics. For example, back in the office we started out way in, we found a note from the good doctor describing how a picture of his wife is hanged on the southern wall, a picture of his son in the east and of his daughters in the west. Looking at the walls we realized that the twins were opposite the wife - which didn't match the description. We rearranged the pictures in a way that made sense and click! - a door unlocks itself.

So, in short, if you haven't tried any escape room yet, you really should give it a try. You're in for some crazy, original and unique experiences that just have to appeal to most gamers.

Any other escape room addicts around these partS?

Well, f*@k.

Direct ramifications for this could end up with million of people being affected, with hundreds of thousands dead. Europe could very well perceive this as their own version of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. No country will stand idly by and wait to see if the next mass murder is happening in their capital city or that of their neighbors. This may very well be the end of an era.

I hope, I really do, that I'm seriously wrong. But it doesn't feel that way. This is big. This is a historical event. This is Charlie Hebdo magnified more than ten times over. This is the kind of bulls#*t that starts wars.

Please tell me I'm wrong.

1) People shrug in books. I mean, all the time. Not sure I have even read a book where not a single character shrugged. Yet, somehow, I've never seen anyone shrug in real life. It's as of there's a secret agreement that includes all authors and all readers that states that shrugging is an actual thing. Does anybody know of anyone outside of a book that shrugs?

2) One of the things I like so much about books is how they are not a visual medium, how they allow me to imagine things on my own. It's an intimate experience, with no buffer between me and the story as the author intended it. Yet for some reason, good cover art is really important to me. If the cover is some grainy blob of abstract colors, I'm just unlikely to want to buy the book - even if the story sounds interesting. Heck, even if I'm buying it digitally and never have to look at the cover! What's wrong with me?

3) So songs have lyrics, right? and those lyrics sometimes tell a story. I find it interesting to think of those stories in terms of genre - about 99% of them would be romantic, I guess, and of the remaining 1% many would be literary or political. You know, character studies and such. But there are also fantasy songs and ever more rarely science fiction songs. I wish there were more.

4) Continuing with the song theme, it's interesting that authors are always expected to be able to write convincingly from the points of views of characters very different from themselves - of different genders, ages, races and occupations. But singers are always just expected to express themselves. Is that fair? Should I be complaining that the Beatles can't write female characters, and that there aren't enough oriental people in their songs? and assuming that's not the case, why is it fair to demand this of authors then?

Comment on my points. Add your own. I know you all have all sorts of weird thoughts about books that you just never got a chance to talk about with other people. Here is the place :)

They have been announced, and I thought in light of some recent controversies it would be interesting to look at how they penned out.

NO AWARD was chosen for five categories: novella, short story, related work, editor sort form, editor long form.

Personally I'm pretty sure using NO AWARD in this way was not the intentional spirit of the law when the option was included in the process, but then neither were voting slates, so there's that.

In the categories that weren't bombed, it still seemed like the slate didn't really get anyone through, with best novel going to a Chinese author best novelette to a Dutch, and best graphic story going to a comic about a woman. Speaking of which, two female writers walk away with a hugo this year, G. Willow Wilson for the graphic novel about Wonderwoman and Laura J. Mixon for fan writer.

On a personal note, I have to highlight Orphan Black taking a hugo for dramatic representation. The show may be somewhat confused (or at times downright unintelligible) when it comes to the overarching plot, but dammit it deserves recognition somewhere for the unbelievably good delivery on the premise of a single actress convincingly playing half the cast of characters. I think that in this day and age it is increasingly silly that Doctor Who is such a consistent winner with barely any cimpetition when in reality many SFF shows outperform it in every meaningful way. Happy to see Orphan black getting a nod.

On the other hand I am equally sad seeing Guardians of the Galaxy winning the movie category. The movie was good times and fun to watch, but it beat Interstellar, which I consider to be maybe the finest SF film of the 21st century (so far...) and I can't help but viewing it as a serious missed opportunity.

Seems like it migth happen.

Good news. Steelheart is a YA book by Brandon Sanderson. For a YA it is really solid, with an interesting premise, reasonably good story and action, and some awesome twists.

Also, it should be really easy to adapt to the screen. It is already written like a smart popcorn movie in book form anyway, so reverting it to its natural state shouldn't be too hard.

