Art Books and Video Games

Hey all,

Like many, I am posting the holiday roundup for this year.

This year's holiday yield included nothing in the hobby gaming category. While much of what I received is certain inspirational and related and a geeky, extended family sort of way, not a single die or adventure supplement was to be had.

Don't think I didn't appreciate what I did get, though and what I did receive was very nice. I received a video game i had been looking for - "Borderlands". I have purchased this game twice as a used copy but neither worked and this year i finally got a hold of a new copy that works fine.

The other items, the ones that were really nice were some art books (pictured above). Oneo f them was the impressive art book for Elysium. not only is this book full of great concept art, but the text really illustrate why Niell Blomkamp is a much a real film maker and an artist. I mean, come on, recruiting real tagger and graffiti artists from Mexico city to do the graffiti designs on his sets and props. Talk about legit.

The Halo 4 art book features some really spellbinding concept art for character and environments. It doesn't feature much in the way of vehicle or weapon concept, at least not in comparison to the other Halo art books I have read, but it's still wonderful.

Nuthin' But Mech is a nice sampler of concept art from various artists and a great way to check our to see who is doing what so I can seek out more of their work.

Captain Midnight Chronicles

I'm always on the look out for good reading and inspiration for my gaming hobby. I guess i like to kill two birds with one stone. This book really succeeds in fulfilling that goal.

"Captain Midnight Chronicles" is an anthology of short stories reprising the classic pulp character of radio and film fame in all new adventures written by some very talented authors of the genre and edited together by Christopher Mills (also a contributing author). There are twelve unique stories of adventure and derring do in a number of locations and against some truly pulpy villains like Ivan Shark. Aerial escapades and thrilling on-the-ground action are the meat of these stories.

Give it a look. I picked mine up on Amazon.com.

-Eli

A Curious Little Tome

I picked this book up at the local Half Priced Books. Four the $5 it cost me, I didn't see a problem with picking up an obscure bit of 3E fun and I cannot say that I regret it.

The book itself is presented in a curious format. It has a lay-flat, ringed spine and hard covers, making it perfect for the tabletop. No trouble getting it to stay on the right page which is critical as this book is set up for a series of presentations that are splashed across two facing pages.

The book is is a series of encounters, or small adventure areas, usually just a few room per map. You get a nicely rendered grey scale map, and a series of descriptions detailing the various rooms presented on the map. There are occasional note suggesting tie-ins with other sections in the book in some of them, allowing you to expand beyond that map if you choose.

What I find most useful about the book is that each of the sections is self-contained enough to allow for a quickie side jaunt but also tie into a larger section if you need something more substantial. Even though it's statted for 3E, it would be no great thing to sub in the stats from whatever version of D&D or similar system you are using.

I see this getting much use in my family game.

-Eli

Monster-Blood Tattoo: Well, cheers, dear friends.

If you recall, I had mentioned the wonderful fantasy series known originally as the "Monster Blood Tattoo" and now the "Foundling" trilogy.

The author, who is also the artist, creator, cook, chief political officer, etc etc on this series (he really doe a lot) posted some pictures of his concepts for some of the vessels and uniforms of his work in a post on his blog Monster-Blood Tattoo: Well, cheers, dear friends.

I am sorry, I cannot help but think that his designs would make a killer miniatures game. Due to the scope of his battles and such, I'd love to see it in 16mm, but regardless I think his blend of 18th century chic and alchemical magic and fantasy would make one hell of a game to play. I even said so on a comment on his blog.

Check it out,

-Eli

Books & RPG For The Youngsters

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that my oldest daughter Anna has a fondness for the "Warriors" series of book by Erin Hunter. If you are not familiar with this series, it is about tribes of feral, non-anthropomorphic cats trying to survive in a world of man. But, this is more than a simple naturalists tale.

I have not read the books myself, but Anna has told me quite a bit. Listening to her tell me the tales of her favorites characters' trial and tribulations has made me more than simply acquainted with the world of Warriors. These cats have rituals, prophecies and political and emotional conflicts that make them interesting and deep characters. Within the stories that span three series of books with a forth on its way, characters grow, some die, and the plot thickens. All in all these are a great series of adventure books, especially if you have children who perhaps are not sold on trolls, gnomes, hobbits, etc.

In an interesting move, the publishers of the books have also decided to make an RPG for the series, a game they refer to as an "Adventure Game" This is free for download on the official site for the game. They also have a map for the main setting, character sheet, an introductory "mission" and a handy quick start guide.

