This is the second week of Book Review Friday and already things are starting to look up! I have reviews for two RPG related items, one awful time travel book and a collection of fantastic web comics.
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Written in Time by Jerry Ahern
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Ok. I admit I didn’t finish this one. I got about a hundred and fifty pages in before I realized that it wasn’t getting any better. The pacing is terrible, I feel the prologue kinda’ destroys any mystery the authors could have built up, the dialogue is almost unreadable and without reasearching the authors I can already tell that at least one of them is a gun “enthusiast” because the book spends paragraphs describing them. This whole thing reads like the worst sort of author insert fan fiction, only the authors didn’t at least do the reader the favor of setting the book in someone else’s interesting universe.
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I was more disappointed in this book than anything. The back cover copy sells it as a race against time adventure to stop people changing history for their own gains, and the authors destroy that in the prologue, and manage to kill my interest about five different ways within the first hundred pages. I should be applauded for reading anything past the point the main character says “Wouldn’t that make a great idea for a novel?” without any irony at all.
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White Plume Mountain by Paul Kidd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a really fun book with a great cast of characters. I really like the interactions between the Justicar and the pixie (who’s name I forgit. It’s been a few years since I’ve read this.) With a good mix of action and humor the author manages to make the adventure the book is based upon into a fantastic story. I would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of fantasy fiction.
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I’ve never run or played in White Plum Mountain so I couldn’t say how close the book keeps to the source material, but it was fun to read and I liked how the book’s tone contrasted with the in-setting nature of the place they were exploring, the same way that most groups would react out of game to the adventure.
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Theater Hopper: Year One by Cami Brazelton Tom Brazelton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Theater Hopper is one of the best web comics out there! There I said it. I’m a bit of a fanboy when it comes to this comic. The collections of the first three years are some of the only autographed books I own, and the Kickstarter to get Year three in print was the first time I’d ever participated in crowd sourced funding for anything.
The art for the first year is a bit rough compared to the later years, but you do see it improving as the Tom refines his style and improves his skills and it’s great to see the work of an artist evolve over time.
This being a three a week webcomic about movies, the jokes are going to be a little stale if a few places simply due to the passage of time, but overall it’s a fun read and I recommend the book to any lover of web comics or movies.
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Seriously, give Theater Hopper a read.
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Spelljammer: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Adventures in Space by Jeff Grubb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
SpellJammer is simply my favorite campaign setting EVER! I love it for the same reasons that so many people hate it. It’s fun. It’s silly. It’s gonzo. It has tall ships boldly sailing through space. it mixes all that’s great about the Pirates of the Caribbean with the cool space adventures of classic Star Trek. It mixes settings like a blender set to “awesome” and delivers the evil with a death ray eye laser or a mind blast from atop a giant space hamster.
It’s a setting that can see ships massed for fierce battles with the dreaded horrors of the beyond or fantastic voyages into the unknown. I’ve run two campaigns set in the wild space of SpellJammer and I’d suggest to anyone to give it a shot themselves.
That’s it for this week. If anyone has any suggestions of good books feel free to leave them in the comments!