Looking forward to it, if it does indeed end up happening.

Any other fans in this here forum?

I just finished the second season. In many ways these games have been among the best interactive story telling I've ever seen. However, having finished all there is to the games for now...

I am not one, and frankly, I'm curious about the reading experience of those who are.

For me, a novel is a journey. Even when I blaze through a short book it takes me days. Over in the Jim Butcher thread people seem to be able to read s Dresden Files entry in a day. They are quick reads for me too - in that I read two or three hours each days and finish them in a week.

What I can't quite grasp is how people can wrap their heads around so much so quickly. A 300+ page book has so many different moments, scenes, characters, each scene with its own emotional weight. I don't think it is possible to have the same expereince reading a book for a week of three as with reading a book in a few hours. How can a fast reader encompass it all?

So my question to any fast reader willing to indulge my curiosity is,

1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<

Heya,

this is important for my game ronight. Two unrelated questions:

1) The "frightful presence" ability of dragons has a CR and a range, but the effect is not made entirely clear in the bestiary. In the monster entry it refers to the indices (page 300) but there it says only "a creature may become shaken or frightened". Well, which of them is it? Is it shaken or frightened if it was shaken already? this is the interpretation I'm going with currently.

2) The evasion ability of a rouge allows to negate all damage in reflex saves that would otherwise only negate half damage. Does this have any effect on negative effects that are not damage? For example, if a sorcerer casts an icy prison on a rouge with evasion and the rouge makes the save, will she (the rouge) still get tangled?

Many thanks!

The time of year is upon us again, and I am set and ready to get as close to a years' worth of video games as I can.

For the opening shot I got Valkyrie chronicles, for the handsome price of 5$. Doesn't get much cheaper than that, and the game seems like it could feed my inner XCOM demon for the next few months. I am also eyeing the telltale games prequel to Borderlands - but, I never played borderlands and so am no invested in the world, and I have reason to hope the game might return later in the sale for even cheaper, so I'm probably passing on this offer.

My wishlist? Well, there are all those nifty new RPGs that came out this year and they are most of the list. Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Creation, Numenara, Dragon Age Origins. There is also the Banner Saga which looks promising. Rounding up the RPG batch, I would pounce on a good deal for either the Game of Thrones or Walking Dead telltale games.

In other genres I am hopeful for Bioshock: Burial At Sea, Wasteland 2, Massive Chalice, Broken Age and possibly Alan Wake.

What are you guys and gals getting?

The movie adaptation of the debut novel of Andy Weir (and one of the best reads I had in years) is apparently gathering a lot of talent. Ridley Scott is directing, Mat Damon has the lead, and Jessica Chestain (interstellar), Kate Mara (House of Cards), Donal Glover (Community) and Sean Bean are only part of the names in the support cast. The film is expected to be released November 2015.

I'm fairly excited for this. Seems like people are pretty serious about trying to make it good. My only concern is that the story will have to be adapted smartly - as most of the book is composed of the main character doing smart things (many of which require some basic knowledge in physics, engineering, chemistry and occasionally botany to understand) to solve seemingly impossible problems. Without the POV journal internal monologue its going to be next to impossible to understand the events of the book and, possibly even worse, being a lone astronaut on Mars means that the main character does not really interact with others all that much in the novel.

So clearly, something has to change for the movie unless they want to relay on near constant narration. There are several good ways to approach the problem, and I hope they choose one of them, I just hope they don't flop. This is going to be about more than just filming events in the novel - it will have to be adapted to a different medium and change as a result. I hope they pull this off.

So, I dabbled a bit in Alastair Reynolds and Peter Hamilton, both of which I liked. Specifically, Reynolds had huge cosmic scale ideas that coupled with his devotion to "realistic" science adhering to the laws of nature create a real sense of awe. Hamilton I only read a sample of in "Fallen Dragon", but I liked his murky shades-of-grey kind of future that is maybe better or maybe worse than the present, and his attention to details was nice, especially a very interesting presentation of the teraformation of a planet.

