Reading Wednesday

[ironymaiden]

Recently Finished
The Riddle-Master. yeah, those books were not for me. at least i correctly guessed why our hero had his superpowers? has someone written fanfic in this universe? i feel like someone else doing something interesting in that world might be good. (just now i realized that it may have been an influence on Birthright. i should check, often the designers will credit their inspirations in the book somewhere.)

DNF: Woman on the Edge of Time. it started with violence against women of color and a forced abortion and i noped the fuck out of there. i know there's supposed to be some good spec fic beyond that point but no, not right now.

Clockwork Boys: D&D meets Suicide Squad featuring a forger, an assassin, a disgraced paladin, a cleric, and some scary stuff going on in the world. unfortunately it's really just half a book, so don't get it without its sequel. (i have that one out from the library but am still racing to finish expired books on the kindle.) i adored it.

Plain Kate: an orphan girl strikes a bad bargain with a witch and has to dig herself out (and save a bunch of lives in the process). it has nifty worldbuilding and a very special cat, kind of classic YA hero's journey stuff. trigger warning for violence against animals.

Cart and Cwidder: more classic YA, a growing into power story featuring magic music and the best horse. i enjoyed this but while the sibling dynamic was great the kids' relationship with their parents was profoundly odd and hard for me to believe; it's book one of a series but while i liked it okay it wasn't enough to seek out the rest. also has violence against animals.

Currently Reading
Jade City - duelling crime families in a Vietnamesque country where jade provides people (who are genetically able) with superpowers. think Mistborn (but with an element that doesn't get consumed) meets The Godfather.

What's Next
kindle library backlog! i'm getting more and more caught up.

Comments

[ironymaiden]

I played in a Birthright campaign within the last few years and I feel like it reads better than it actually plays. Or at least I didn't find the domain actions part of play to be fun. (It just felt like more accounting than I like to do. If you are scrupulous with material components and eating and weight limits YMMV.)

[dorchadas]

The last game I ran did have a week of downtime because one PC's wounds got infected and no one in the party had any healing magic (and later a month and a half of downtime because one PC was critically wounded and the same thing, no healing magic), and I know several times they made camp in mid-afternoon because they were all exhausted from riding hours in the rain. I am the kind of GM who loves rules for cholera.

I loved Birthright's setting--especially its version of elves and the existence of awnsheghlien--but the rules feel like two games laid on top of each other, the adventurer game and the domain ruling game, with barely any interaction between them.