Recent Media Consumption

Books:

A Picture of Murder, T E Kinsey

The fourth Lady Hardcastle Investigates story, as usual narrated by her lady's maid Flo, who does all the heavy lifting, while Lady H swans around being intermittently batty and incisive. It's November 1909 and a travelling film show* is coming to the village at the invitation of Lady Farley-Stroud up at the Grange. Only her plans to put them up have fallen through as the kitchen at the Grange just went up in flames. So Lady Hardcastle steps in to host the visitors: director 'Colonel' Nolan Cheetham, and his three actors, Euphemia the young starlet,  Zelda the mature female actress and Basil, the ageing character actor (apparently having the actors on hand to take a bow was a thing). It turns out the village pub also has a visitor, Aaron Orum, 'Colonel' Cheetham's estranged writing partner, who insists his plot has been stolen, and the society columnist of the Bristol Post is intent on being a snobbish pain to pretty much everyone she encounters. As we're right at the start of film as media, the film is very short and simplistic - young beau loves young girl, evil witch intervenes, witchfinder intervenes, everyone dies horribly. Which is fine, everyone is impressed, except the rentamob Christians convinced film is evil and films about witches are the express train to hell. But then the cast start to die, in identical ways to their characters, and Lady H and Flo really can't stand by when people are being done-in on their own kitchen floor.

I was less impressed by this than by the previous three. The writing for the main arc is fine and Flo and Lady H continue to be delightful, but the plot really isn't so much convoluted as contorted, and shouldn't have worked even if it was carried out perfectly.  There's also a clumsily inserted bit of combined backstory and foreshadowing that really doesn't make sense. I mean, if you have a couple of passing London-based acquaintances pop in and announce that they ran into your brother a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that next time they see you they should probably mention your life is in danger from a foreign intelligence service, then wouldn't the first thing you would do be ring your idiot brother and ask what he's playing at and couldn't he pick up the phone himself?

* It's admitted in the end notes this is a little late for this kind of thing.

Christmas at the Grange, T E Kinsey

This is listed as book 8 of 8 by Amazon, but it's really not in the main sequence of the Lady Hardcastle tales. Instead it's a novella set a few weeks after A Picture of Murder, with Lady Hardcastle and Flo invited (both of them, not as Lady plus maid) to spend Christmas at the Grange with the Farley-Strouds and their crowd of relatives. So there's a Christmas Eve party, a Christmas Day meal, and a Boxing Day dinner for the entire village to be navigated, and in the process a priceless pearl pendant goes missing, and of course it's absolutely impossible to call in the police, so it's up to Lady H and Flo again. It's so slight a plot that even Lady H and Flo remark on it, but it's not so much a plot as a device to justify spending Chrismas with our protagonists.

Gaming:

Traveller, the Little Black Books

Back in the 80s the first edition of Traveller, the first ever SF RPG, was published by Game Designer's Workshop as A5 sized books, usually 40-64 pages, each black overall with title in a varying colour - quite stylish, but marketing-wise not really something to leap off the shelf and grab you by the throat. These were universally known as the Little Black Books (or LBBs). The core rules were books 1 to 3, supported by a range of more detailed character generation rules, background supplements, adventures and double adventures - two short adventures printed back to back.  I originally started buying them at university and I ended up with about half of them in physical copies before Traveller moved on to new editions and they disappeared from the shelves. So when Bundle of Holding ran two bundles to cover all of them, I took the chance to complete my set by picking them all up in e-book format.

It works out at about 60 books total and 3 maps. About 5 of them were either free or included in other things, and there were a few more I had no intention of paying money for - only GDW could think a bunch of forms was a good idea for a supplement for a role-playing game, and they did it for every edition of every game they produced. At least one suggested role-playing filling the forms. So call it 50 books I'd have paid money for, and checking back in an old magazine they were retailing at £4 at the time, so $40 for the complete set of ebooks isn't bad.

I'm not disappointed in the purchase, but what reading the first few has done is remind me how far roleplaying has come in 40 years (1st edition of the Traveller rules was 1979). My memory of the contents of the ones I had is pretty good, but what I'd forgotten is how slight they were. Many of them don't so much guide you through an adventure as sketch in a very minimalist skeleton for a campaign, drop in a few ideas for incidents and leave the GM to get in with it. So rather than remembering the highlights it turns out I'm remembering pretty much the complete thing. For instance the introductory adventure 'The Imperial Fringe' ('free' with the boxed set of rules), handed your characters a scoutship and said in effect "there are 488 star systems in the sector, I want an independent audit of each of their statistics, I'll pay you so much per system, see you in 20 years". A very similar adventure, 'Leviathan', ups the level of detail a bit, cuts the area of interest down to a subsector of about 30 stars and leaves you to get on with developing trade links for your employer. There are a handful of mysteries hinted at, missing ships, pirates etc, but absolutely no details. Nowadays they'd be the precis before you got to the meat of the campaign, in 1980-85 they were the main event.

I can see how this would have developed based on Traveller's origin as a house-rules add-on to Imperium, a strategic space warfare game GDW had had a lot of success with, where your character would swan around the galaxy, leaning on a die-roll here, giving a favourable shift on the Combat Results Table there (they spun off a later RPG, 2300AD, in a similar process). And I'm not sure some of the GDW principals ever really got role-playing other than at that very abstract level (afaics Marc Miller - the current GDW-successor edition is 'Marc Miller's Traveller' - is still trying to reduce Traveller to numbers and forms).

So, very much one to buy if you know what you're buying (and the offer closed on Monday so it's too late anyway).

OTOH Bundle of Holding - https://bundleofholding.com/ - usually has about three to five bundles ongoing at any one time, many for quite modern RPGs (occasionally for books too, they have a Glen Cook offer at the moment), and pretty much all structured with a sub-$10 basic offering that'll get you 3-6 core books and a main offer in the $15-25 range that'll get you three times that, so if you're into gaming they're well worth watching/subscribing to their mailing list. Downloads are generally via DriveThruRPG, though you also have your own 'Wizard's Cabinet' with BoH that'll get you direct to anything you've ever purchased.