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NeilNjae
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- NeilNjae
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Comments
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I'm not sure what the naming is saying. There are characters that have names and peripheral ones who don't. Is that just an attempt to keep our attention focused on the characters in Bataween, by making all the others ciphers? (I did like the commen…
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And I forgot to add the reference to (Quote)
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Stories, and storytelling, and stories within stories, are a tradition ever since the Arabian Nights. The structure in this book could be genuinely following that tradition, an intertextual reference to the Arabian Nights, or a deliberate ploy to di…
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Good question. For me, the book is all about justice and everything about it: who decides what is "just", what is done about it, what should happen to criminals or sinners, and what should happen to victims; when are crimes justified, or w…
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A quote from the book: (Quote)
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This wasn't a big part of the book for me. I think the references to magic and djinni served to make the magical seem mundane, just another tool. That meant that the act of animating Whatsitsname wasn't the focus of the story, and we could instead g…
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(Quote) I don't know. I know that news reports, by necessity, simplify situations from what they really are. But the book doesn't end on an optimistic note.
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I agree with Richard, and I think the book succeeded because it concentrated on the people and their very human reactions to the violence and their need to continue living in the face of it. In many ways, the bombings were kept outside what they con…
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I liked that it raised the diversity. Why shouldn't Baghdad be as diverse as London, New York, or any other global city? As for the distinctions no longer mattering: I wonder how much they ever mattered. In the quote above, I get the feeling that bo…
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Whatsitsname is, for me, the clearest symbol in the book. It's not a person, its the combination of many aspects of the city and its people. All the way through, people are projecting their desires onto Whatsitsname. Almost never does it have any ag…
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I don't know how representative the characters are of Baghdad. It's a large city with a long, long history of trade and exchange, so I'd expect it to have plenty of variety in its citizens. But I've never been there and my perceptions of modern Bagh…
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I think it was more the "literary" end of fiction than the "genre" end, hence the focus on characters and setting over plot and events. It was very clearly an allegory for events in Iraq, and a wider consideration of power and ju…
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(Quote) I've not read any of their stuff, but it seems worthy of discussion. I'm happy to give it a go! And @RichardAbbott , it wasn't me that suggeseted Klara.
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I've finished as well.
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(Quote) Sorry, I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification. FWIW, I think both modes are perfectly feasible in play, so long as all the players agree what they're doing.
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(Quote) The mission-based style is common in RPGs, even if the initiation may be different: "you have your orders" vs "the old man gives you a treasure map" vs "you are the prophesied Chosen One". (Quote) My definition…
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I heard once that the ideal for a play was for all the events to take place in a 24 hour period. That short period of intense activity is achievable for just about everyone. Even if things aren't that short, a lot of standalone stories are one-offs.…
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Yeah, I'm not that bothered by realism. I want things to fit the setting, but I'm more interested in using setting features to prompt interesting decisions. For example, you can catch the tide and sail now, but the ship won't be fully equipped. Or y…
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Thinking about it, Star Trek: Lower Decks may be a good model for a military RPG. The characters are much more concerned with their own agendas, with the overall missions being more prompts and backdrops than they are the focus of play. In that way,…
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I always have a problem with military games, because I think I get too caught up on the "chain of command" thing and now allow the PCs sufficient freedom. You can get away with that to some extent by having a mostly-independent unit, such …
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A decent military adventure romp. It's a cross between Sharpe and Hornblower, but with steampunk nerd-troping. Despite being steampunk, it doesn't glory in the racism, classism, colonialism of the era. A good book to read for unwinding before going…
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I thought there was too much technical exposition. It didn't help that it was all invented by the author for this book. Other Napoleonic military books (Sharpe, Hornblower) at least have the benefit of including some genuine historical detail on the…
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It was an action romp that mostly rattled along. There were some large wodges of exposition that I found myself skipping over. It didn't help that most of the detail of airship operation was just invented for the book (there not being much to draw f…
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Josette was the main protagonist, and she grew a bit, becoming a more confident commander with support of her crew. But there wasn't a lot of that. Bernat did the most growing, I thought, but that was a fairly predictable journey. Overall, not a l…
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I liked that Josette wasn't perfect, and had flaws like a temper and a dose of fanaticism. Bernat was a bit erratic, I thought, veering from upper-class fool to cynical operator a bit too much. The rest of the characters were mostly flat, as Richard…
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Steampunk always seems closely associated with classism and colonialsim, and saying things like the British Empire was good, actually, and aristocrats are the best people and should be in charge. So I was pleasantly surprised when this book didn't g…
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A Guide to Condor Heroes from Tor. It looks like the books are more of a trilogy than I thought, but still spanning generations.
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(Quote) I think it is stand-alone, but was sufficiently popular at the time he wrote a sequel. Or two. Or eleven. Same setting, different characters, but ramifications of one book flow into another.
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I'm still considering choices for June. As my wife is getting me into watching wuxia at the moment, how about a wuxia book? A Hero Born ( review ) could be a good one?
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(Quote) Exactly. A new take on Lovecraft would have been good. Emphasis on the horror of a mind parasite: that's a little-explored and potentially horrifying idea to build a story around. In this one? They couldn't even be bothered to deal with the …