This game is a pretty solid introductory set of gaming rules. Character generation is simple and straight forward and game play is a task resolution system that manages to be functional and diceless. Characters have bonus points that can be spent to boost their chances to resolve tasks. As nice and simple as the system is, I think it is the language and care that is used to convey the concepts of RPGs to the young readers that makes this game outstanding.

Throughout the text of the rules there are sections that go to great lengths to explain concepts of fair play and to instill a casual and fun attitude toward gaming. They cover how to run a game, how to play, how to settle disputes at the table. They even have a section covering the dynamics of player versus GM and how it's okay to just want to be one or the other or to rotate who runs the game. In fact, the game assumes that every memeber of the group will at one time want to tell their own Warriors story and discusses what to do with your character when you are running the game.

The Warriors books and its associated RPG are a great package to introduce to your adventure-minded youngsters. My ten-year old loves the books and has rewad them over and over. The RPG is a great primer and actually a fun game to play and can serve as a wonderful transition into the world of RPGs without it having to be "your games". I printed out a copy of the game and put it in a binder, handed it to my daughter and told her to tell me when we were playing. It made her day and now she has several stories ready for when a little time presents itself.

Give it a look and enjoy,

-Eli

A Very Useful Book - The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook

If you are like me, you have entertained the idea of making your own molds for casting at one point or another. This prospect can be a pretty daunting one as a good number of the skills and practices of this art are hard to learn, require a good amount of experience to get right and can be a bit specialized and pricey in their materials. This is why the Prop Builder's Molding And Casting Handbook is such an incredible book.

Thurston James, also known for his Theatre Props Handbook, makes the entire process of molding and casting seem rather straight forward and matter of fact. Simple processes, walking through specific examples heavy with photos guide you through a number of prcoesses you are bound to encounter when making your own cast materials. But it's not just the examples, it's the experience and wisdom he pours into the examples and instructions that I find very useful.

The book has all sorts of useful lists and sub sections and though the focus is on prop-making for theatre it can all be scaled to any project. A one-page listing of common casting materials and their recommended mold releas agents is provided, along with a section on casting with common hardware store products. There is a good glossary of terms and even a section on where to get stuff. This last bit is not just a list of manufacturers with contact info (though it also has that) but tells you what items can be picked up at drug stores, hardware stores, specialty shops, etc.

But wait, there is still more. If you are particularly motivated and the handy hardware type, there is even an entire section on vacuum forming including a how-to on making your own vacu-forming machine. I could never do this, but I am sure there are some among you who can/could/will.

I have to admit, space, time and funds have never really allowed me to make use of this book, even though I've had it for years, but I do find myself coming back to it time and again and some day I may get gutsy enough to pour some resources into some molding and casting.

Who knew you could freeze store bought fish and make a mold to cast props for a fish monger's stall?

Check it out and enjoy,

-Eli

Add Some Flavor To Your Gaming

I have mentioned in other posts that I like to use food in my games as a way to establish a sense of place and setting but I just uncovered another lost gem in my book collection that I had completely forgotten about. The book was originally picked up for use by my mother in catering my wedding and is entitled, "The Bors Hede Boke of Cookery: Food and Cooking in 14th & 15th Century England", written by Roger Shell and Sally Charles.

This quaint book is full of real, usable recipes as well as interesting history and facts that date from back to the days of old. The book is broken down into a number of very informative sections -

Foodes - the sorts of foods of the age.

Feelds & Gardeyns - a brief overview of the sorts of gardens found at the time and how they were used.

Kichenes - a look at the sorts of kitchens in use at the time.

Tooles & Artes - a section covering techniques and the tools used in them. Includes some nice illustrations.

Meals - a look at the meals eaten by people of the time.

Recipes - divided into several sections from drinks to soups and more involved goodness.

Even the recipes present the reader with little tidbits of anecdotal history. Each one is begun with a piece of instructive text from the period, followed by a translation into English. This is followed by the traditional list of ingredients and a more conventional recipe instruction. I can say that some of these seem very foreign and odd to my modern American pallet but as I mentioned before, the catering for my wedding came from this volume and I enjoyed every bit of what we ate that day (doesn't hurt that my own mother cooked it!).

The last section of the book is incredibly useful for those trying to weave this very functional book into their gaming as it is a full-on glossary of terms used in the period and throughout the text of the book itself. This is not a small collection of terms either and covers a full 82 pages of the book, itself. The book also includes a full index of general topics as well as an index of recipes.

USING IT FOR GAMING

If you wanted to try to add a bit of authenticity to your game world and offer your players with a listing of inn fair that they may never have heard of to make your world seem all the more exotic and believable. I don't know about you but it seems every inn in a lot of games features the same goods. Imagine your player's smiles when the inn now offers them egurdouce with daryols for dessert (that's actually sweet & sour lamb or rabbit followed by custard pie).