I'm looking out for more, and don't want to stumble on the unremarkable ones. Greg Egen is a name that floated to my attention a couple of times, and the translated book "Three Body Problem" caught my attention (I think it is telling just how much the name of the book made me want to read it). Other than that, I know very little of the genre.

Any recommendations?

Also, out of curiosity - are there any women in the field of hard science fiction?|

Awesome

Not sure I'm perfectly OK with the storyline - I mean, it will be new and refreshing and interesting, but having humanity lose "off screen" after putting so much effort into winning the first game is annoying. I guess XCOM is less about the story than it is about the mood, but still.

First game was awesome, Enemy Within was surprisingly worth the price, so I have high expectations.

So, any other fans of the show around there parts?

I just finished watching everything that's been out so far (episode 11 of season 2), and I feel comfortable saying that this is my favorite cartoon show (eclipsing The Last Airbander by a small but noticeable margin, and being of far more consistent quality than Rick and Morty which were the two previous contenders). Honestly, it might just be one of my favorite shows period.

For those unfamiliar with it, Gravity Falls is a blend of fantasy, horror and science fiction that should honestly appeal to most fans of any of those genres. It's about twins (a boy named Dipper and a girl named Mable) sent to spend the summer with their great uncle Stan in a remote town called Gravity Falls. They quickly find that the town is swamped with a mix of creatures and unnatural powers that ranges from the funny, through the terrifying and unto the realms of the utterly bizarre. The story lines are original, awesome, and often so twisted that its hard to believe that this is a show aimed for kids. The characters are a great highlight as well - they are funny and likable, for the most part well rounded and avoiding cliches. An important part of the reason the show is such a joy to watch is the Mystery Twins (don't call them that to their faces, though) themselves - Dipper and Mable are VERY good child characters. Their bland of innocence and eagerness for adventure feels very believable, and they genuinely love each other - which is truly heart warming to watch. The last highlight is the plot itself - most episodes follow the "freak of the week" pattern, but especially in the second season things start moving forward in a startling pace and I found myself holding my breath quite a bit. It got really tense. Anyway, if you haven't checked it out yet, I strongly recommend that you do - you will not be disappointed!

For those who are already fans,

News!

I'm excited. The new concept art is good looking, and while I think Alien didn't age well, I think Aliens is one of the best science fiction movies of all times, so would definitely want to see another one.

I'm not extremely happy about Blomkamp as the director/writer though. District 9 was good but forgettable, and Elysium was downright boring. Plus, there are some pretty big shoes to fill in this franchise.

But, he seems like a true fan (truer than me, certainly) and I have faith his passion to the project will translate to the screen.

So this happened.

To be honest, I'm not convinced making a good TV adaptation of The WoT is even possible - maybe if people were smart about it and concendced the series or something. Anyway, it will be years before we see an attempt now, unless someone finds a way to stop this shameful farce.

I've been saying it for years but given a recent influx of "Which AP to run", "Which AP is the most X" and "rank the APs" threads I will say it again.

This sub forum needs a sticky thread where people discuss and compare APs. There are always going to be people out to choose their first AP, and the community is always great with providing various opinions. But why not make this huge amount of information easily accessible to anyone who wants it? And anyone who wants to know something that wasn't already covered could just ask - and have the answer given to them be available to anyone who might want to know in the future!

Since those threads keep popping up, I think the intelligent thing to do is figure out the pattern and adjust accordingly. People want to be able to compare APs under various parameters, that information will always be relevant and there will always be new people.

So apparently this is happening, and they got Mila Jovovich too.

Certainly interesting. These stories are good - in particular I like In The Lost Lands a fair bit. However, I'm not entirely sure yet how the movie will include all three stories - they have some tenuous thematic connections, but mostly they are about different settings and have different emotional tones. I'm hoping that the movie will actually feature three separate stories that it will hop between (thinking of Cloud Atlas) and not attempt to make all three stories into the same one. The second option seems somewhat nonsensical.

The State of Sanderson for 2014 showcases Sanderson pretty well. It recounts, among other things, the story of how he sneakily wrote another Mistborn novel while nobody was looking (totaling 2 new books in the Wax & Wayne series for 2015!), and his extensive and eleborate Cosmere plans for the next, oh, 30 years or so?
It's not only vague plans to do "more books in this or that series" either - his plan includes the order in which the books have to be done (the third mistborn trilogy has to happen after the Elantris sequel, for example) which suggests he actually has a fairly good idea of where these stories are going.

