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Apocryphal
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Comments
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Again, pretty pulp.
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We’ll, neither the archaeology nor the science was convincing, but we’re talking about something that is trying to emulate pulp magazine fiction. The locations? I suppose so - didn’t really note them.
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Well, it was generally ok, but OMG ‘the rate of suicides in ancient Hattusa’ is just not something anyone is ever going to be able to study, so that was pretty ludicrous. I had to learn to let that go pretty quickly.
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I rather enjoyed it up to the midway point, but after that I found it started to drag on a bit and I have to admit I didn’t follow it was well through the third quarter. It was interesting to me how it started off exactly as billed - very Lovecrafti…
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I'm finished as well.
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No, that's my job :-D
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Also, it seems rare to me that we all like a book, and still find lots to discuss. Often with this kind of agreement, the discussion dies off quickly in a murder of mmm-hmmms.
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I quite enjoyed this book, I have to say, and it was a nice addition to the TTRPBC canon. Thanks for recommending it.
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I agree, a lot of it is genre conceit. When push comes to shove, most of us prefer that our institutions deal with things rather than well-meaning mavericks. But as someone who has to work with (often unreasonable) civic bureaucracies, it's always n…
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Aren’t heroes generally selfless, and villains selfish? In that sense, it’s easy to see how no one is purely one or the other. However, I do think Smith is a villain - even though he has a higher cause, it’s essentially a selfish one. Takahashi was …
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He had 3 years to fall in love with Sachi - it just was kind of glossed over because this isn’t really a love story. But I thought that loyalty to his word (rather than love) was his driver through the second half, and the need to do a good job in t…
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It’s an interesting tension. The whole idea of patriotism in the USA is entwined with the idea that ‘patriots’ are willing to do what’s necessary to overthrow an ‘oppressive’ government. This tension underlies the Jan 6 riots and the Canadian convoy…
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Luckily, as someone who neither has to kill, nor formulate a law, nor worry about the programming of an A.I., I have no need to put the necessary work into developing an answer. :-)
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Not really, no. I’ve done a lot of running by the seat of my pants (the latter method) and it can result in a lot of red herrings and not really any more satisfying a conclusion. And the players spend a lot of time wondering why this NPC or that did…
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For my part, the meat of roleplaying isn’t investigation or action or planning, it’s conversation. In character conversation. Whatever you can do to foster that is a good. I’ve also found that mysteries can be very compelling drives both in fict…
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Those views are now considered sexist/ racist by western university educated elites, but are still widely held around the world and even by many in the west. In other words, that outlook has not yet been relegated to history, in my view. I don’t…
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Ah, that’s interesting. Ok know very little about the history of Hawaii, so I’ll have to read up. I know there was a Hudson Bay Company factory there at one time. I noted in the text the use of ‘King St’ and also something else that made it differen…
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My comment wrt this is that that I found in remarkable and highly implausible that both McGrady and the Japanese American woman both floated through the whole war in a kind of cocoon. Japanese Americans and Canadians were rounded up and placed in in…
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Why wouldn’t it have a place in a modern book?
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I honestly didn’t notice anything remarkable about it. Since you bring it up, though, I do wonder if the book would have been better or worse in first person. I don’t have an answer. Is it a purely stylistic choice, in this case?
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Turning to Wikipedia, this seems to be more hard mobiles than noir. This is from the ‘hard boiled’ entry: "The best definition of hard boiled I know is that of critic Eddie Duggan. In noir, the primary focus is interior: psychic imbalance le…
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I think McGrady is a well-meaning enough fellow, and is sympathetic to the every day joe. This is an aspirational quality. Does he have flaws? Sure. He’s pretty jaded, and becomes more so over the course of the novel. He also doesn’t really understa…
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The book held my interest all the way through, and I had no issue with the pacing. I didn’t find the book flagged during the ‘basement’ scenes, but it did feel to me that the first sex scene (with Molly) was kind of an odd interlude that broke the p…
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I’m finished now as well.
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There was something in the news this week about remembering Chinua Achebe’s influential novel, _Things Fall Apart,_ and I got to thinking how it would make for an interesting comparison read to _The Orenda,_ tackling many of the same themes.
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I’m about half way through. First impression: Pretty solid detective fiction.
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RPGs for the most part emulate heroic fiction, and most game designers give players a chance to play ‘big heroes’. If that’s what most people ( or at least most vocal people) want to play, then that’s what most designers will make. I’ve often wonder…
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What kind of stories would you prefer to read, @BarnerCobblewood ?
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Fangorn forest, more like 😂 Paul always said I was an ent.
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I am amazed at the attitudes of people around me, and I've lived in a variety of Canadian cities my whole life LOL.