The terms included in the glossary can be used to spice up dungeon and map details by offering you period terms for various fixtures, devices and tools. You can give a more vivid description of village life be describing the rustic using pipkins, pottels and trefet vessels. Sure they are little details but it is things like this that can make an adventure seem more real.

I do hope you all enjoyed this little review.

Take care,

-Eli

Dungeon Alphabet Has Arrived!

Dungeon Alphabet arrived the day before yesterday but, because of a lack of communication on the part of UPS and our apartment managers, I didn't find out about it until late that night when I tracked the UPS shipment. Anyhow, after bribing my wife I was able to get her to swing it by my workplace at lunch so I could start looking it over yesterday. It's amazing.

The book is pretty straight forward and at its core a book of random charts and tables that can be used in games or in planning adventures. It might seem like a lightweight product based on that alone. What makes this book a "must have", at least in my opinion, is the attention to detail, the love put into the book and the amount of content they managed to squeeze into so few pages.When I first read about the book, I did not expect that it would have so much detail in it. I expected a book that would contain a pretty direct A-Z of traditional dungeon elements with each entry being a simple two page affair or some such. I am happy to be wrong.

Each topic is given the space due to it and the art is used lavishly and effectively throughout the book. Each letter receives its own thematic art associated with whatever subject that letter has been assigned to. There are no canned frameworks into which the content is put. I should also mention that the subject matter is given ample space for either multiple tables and/or flavor text. Some of the charts have more than a single column on them making them multiple charts in one. The creators of this book worked hard to give each bit its due.

One last thing to mention is the creativity in which the subject matter has been approached. The natural tendency when doing a project like this would seem to be to make everything as directly applicable as possible. Dungeon Alphabet does that but in a way that uses whimsy and wild creativity to fit the topics to the letters of the alphabet. Who would have thought of "Yellow" as an obvious pick for a dungeon element beginning with "Y"?

This book is just fun, useful and, dare I say it, classy. Looking through it I find a book that I can make use of and that brings back misty memories of a time when gaming was new, ever piece of art was something I hadn't seen before and when I didn't think I had it all figured out. This is more than a gaming book; it's a wayback machine and happily so. I'd have gladly paid twice what I did, but at a price of $10 you are nuts to pass it up.

Take care,

-Eli

Artistic License In Games

A recent post over at Grognardia got me to thinking about how there seems to be a tendency among people and especially seem to real against the interpretation of classic or favorite literary sources into new permutations. The topic on Grognardia is in regard a video game based loosely on Dante’s Inferno that seems to take a lot of license with the subject material. Now, I am sure that this is just a software company using a thin overlay of classic literature to add a sense of place and setting to their game. But let’s think about that last sentence.

As gamers, we do this all the time. We pinch from literary, historical, mythological and folk lore sources all the time and use what we want and cast out the rest. There have been essays, interviews and articles, beyond counting, written about the origins of our favorite gaming worlds and where the various bits and pieces of those worlds came from. Even those who we consider the classic forefathers of our hobbies claim at least some inspiration from earlier works or classic sources, sources from which they pinched what they wanted or liked and then remixed into their own worlds. Sure this can be done in ways that are better or worse, but it really doesn’t sit all that well with me that when it happens to “us” we gamers tend to throw the origins of our hobby and the worlds that shape it out the window. I know that my game worlds have included elements of the Conan, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Classic Myth, reinterpreted history and a few new ideas here and there to hold them all together into a mishmash that would either amaze or horrify any academic.

Several articles in Dragon magazine over the years have talked about the origins of the various beasties of the D&D world and how they have been pulled, almost rendered down from various sources into their current forms. The Drow are one good example, being drawn from old tales of dark elves, blended with “Trows” from the Orkney Islands which were a sort of trollish faerie creature and then given a different pronunciation and a face lift as pretty ebon-skinned elves. Heck, even the Drow has gone through a few of its own artistic interpretations over the years. Now, there is no excuse for the abuse of good literature, but there are times when a fair amount of interpretation and redesign can come up with something wonderful.

Using the above mentioned video game as an example, this product would have existed and likely has under one name or another and with any number of variations on window-dressing. The game may suck or it may be really fun and if so does the association with the literary work have any reflection on that? Does the game really reflect on the literary source in any way that matters? I don’t think so on either account. People who like the game will like it. People who don’t like it won’t. More importantly, I don’t believe that people will suddenly find the literary classic Dante’s Inferno any less appealing for the existence of this game just as I don’t think this game will bring more than a passing awareness of the literary work to anyone who doesn’t already have one. However, there is the hope and possibility, that just a small few may discover a love of this work through its association with the video game.

