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That was a pretty cool plan from Catherine. My big questions are whether stealing the Triumph (I think) Aspect is permanent or temporary, and the conditions of doing this again in the future. Or if she just Took the ability associated with the Triumph Aspect and made it part of her Take Aspect. Also not sure what her Name currently is; I'm thinking it's still Squire, it could be Queen of Callow though. An argument can even be made that she stole the Heiress Name. Of course, she might even have a completely different Name, even something new. SerSpook fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 07:16
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SerSpook posted:That was a pretty cool plan from Catherine. I think you're right since William still calls her Squire after she comes back. So, it's more she stole the Rise Aspect from TLS then killed that version of him. I don't know if that means she now has 4 Aspects or it just ends up as 1 of the 3 Aspects Squire has. Given the discussion earlier re: Squire, it should mean TLS still has 3 Aspects for whoever gets that Name next though. If William had lived, I think it would mean he'd only have 2 Aspects available but that's a moot point. But hey, at least, she gets a cool sword now.
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Dec 7, 2016 07:30
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Katreus posted:I think you're right since William still calls her Squire after she comes back. So, it's more she stole the Rise Aspect from TLS then killed that version of him. I don't know if that means she now has 4 Aspects or it just ends up as 1 of the 3 Aspects Squire has. Given the discussion earlier re: Squire, it should mean TLS still has 3 Aspects for whoever gets that Name next though. If William had lived, I think it would mean he'd only have 2 Aspects available but that's a moot point. I'm thinking she maybe didn't steal the Aspect itself, but abilities associated with it, like the healing? And then subsumed it into Take? That keeps the Aspect count at 3 for Squire while still providing a pretty damned powerful upgrade. e: Actually, thinking about it, I think that Catherine pulled something similar to what Captain did when she was offered the Warlord Name. Instead of taking what was offered, she forcibly changed it. So it's the Queen of Callow Name, but fundamentally changed in some fashion? Maybe she took the Name Governess of Callow, since she would be ruling it for the Empire? Hell, the visions she saw were fundamentally the same thing Captain saw. Herself leading a conquered people against the Empire and liberating them. Similarly to Captain, though, she refused this and found a way to simply take what she wanted; a resurrection in her case, or something to help fight the Curse in Captain's case. We see a similar pattern at play with Warlock's chapter, where he kills the past Warlock and then we immediately go to Apprentice exploiting rules of magic to break the gate to Liesse. SerSpook fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 07:33
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Finally caught up with Practical Guide again. Looks like I picked the right time to see the story stop making GBS threads on our protagonist again! Though it didn't really feel as bad on the way this time since just like it always felt her enemies had an ace up their sleeve, the same was true for her this time around. Granted she hadn't planned for everything, but all her most major setbacks were basically previously accounted for this time, so it never felt like a desperate fight for survival in the same way. Still felt unfair as hell though, I mean TWO self-resses in one fight? The Swordsman was clearly cheating and hopefully now she can too. I do feel like she's going to still be Squire, even if another Name would be pretty awesome. Part of it is just from what the story tells us - the previous chapter being Squire (Redux) would still make perfect sense even if she got a new Name in this one, but I'm not so sure about the timing, and she did get called Squire again at the end after getting her sword too. The other part is, I feel like she needs to be Squire to maintain her position as the Black Knight's apprentice, and I don't think that role is over for her just yet. Somehow I feel like Heiress probably won't be beaten for good here, though she just about earned a nice set-back and regular trouncing. Although I guess by how the story has played out so far since the start, you could argue she'll win instead since she is I believe still due a win against Squire in their own 3-part match, right? And with Catherine getting her Name refreshed, her life (un-undeath?) back, and best of all a pretty magic sword, things seem to be going simply too well.