What so impressed me about the man's writing initially is how well planned his books are. The plots are incredibly smart and very well structured, and in reading a trilogy by him you can count on it that there will be a hint to the end of the trilogy within the first pages of the first book. Especially in our current world, where writers of all sorts rarely plan their books well enough to reach a truly satisfying ending, that stood out.
Well it seems that for Sanderson meticulously planning a book is small scale. It's planning a multiverse that would span dozen of books, tens of thousands of pages, spread across an unreasonable number of standalone series along with some connecting series... that's closer to the kind of challenge he envisions.

I have to tip my hat here. I don't think I've ever even heard of an author capable of what Sanderson is doing.

A recent article by the Russian communist party that, apparently, still exists somehow, addressed the landing on the comet P67, which was first discovered during the sixties by a couple of Russian communist scientist, condemned the European Space Agency for daring to land a "capitalist craft on a communist comet, that was discovered by socialists".

The communist party claimed that "Klim Choriomov and Svetlana Grsimnko didn't sleep for whole nights, worked, studied the comet. All of the Soviet Union was following their progress with vigilance and concern, and all of a sudden the European Union sends it's spaceship there without asking out permission!... One could say, 'well, good for them, why would we care when we can make do with all the other comets in space?', to which we'll say,'No, comrade! Lenin said the socialism means to settle accounts on all things'. Russian needs to address the International Criminal Court to punish the European Space Agency for it's criminal invasion."
"we need", they cried with outrage, "using special signals, to make the comet to fly far far away and get swallowed in some black hole so that no one could have it, and that damn European robot be tossed the hell away. As for us, our scientist will discover new comets, on which only soviets and Russians would live!"
We Russians share our discoveries generously. We wouldn't mind it if the comet was taken by Cubans, North Koreans, or Chinese - what, would it hurt? are we lacking for comets? But the ones who made it there, with cunning and audacity, are those who now strangle Russian with their sanctions! And what if these perverts will eventually hold a pride parade there?"

Note: this article was translated from Russian by a friend, so the translation is not entirely accurate, but the spirit of it was conserved.

So, since I got a smartphone (it's a more recent event than would seem logical to most people) I've been an avid podcast listener in long drives. I am always on the hunt for new ones, as I devour about 8 hours of podcast content on a slow week.

So, I thought it could be a great idea to create a thread where we share, recommend and discuss all the great podcasts out there. My focus is on geeky, hobby podcasts but anything goes really.

I'll start with my list:

1) Limited Resources - this Magic: The Gathering podcast is truly the best in the business. It is a weekly, 90 minutes long podcast about a strategic approach to playing limited Magic, and not only is it entertaining, but it also vastly improved my results since I started to listen. Their set reviews (which they do for each set that comes out) are especially useful. If you play Magic, even if you don't intend to regularly listen to Limited Resources, at least check the set reviews out. They are, simply put, the best way to learn the new set and get ahead of your fellow players.

2) Litreactor - I only discovered these guys recently, and they only have about 20 episodes out and no indication of a new one coming. However, their discussion of books and everything related to books and publishing is extremely entertaining to me. Not a lot of value in this one if you mean to learn something useful, but very fun and funny.

3) SF signal - this is a hugo award winning SF/F podcast but I'm honestly not sure why. The discussions are always very shallow, and the host has a very annoying and prominent personality that tends to overshadow the awesome guests he brings to the show. However, occasionally there are interviews with very interesting authors, so I'd still say this one is worth a listening.

4) Know Direction - the Pathfinder podcast. Come on, if you are on this forum you probably know them. In case you don't, check them out for reviews, discussions, interviews and con coverage. If something has to do with Pathfinder, it's here.

What I'm really looking for is a podcast to replace SF Signal as my SF/F podcast. Anybody knows about something like that?

So for the last few years, the design philosophy behind APs seems to be a straightforward and successful one - choose a theme, build AP around it.