I can say with all certainty and honesty that before I got involved with D&D my interest in medieval history was a passing thing, limited to the romantic views expressed by most little boys of the 70’s. However, and to my mother’s glee, D&D and then gaming as a whole got me reading and looking into more of source materials that the games were built on. Arm loads of books from the library and bought with allowance spoke, with no pun intended, volumes about how much my interest and education on the various subjects had grown since my introduction to gaming as a hobby. Do I think the Dante’s Inferno video game will do the same? Not really, but it might actually put the book into the hands of a reading teen or even adult who might not have ever picked the book up otherwise.

Really when it comes down to it, I don’t think there is anything wrong about this sort of artistic license as long as credit is given and the original source work isn’t twisted into something that is hateful and hurtful to people (at least intentionally). I think if any of us took a look at the games we play and the worlds we play in and build that we’d see this sort of thing isn’t as outside of us as we might think.

Hidden Treasures - Ariel The Book of Fantasy

A while back I had scored an Ebay auction fo the classic "Gnomes" book from back from my childhood, a treasure I have been tracking down for ages. It was not in the best condition but I really just wanted an okay copy that I could share with my kids, so I bid after and won a softbound copy of it along with another book I had not heard of nor was particularly interested in at the time. So I enjoyed Gnomes and put the other book aside, ignored and forgotten....until the other night.

Published in 1978, it turns out this book is Volume Three of a series of books that featured art, fiction, and interviews with some of the greats of sci fi and fantasy. The book I have has a Barry Windsor-Smith cover as well as interior art and an interview with him. Also included inside are interview with Frank Herbert (how bad is it that I never knew he was a local). There are short stories by Michael Moorcock and Peter Jackson as well as poetry by Robert E Howard. and Roger Zelazny. Also included are Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, David James Bruce Jones to name a few. There are illustrations and works by others as well.

I have to admit that I think it has been my recent interest and investigation in OSR that may have brought this book back to my attention. So much of the art and themes of the work inside call me back to my early days of gaming when I found it much easier to just enjoy the fantasy of things instead of allowing myself to bog down in the details of things. I guess that is an easy trap to fall into with age - responsibility, paying attention to specifics, shunning spontaneity. Anyhow, this is a great book and I find myself wanting to track down it's sister volumes.

If you find a copy of this or one of the other of its kind, snatch them up. You won't be sorry.

-Eli

Gameable Books - Leviathan

Not one of mine, but speaking of gameable books, check this one out on Baron's Blog!

Take care,

-Eli

Gameable Books - The Monster Blood Tattoo Series

Howdy all,

Those of you who I keep regular correspondence with off the blog may well know that I have a new obsession. That obsession would be a series of books called the Monster Blood Tattoo series by D.M. Cornish. Very few books grab me enough to spew over, and this one did within the first couple of chapters.

Colorful, evocative, and intensely interesting, Cornish's series that begins with "Foundling" stands out among the various fantasy books that I have read for it's gloomy, 18th century feel full of tricorns, work houses, pre-industrial, musket and shot goodness. I have to admit that I am propping up this book before I have even finished it, but considering I am throwing this out not just for it's literary merit but also for its "game-ability" I think it'll be okay.

Why is this setting gameable? You have a world of humanity living in a gritty, grungy fantasy world, surrounded on its fringes by looming monsters and the constant threat of incursion and invasion by these same vile denizens. These human societies are divided into distinct city states all under the banner of an Emperor. You have musket firing soldiers, potion slinging monster hunters and a strange sort of pre-industrial techno-alchemical technology base that provides the setting with such wonderful things as magically treated clothing that can turn blades and musket balls or boxes stuffed with grown olfactory and optic tissues that gives the wearer enhanced senses. Even the ironclad sailing vessels in the book draw from this, using grown muscles to drive their screws instead of steam engines.

I won't go into plot or anything of that sort, too much, because I do not want to spoil it for those who may choose to read it. The series is intended for the junior readers, but the author doesn't dumb it down and his use of colorful language and dark imagery really pushes the bounds. If I had to classify the series, I'd say that it's in the same category as the Harry Potter series but instead of an orphan away at school, we get an orphan who is out on the world on his own, having never had a home other than an orphanage.

The book has obvious role-playing potential with lots of greeblies and goodies to rip-off -cough- borrow for your tabletop games. But there is also some good wargaming potential here. If you've been looking for something new to throw on the table, you could borrow from this and go for some 18th century fantasy armies.

In short, good stuff here.

Thanks all,

-Eli