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Dec 9, 2016 20:47
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Insurrectionist posted:Somehow I feel like Heiress probably won't be beaten for good here, though she just about earned a nice set-back and regular trouncing. Although I guess by how the story has played out so far since the start, you could argue she'll win instead since she is I believe still due a win against Squire in their own 3-part match, right? And with Catherine getting her Name refreshed, her life (un-undeath?) back, and best of all a pretty magic sword, things seem to be going simply too well.[/spoiler] I think because she's on a new iteration of the Squire name (or maybe a new name entirely?) she's no longer bound by their previous pattern. It reset her aspects and I think her connection to the name too, since after she was raised she said it felt like it was just hanging off her and I don't think that was mentioned again. I's find it kind of inconsistent if it didn't reset the rule of 3. Arguably Heiress nicking her name in the first place was her victory since that would have killed Catherine or allowed Chider to kill her if she wasn't already an undead monstrosity. I like the sort of inverse wins over TLS too: in their first encounter she got all goofed up on necromancy in order to beat him and nearly died, in their last encounter she was a fancy zombie and got outright returned to life before killing him. I really dig Practical Guide's setting, I love that narrative cliches are outright rules of the universe and that people can exploit them to their own advantage. TGaB: After a couple weeks bingeing I caught up to current updates and I am frustrated. The sci-fi poo poo made me stop reading for a bit, it's just so uuuugh. I guess in a setting that's very D&D I shouldn't mind Might and Magic style shoe-horned sci-fi nonsense but I don't like anything to do with it. It adds more unnecessary layers to a story that's incredibly full of unnecessary layers. I feel like book 11 is at least twice as long as it needs to be and moves the plot almost nowhere and I had to outright skip whatever was going on with the Fedora dude because it was just too goddamn insufferable. There's these cool plot threads of what did Justinian do to the gods (which answered how he could be plotting mass apotheosis and not get smited and was a Good Chapter)? What exactly turned Elilial against the Pantheon? How the gently caress is Justinian going to achieve mass apotheosis? And then there's slightly lesser ones like Syrinx and Snowe and whatever Ingvar's going to do, which at least ties into all the god stuff, and whatever the Conclave is going to do but not even that's enough. Let's have even more characters like a cyborg that's probably evil and some inconsequential thieves like circus girl and disaffected richboy and the one dude who seems depressed but is actually trans out of nowhere(?) (and we will spend an entire chapter on this) and insufferable Criminal Minds man and probably that headhunter again and genuinely likeable witch dude who is also related to Trissiny because why the gently caress not and add some pointless poo poo with Dwarves and now there's guns (and they're also really effective!) because even though you have cool lightning guns that fit really well with the overall aesthetic of the setting that's just not enough. Just  I want to like your story, please stop adding characters and plot threads and just focus on the actual good things you already have going and take them somewhere. It's not like the new stuff is even bad, necessarily, but I'm just so over the endless additions of new stuff and characters that are either tangential to everything I find interesting in the setting and story or actively make it less appealing. I'm invested enough in the good stuff to want to keep reading and I think that makes it worse.Also I really wish Shook and Vandro were dead or just not in the story ever again because they are repugnant fuckers who have had far too much time spent on them already.
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Dec 11, 2016 14:58
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Gitro posted:I really dig Practical Guide's setting, I love that narrative cliches are outright rules of the universe and that people can exploit them to their own advantage. Yeah, I like it a fair bit too, even if I sometimes kinda feel it gets a little bit too 'game-y'. Or uncomfortably similar to TV-Tropes or something. However, luckily the author has actually used it pretty smartly so far and also refrains from using said narrative cliches for loving EVERYTHING, instead mostly just containing it to Catherine's actual rivals and her aspirations to climb the ladder of ambition. Part of the reason why the army stuff feels so important I think, because when Cat is doing army stuff the story either leaves the more mechanical parts of the setting by the wayside, or else explicitly uses said army to counter or circumvent the rules. It'd be a bit boring if all her interactions were based on those sorts of cliches. Speaking of, binging the last 10 or so chapters really showed that all our novice Names, be it Cat, Heiress or The Dead Swordsman, are honestly pretty bad at the whole 'exploiting the rules' part of things. Now, obviously Catherine redeemed herself on that front in the latest chapter, but that was only after basically spending the whole story mostly completely falling into the traps and restrictions imposed by roles and stories, and she rarely seems to actually plan to break the stories beforehand. And she basically called out Heiress for her narrow focus and playing inside the rules of Creation too strictly. Meanwhile William mostly didn't even need to since he had Almorava doing all the work for him on that front, and he was painfully straight-forward anyway. Comparatively the older Names have shown a lot more proficiency in countering, manipulating or just plain ignoring the rules, including I'd say in the recent bonus chapters for Captain and Warlock from long ago. I feel like this is probably the area in which our protagonist might benefit the most from improving on, especially since her brute force is a poor match for Heiress in general, while an affinity or talent for twisting her story the way she wants it would be a much better fit.
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Dec 11, 2016 16:42
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Latest Practical Guide (ch. 48) Thoughts: 10/10 evil plotting. That was some very nice word play on Catherine's part to technically adhere to the oaths, and I laughed at the interplay with the High Lords and the blackmail threat exchanges. OTOH, while Catherine might have felt it was all personal already, pretty sure she's moved herself from impersonal obstacle to blood feud enemy for Heiress at this point, which granted, might not mean much difference in the actual plotting going down by Heiress. Guess that tutoring from Aisha is paying off. Usually, I'd be a bit more horrified by the whole soul bound to a rock thing, but I can't see much difference from just killing someone, especially since she doesn't plan to keep the rock around (and will let him go to the Underworld).
