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sI’m old enough to remember a world pre-Star Trek: The Next Generation— though not by much– and so I’m old enough to remember the excitement of seeing how something that I loved so dearly would look with all the shiny, modern flair of the 1980s. Maybe it’s the rose colored glasses of nostalgia, or maybe […]
Preparing a First Edition AD&D Oriental Adventures Game, Part II
Monday , 13, June 2016 Tabletop Games 7 CommentsThere’s a lot to like about the first edition Oriental Adventures hard back. The eastern variants of the classic D&D class archetypes all have a distinctive flavor. Each one has their own ki power to further differentiate them while simultaneously infusing the game the essence of great kung fu movies. And no gaming junkie can […]
Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon was the greatest novel to appear in Weird Tales. Jack Williamson’s Golden Blood was the second greatest novel to appear in Weird Tales. Jack William had a total of six stories and two serials in Weird Tales from 1932 through 1938. He also had almost as many […]
Normally, I use this space to talk about short fiction from the pulps to tell folks what kind of awesome stories were being told in magazines from the days of yore. Today, I’m taking a quick break to tell folks what kind of awesome stories are being told in Issue #2 of Cirsova Heroic Fantasy […]
SENSOR SWEEP: Neutered by Star Wars, Soulless Elves, Peculiar Shifts, and Dozens of Indistinguisable Books
Wednesday , 8, June 2016 Sensor Sweep Leave a commentBooks (Glorious Trash) After the Good War — “One of the joys of any trash fiction fanatic is scouring the mass market paperback racks at the local second-hand books emporium. I’ve made countless discoveries of heretofore-forgotten novels this way, and this book, first published in hardcover in 1972 and released by Popular Library with a […]
As discussed in some of my previous Elements of Wargaming installments here on the blog, Wargames are designed to be faithful enough to war and real-world experience to be useful in a real-world scenario. I recently was directed to a further proof of this, in an article discussing the resurgence of Wargaming in the US […]
SUPERVERSIVE Review: “Style is the Rocket”
Tuesday , 7, June 2016 Book Review, Promotions, Superversive 5 CommentsFirst off: I need to warn all of you. This is quite a long post. You need not panic, as much of it is made up of quotes, which can be skipped if necessary in favor of my analyses. But I hope I manage to keep your interest – and ah, therein lies the challenge. […]
Guest Post by Misha Burnett: Abel Baker Charlie by John Maxim
Monday , 6, June 2016 Appendix X Leave a commentA Man Of Parts: John Maxim’s Abel Baker Charlie Published in 1983 by Houghton Mifflin, and then re-released in 2001 by Avon, John Maxim’s Abel Baker Charlie seems to be effectively out of print. There does seem to be a Kindle version available, but skimming the sample on Amazon shows that it’s a quick and […]
Building a Weird Tales Library: Part 9- The Single Author Collections
Sunday , 5, June 2016 Fiction, Short Fiction, Uncategorized 7 CommentsIn addition to the multi-author paperback anthologies reprinting Weird Tales fiction, there are some single author collections that can expand your reading experience. E. F. Benson is one of the great English ghost story writers. Benson had seven stories in Weird Tales from 1929 to 1933. You can find them in the Wordsworth Night Terrors […]
Ordeal in Space by Ralph Sloan appeared in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories. It is unrelated to the Robert Heinlein story by the same name. Ordeal in Space is a gritty story of a cop who’s walking a dangerous line between the law and his desire for revenge. It’s a pretty ‘tough’ tale […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: The Euro Gamer’s Guide to Learning GMT’s COIN Series
Wednesday , 1, June 2016 Wargames 4 CommentsThe top game blog post of the past couple of weeks is, without a doubt, The 5 Worst Mistakes I’ve Made when Learning COIN over at Ludobits. Now… I’m biased because this is on a topic I’ve struggled to articulate previously. But really… check it out: Now what happens when you first sit down at a COIN table with […]