Welcome to the Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club!
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Categories
In this Discussion
Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Comments
Hi @MARCC
I can't say for sure. I know the publisher is planning to kickstart it within the next few months, so I would guess that it will be available by the end of the summer.
You can use it to run a straight historical campaign, if you like, or one that mixed with myth. I think you can also run a very sword-and-sorcery campaign with it - for example:
Imagine playing an opiomancer who works behind the scenes with his exorcist and temple guardian pals to foil the efforts of an ecstatic 'shock-head' prophet to guide their kingdom to ruin? To do so requires that you outsmart third-gender temple guardians made from the clay found under a god's fingernail so you can defeat your enemies and hear the lamentations of their lamentation priests, then, to save your dying friend, you avoid the giant sea snake with mouths on its belly as you travel across the Lower Sea to paradise in search of the plant of life, only suffer an attack of bad news demons, then go to the Temple of Sin where the great king's daughter is high priestess in order to borrow a self-propelled god-boat, only to be told by the fish-headed sages from the time of creation that a monstrous lion-bird stole the world's libido, and that only a human newly sprouted from the sacred soil of the Navel of Heaven and Earth can defeat it?
Your friend might also like my half-hearted Ancient History blog, which has some early playtest reports, book reviews, and other odds and ends: https://egunnu.blogspot.com/2018/11/what-is-many-coloured-house.html
Here's the cover of the book:
I am porting all my Blood Games games over to the StarCluster 4 system. Blood Games II will add on some new bits and become Blood Games 4. OHMAS will become the Renaissance+ Toolkit, dropping the setting elements, which are pretty much entirely available from the net, and Outremer will become the Outremer Setting, using Blood Games 4 and the Renaissance+ toolkit. This will vastly simplify development, as Blood Games 2 was all about the exceptions, and SC4 is far lighter than SC2, so expect to see more titles developed from it.
Thanks for the quick response! I'll pass along the info.
I just finished a short story. I have no idea if it’s any good at all. Although I’ve done plenty of professional and academic writing, I really only started writing lyrics and poems a couple of years ago, and this is my first self-contained prose fiction. It’s in the rural fantasy sub-sub-genre, I suppose.
I know there are groups where budding writers share their work and receive criticism. And I know some of you are published authors of this kind of work. Do you have any suggestions for me regarding good groups to get involved with to help me decide if I have any potential?
Thanks so much.
> I just finished a short story. I have no idea if it’s any good at all. Although I’ve done plenty of professional and academic writing, I really only started writing lyrics and poems a couple of years ago, and this is my first self-contained prose fiction. It’s in the rural fantasy sub-sub-genre, I suppose.
>
> I know there are groups where budding writers share their work and receive criticism. And I know some of you are published authors of this kind of work. Do you have any suggestions for me regarding good groups to get involved with to help me decide if I have any potential?
>
> Thanks so much.
First, congratulations
In my experience, different people have different ways to do this. Some folk are indeed part of a mutual feedback group, or else gave accumulated a group of beta readers whose opinions they trust. I was once part of such a group for an author, but he is quite prolific and I wasn't able to commit the time he needed.
Personally I have a couple of people who read through a book when it's broadly finished and give comments at that stage, rather than multiple times at various stages.
Either way, you want someone who basically gets what you are trying to say, appreciates your style of world-building, and has resonance with the kinds of textual or mythical allusions you like to make. Again with the people I trust, one is way better on the mythical stuff, but the other probably better understands the quirks of my world view, and certainly catches literary allusions and intertextual references. So the combination covers several bases!
It also all depends on whether you are looking for feedback on content, structure, big ideas and so on, or the details of spelling, grammar, use of commas etc. Or - ideally - both of these. I recently read a fantasy novel by an online friend who had obviously had (and incorporated) feedback on plot structure, flashback passages recapitulating earlier books in the series, etc, but the grammar and comma use was all over the place. Which for me, somewhat spoiled an otherwise good read.
Anyway, I hope that is of some help to you
Thank you.