Smudge Marks & Engel Werks Inside GMT Flash of Steel Wargame [space] Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerFor the recent Tolkien Reader Day, I picked up the first of Christopher Tolkien’s ‘History of Middle Earth’ series. It takes a bit of unpacking. This is largely the earliest versions of some of the earliest stories. However, while the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The initial book of the Hidden Sea Tales comes to a very satisfying conclusion, but there’s a number of dangling threads. Sofie gets to go back to Stormwrack, and pick up the investigation of this world which isn’t—and is—Earth. She’s[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The third “Swords and Fire” book wraps up the trilogy well. My objections from the first book persist, but are better here, as the story and politics have grown. And all the strong points remain. There is a good mix[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
First off, the electronic version of this book is in better shape than the previous. That had obviously been properly proofread, but there were still some major formatting problems with scene breaks and the like. Well, not even that’s a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This latest book of the Chicks in Chainmail anthology series (with an 11-year gap between the last two, the next one is due in 2026) holds to the same general theme and sense of humor. It leads off with Jody[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sadly, the first impression of this book has to be that it lost Larry Elmore as a cover artist, and this one just doesn’t measure up to the previous covers in the series. But, the important part, the stories, are[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I recently picked up the package deal of three of the Chicks in Chainmail anthologies on Kindle. I’m disappointed that the first two haven’t gone electronic. The general idea is fantasy stories featuring women warriors saving males in distress. The[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The start of epic fantasy stories often have a pacing problem. The desire to provide lots of background, and root you in an unfamiliar world mean that the plot moves like a freight train. It has a lot of momentum,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It took six years for the final volume of this trilogy to come out, and given the page count takes another two-hundred page jump upwards, I imagine it was in the category of ‘the book that ate his life’. The[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of the Fire Bearers trilogy expands the world, and the scope of the plot, with the book jumping up a hundred pages in length to compensate. The first volume left off in a bit of a quiet[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…