Recent Reading ...

[davidgillon]

 ... has been dominated by buying the Humble Bundle with all 90 books from Shadowrun 4th Edition (Shadowrun is the RPG premised on cyberpunk meets the rebirth of magic - William Gibson wasn't impressed). A lot of them are in the 20-30 page range, but the larger background and adventure books run 140-220 pages of A4, and some of them have really been impressing me with the depth of background development (I suppose it helps that Shadowrun had had about 20 years of development at the point they were written).

Ghost Cartels is a campaign sourcebook involving a South American cartel managing to release a new drug worldwide while obfuscating the source of the drug from law enforcement. The first 50-odd pages are a sort of found-footage assemblage of leaks and intercepts and official documents telling the story as assembled by a group of interested Shadowrunners - thieves, hackers, assassins, mercenaries and spies - who are the game's common framing mechanism for this kind of thing as they watch from the sidelines and watch for jobs that might come their way. But 50+ pages of sustained found-footage storytelling is by far the longest I've seen them do and they really levelled up. The rest of the book lays out the adventure scenarios behind that story, as a group of shadowrunners are hired for black-ops and executive protection, starting with them working for a street level gang, but then being passed up the chain until they're working for the heads of the cartel as they stage a world tour to bring local distributors on board. Death on the Reik for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is sometimes claimed as the greatest roleplaying campaign ever. I own Death on the Reik, and I'm not sure this isn't better.

War! This one is a campaign guide to insurgency, counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare in a Siege of Sarajevo type situation, and someone really, really knows their subject. (I loved the bit about a crate of socks potentially being the most valuable thing you can hijack in a jungle warfare scenario). 

I'm actually going to have to go back and re-read the first stuff I read, because I've clearly been missing half the story arcs that are buried within them.

Non-Shadowrun reading:

Tribals, Battles and Darings: The Genesis of the Modern Destroyer, Alexander Clarke.

I've had my eye on this for a while, and jumped on it when I realised that the Kindle edition was on offer at £1.29, not the £12.99 I thought I'd read. But, aargh, what a frustrating read. It's got a good first half dealing with the Tribal Class destroyers and their individual histories in WWII (though I kind of want to dive in with an editorial knife and completely re-order it), but then goes completely to pot dealing with the Battle and Daring Class destroyers that followed them, and a couple of pages on the Weapons class are outright wrong, their reduced length isn't inexplicable, it's because they were deliberately designed to be built in shipyards that didn't have the physical space to build a Battle.

Moonlight's Ambassador

Dawn's Envoy, T A White

Aka the Aileen Travers series, books 3 and 4. I started the series assuming from the titles that reluctant vampire Aileen would end up doing some sort of ambassadorial role between the different races in fantasy Columbus, but Aileen is temperamentally much better suited to punching someone in the face for annoying her. Especially if it's hulking vampire enforcer Liam, or at least she would be if he wasn't too fast for her to land a punch. Moonlight has a nicely non-obvious mystery as Aileen's bestie, and newest werewolf on the block, Caroline is implicated in a series of attacks on werewolves and vampires, while Dawn is rather more straightforward as the High Fey arrive in town intent on a wild hunt, and guess who's front of the queue for being hunted.
























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