Bill Ward and I are re-reading a book from Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar series, Swords Against Death. We hope you’ll pick up a copy and join us. This week we tackled the eighth tale in the volume, “Claws from The Night.”
Bill Ward and I are re-reading a book from Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar series, Swords Against Death. We hope you’ll pick up a copy and join us. This week we tackled the seventh tale in the volume, “The Seven Black Priests.”
Most of us can be defined in part by our obsessions, those things we’ve spent immense amounts of our lives practicing or researching or observing or collecting. The older we get, the more interests we’ve accumulated, or practiced and discarded. Some obsessions we continue to explore, others go by the way side, and some linger on the back burner to be occasionally re-ignited, as my own interest in The Beatles was when I finally read The Beatles Anthology this winter.
I really threw myself down that particular rabbit hole. I already knew a LOT about The Beatles, but when I climbed back out and wiped the dirt off I knew so much I was a little dismayed. And yet there are people who know EVEN MORE.
Take any given topic you love and the odds are that there’s someone out there who knows more about it, probably to a frightening degree. The Internet makes it very easy to search out and discover everything you want to know (probably beyond that) about any subject. And if you’re not careful, you might find you’ve fallen into someone else’s rabbit hole.
Bill Ward and I are re-reading a book from Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar series, Swords Against Death. We hope you’ll pick up a copy and join us. This week we tackled the sixth tale in the volume, “The Sunken Land.”
Bill Ward and I are re-reading a book from Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar series, Swords Against Death. We hope you’ll pick up a copy and join us. This week we tackled the fifth tale in the volume, “The Howling Tower.”
Bill Ward and I are re-reading a book from Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar series, Swords Against Death. We hope you’ll pick up a copy and join us. This week we tackled the fourth tale in the volume, “The Bleak Shore.”
In the coming weeks Bill Ward and I are going to re-read a book from Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar series, Swords Against Death. We hope you’ll pick up a copy and join us. This week, so that you’ll have a little time to get on board, we’re just providing an overview.
Howard: Mid-way through junior high I’d read a whole lot of science fiction but very few fantasy books and no sword-and-sorcery. I’d been playing a whole lot of Dungeons & Dragons, though, and one day I read the famed Appendix N and decided to explore its recommended fantasy reading.
Unfortunately, when I went to the library it proved woefully empty of nearly everything on the list. The used bookstore ended up being my salvation, although, owing to chance, all they had that first day was one Fritz Leiber book, which meant I didn’t actually read Robert E. Howard — sword-and-sorcery’s originator — until I was well into my twenties.
Bill: This closely parallels my own experience, and it was D&D that introduced me to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser long before I ever read any of their stories. Books were just hard to find, even if you knew what you were looking for. I didn’t get to Conan until I was thirty, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sometime after that! My luck was to find Elric in my late teens and early twenties, probably because they were all being reprinted and the old Daws also seemed easy to find at the only used bookstore I knew about at the time.
I hope all of you have been having a pleasant December.
As usual, silence here means that I’ve been busier than usual. First it was with writing, or, rather, revision, up until the day before Christmas Eve. Then it’s been with traditional and pleasant holiday things like picking out gifts and wrapping them and meeting old friends and gathering with family.
I’ve taken some time off for reading some different books and to play Battle Academy 2, my chief present this year.
If you’ve spent much time on the Black Gate website you’ve probably seen Barbarian Prince get mentioned at least once.
A solo board game from the ’80s designed by Arnold Hendrick, Barbarian Prince is a little like one of those old “choose your own” adventure books, except that the order of events is far more random, for they’re generated by rolling on a number of tables depending upon your location on the map and are partly affected by choices you have made and gear and allies you may have accumulated in your travels.
It never plays the same way twice, and a lot of us find it glorious fun — although it is difficult to win. John O’Neill is a huge fan of the game, and he got me interested some years back when he gave me an extra copy he had lying around.
When I heard rumors of an unofficial redesign over at BoardGameGeek, I dropped by to take a look and was incredibly impressed. Someone — Todd Sanders, as it turns out — had gotten permission to create a new game board, pieces, and redesign the layout of the rule and event books.
The result was brilliant, beautiful, and a completely professional product.
It’s available, free, for anyone who wants to download the files and create their own version of the game (the original version of Barbarian Prince is also available for free download, courtesy of Reaper Miniatures and Dwarfstar Games).
I contacted Todd to learn more about his redesign and what had inspired it, and discovered he was responsible for a number of stunning games of his own creation.
We talked about game design, Print and Play games, and, naturally, Barbarian Prince. Larger versions of the lovely game boards can be seen by clicking on their pictures.
Note: This article is reposted from the Black Gate web site, where it appeared in 2012.
At some point in the near future I hope to post that I’ve finished the outline of my new book and then share some lessons I’ve learned from it. Right now, though, it’s still somewhere between halfway and two-thirds complete.
There are secrets and counterplots and manipulations going on within this one, and knowing when to reveal what and through whom is really the tricky thing. I ALWAYS appreciated Zelazny’s original Chronicles of Amber but as I try to replicate some of the feel of revealing layer upon layer of how the world works and who’s behind sinister plots I have more of an appreciation for what he himself pulled off. It’s not easy.