It works for a few reasons - firstly, as long as the theme is resonant enough (which so far they have been), people get what the AP is about right away which helps their decision to play it. "Oh, cool, this is the pirate/horror/demons AP!". Secondly, the themes that Paizo went for so far are such that there are many associated story tropes that go with them, as well as a built in aesthetic that allows APs to feel distinguishable. Thirdly, as campaigns, it's good that APs have themes. In some of the campaigns there wasn't much linking the adventures together, and a unifying theme still made all six adventures into part of a cohesive whole.
There are many other advantages to this style of designs but I'd say these three are the main ones.

Now here's what I feel - while things are working very well right now, I think APs could be more interesting (and play out better) with a slightly different design philosophy. My pitch could be surmised as followed: "For each adventure path, choose two themes - a main theme, and a support theme."

Does anybody else think this is a good idea, or has an even better idea? I don't think I've ever seen a discussion about this before, and I'm curious about the way others in this forum think of this subject.

So, let's say four skalds are working together. Each of them has the Raging Song ability.

1) If they all choose to activate the ability with the same song, say Inspired Rage, do the bonuses stack for each of the listening allies?

2) If they choose different abilities (e.g one of them chooses inspired rage, another chooses song of strength), can allies benefit from both?

Bonus question:

3) Can a barbarian who's raging gain the benefits of Raging Song? My instinct says yes but I'm not sure.

So, having recently reread the article on Shoanti from Curse of the Crismon Throne #4 (A History of Ashes), I noticed that it is heavily hinted that the Shoanti once served Thassalion.

There are two folklore stories written in that article. One of them is about how the Shoanti used to be the selected warriors of an ancient empire. But then the leaders of the empire were corrupted, and the Shoanti left to fend for themselves.
The second story is about how the seven (hmm, suspicious) tribes of the Shoanti won a great battle. The leaders of each tribe gathered and each lay a blade on the ground pointing to the leader of the tribe whom he thought contributed most to the battle. Each of them lay a weapon pointing at one of the others and when they were done, each leader had exactly one blade pointing at him - creating the shape of a seven pointed star (hmmm, very suspicious). One of their masters from the ancient empire saw what happened, and told them that this was the shape of victory.

So, did I stumble upon a conspiracy here? or just something that everyone else already figured out? or is it addressed somewhere officially?

Is this for real? 'cause if it is, I'm pissed off.

Literally a minute after I was done explaining to my young brother that no, we don't need to flee to the united states because we are not even in danger, the alarm sounded. Wasn't really scary, because the missiles are very inaccurate and the alarm covers a very large radius... but still, it was the first time ever that an alarm was sounded so far north.

A friend in the army confirmed to me a couple minutes ago that it was a true alarm and that an actual missile was blown up over my sky with the defense system. My mom's friend's son was hastily recruited back to the army with a "directive 8" - one used to bring back soldiers to active service ASAP when a war starts.

Drek.

Current state of affairs in Israel, politically, a rough sketch:

Perhaps not surprisingly (it was to me) being shot at, even impersonally, kind of ruined my mood for the evening. Here's hoping for a quick end to this latest round of fun.

So far I got all 3 expansions of Heroes of Might and Magic 6, and also X-Com: Enemy Within (I don't agree with the principle philosophy of the game, which only adds content to an existing campaign rather than introducing a new one, but for a 67% discount I was willing to grab it).

Anyone else already have their hands full of loot?

Three times I was scared when reading. The first was when I read the shining as a fourteen years old. A couple of the scenes just wouldn't leave my mind. The second was when I discovered Lovecraft - I would read the stories mostly because they were cool and had mythos stuff in them, and then find myself awake late at night, trouble in a way I could not entirely understand, and feeling threatened by the dark (which is kind of the point with those stories, but isn't all that pleasant when it actually works).

The third was a couple minutes ago. It was in a book of the Otherland series, and I was scared by the notion of answering a phone. The details are not terribly important, only the fact that what was happening was not very scary on it's own, but some... something in the writing, a certain way the words were put together just scared me enough to put the book down and take a pause to calm down.

But once I did get some mental distance from the book, I found myself thinking about what just happened in a more rational manner... and I was curious.

How do horror books work? is it evocative language? is it pacing? is it just scary ideas?

So I had the exciting chance to do exactly as the thread title describes, and the results are here. It was quite an interesting interview, and even though it was meant to interest new readers, I found myself learning some awesome facts about his books that I didn't use to know. So it could be a good read both for those who are not familiar at all with Wilson's work, and for those who are but don't know much of the behind the scenes stuff.

LINK.

So, how do you think they did this on Golarion? :)

So I'm building this 6th level Rakshasa Monk. The BAB from being a 6th level monk is +4, but the Rakshasa has a total of +14.

Two questions:

1) How many attacks per turn does the Rakshasa get to do?
2) Can the Rakshasa use flurry of blows as if it had a +14 BAB? I assume not, because else this monk will get a +17/+17/+12/+12/+7/+7/+2 attacks, which seems to be a bit much...

So, the group I'm GMing is about to arrive to the Arkonas, and I'm wandering how I should handle things for my Pathfinder conversion.

In the original, 3.5 D&D version of the adventure, the Rakshasa are treated as CR 8 creatures, in spire of the "official" version in the monsters manual that treats them as CR 10 creatures. The argument was that they lack in offensive powers, and therefore are not as much of a challenge as they would otherwise be. Some of the encounters include Raskshasas with class levels - like Viamanda, a 6th level monk.

Supposedly, the Rakshasas were fixed for the PF bestiary - they are still CR 10. Should I use them as CR 8 critters? or should I treat them as CR 10? if so, should I maybe apply some CR reducing templates or something? How did you people handle this?

recently announced!

Personally I'm excited, though of course a little nervous, too. This has been a great series of books to follow so far (unlike many, I loved the 3rd book as well as I did the second and first), and it's not like syfy are known for their high quality, well budgeted TV show. Also, given how character driven the books are, any choice of lesser actor for any of the major roles could ruin the whole thing.

Personally, I'm really hoping for Joel McHale (Jeff from Community) to star as Holden, and for William Fichtner (detective Mahone from Prison Break) to be Miller. I also want Morgan Freeman to be Fred, but I guess that's asking for too much, isn't it? :(

On a more upbeat note, I'm excited about the choice of writers for the show - Ostby and Fergus are kind of hit or miss, I feel, but when they hit you get Ironman - so at least I know the potential is high.

Man, this guy ROCKS, and he rocks hard.

Now, I didn't read everything he has ever written. Not even close, actually. So far I had the pleasure to read the entire Mistborn Trilogy, Steelheart and, my favorite so far, Warbreaker.

Sanderson has a very unique style, and his originality with the magic systems is astounding. Further than that, the stories he comes up with are so darn elegant. When I finished reading Steelheart, the latest book by him that I read, I actually had to stop at the big reveal at the end, clap, and say out loud: "You got me, Sir. This is brilliant".

So many authors have a hard time finding an ending to a great story they come up with, but Sanderson has the entire story figured out. Everything makes sense, and the subtlest of details turn out to be clues in retrospect.

Now Warbreaker was my favorite book so far, because of it's fascinating structure -

Any other Sanderson fans out there? if so, which is you favorite book by him so far?

I was curious how many vacations per school year kids get around the globe.

Here in Israel there is one vacation per religious holiday, most of them shorter than 3 days but Hanuka being an entire week, and Passover sometimes being 3 whole weeks. There is also a school break in independence day.

The big one, though, is a 2 months break in the summer, which separates every two school years.

So I basically have no idea how this works in other parts of the world. I know from watching American movies that there's a "spring break", which sounds like it coincides with the Passover break - about 2.5 weeks of vacation when spring starts. Other than that, I don't know anything about school breaks anywhere around the world, and I'm curious. The matter was brought to my attention when a newspaper article explained that kids around here have too many breaks from school, especially compared to other developed countries.

Just watched the first 5 episodes. This show is simply awesome. The voice acting is mostly annoying and I find the drawing style nearly offensive with it's ugliness, but man, it's still great.

So if you didn't have a chance to catch this, umm, "different" new offering from Dan Harmon and the dude who voiced Lemongrab (from adventure time) - I recommend that you give it a try, with a ceveat that it's extremely vulgar (and sometimes gets to be very violent) so if that's not your cup of tea, better pass on this one.

If you HAVE watched the start already... well, discuss!