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Dec 14, 2016 06:40
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Katreus posted:Latest Practical Guide (ch. 48) Thoughts: I dunno, on one hand I'm not exactly thinking she shouldn't have escalated, although other than the bargaining with High Lords part I'm not sure it was strictly helpful for her either. But I definitely think it'll change how Heiress goes about things. Up until now all her schemes have been, ultimately, just focused on bettering her own position, even if a lot of them do so by attacking Squire or endangering hordes of civilians. From now on I'd be surprised if she didn't specifically target the Fifteenth as much as she can afford instead. Probably she's too canny to actually take big risks or waste valuable resources for pointless spite, but I'd say Catherine has actually been surprisingly lucky with her crew of misfits so far, especially with Nilin turning out to have been a leak all along. Now obviously I don't think Heiress had a heart or anything previously and let them mostly be by the goodness of her heart, but she didn't feel any particular need to target them when she had perfectly good and simple alternatives either. I'll be very surprised if the colorful cast of the Fifteenth keep up such an impressive survival rate in future confrontations with Heiress.
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Dec 14, 2016 12:00
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Finished blitzing my way through The Gods Are Bastards. Very solid overall, with good character writing and believable plots. It has the same issues that a lot of serial fiction has; namely, it is in bad need of a good editor to trim down some of the more pointless arcs and diversions to new groups of entirely new characters. I definitely recommend it, though. Be warned, though: it's a very long read, since the author has been releasing three times a week for years. It took me a literal month of reading about two hours a day to get through it. I'm the tiniest bit upset about the secret sci-fi setting. It's usually one of the worst possible ways to take a fantasy story, but so far it's far enough in the background that it isn't mattering all that much.
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Dec 25, 2016 08:01
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blastron posted:Finished blitzing my way through The Gods Are Bastards. Very solid overall, with good character writing and believable plots. It has the same issues that a lot of serial fiction has; namely, it is in bad need of a good editor to trim down some of the more pointless arcs and diversions to new groups of entirely new characters. I definitely recommend it, though. Be warned, though: it's a very long read, since the author has been releasing three times a week for years. It took me a literal month of reading about two hours a day to get through it. Just be prepared for schedule slip. It has been getting worse recently. Aborted/pointless/meadering arc talk: I just want to watch Trissiny get her thieves guild tag damnit! Who cares about sleeping students!
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Dec 26, 2016 21:53
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The gods are Bastards is still being written, right?
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Dec 26, 2016 23:21
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Yes, there was just an update on the 23rd, but yeah dude has like the worst loving luck apparently. I'm pretty sure if I wrote a web serial I'd also be waylaid constantly, but I guess it's a credit to him that I'm like "gently caress where is my Friday update?!" I also marathoned the story in the last month and I might (gulp) like it more than I liked Worm. It's apples and oranges really, but it's fuckin' smart and fun and plays with its genre really well. Worm is huge and well-realized, but the constant widening of its scope made it kind of...unreliable? It slowly grew from an interesting genre story (like Gods are Bastards) and became something different. TGaB widens its scope too but always seems to stay grounded in its initial thesis of "what would the world of D&D be like...in the future"
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Dec 27, 2016 06:03
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Three chapters of that length a week is insane. Is the author employed elsewhere or do they fund themselves through their writing like Wildbow does?
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Dec 27, 2016 07:21
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blastron posted:Three chapters of that length a week is insane. Is the author employed elsewhere or do they fund themselves through their writing like Wildbow does? IIRC, he works full time at a bookstore. He does accept donations, but I haven't seen him get more than $200 in a week.
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Dec 27, 2016 17:43
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Is anyone else starting to find Twig a little tiresome? It's starting to feel that way to me - I'm struggling a little to keep up with each chapter change and the constant cast churn. Still liking Practical Guide a lot though.
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Jan 1, 2017 11:34
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I haven't read Twig at all, but Wildbow does have a lot going on at the moment. Besides editing Worm, he's started writing background for Worm 2, and has one or two other rather interesting projects which might be going places.
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Jan 1, 2017 12:55
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The cast is not much of a problem, but now we've had 3 arcs with one-city-adventure buildups and I hope the next arc will be actually be going somewhere.
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Jan 1, 2017 14:21
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Serial literature absolutely needs an ensemble cast and dozens of secondary characters, but I think the update demands of web serials makes them trend towards bogging down into little details that keep the plot from moving on, or spending tens of thousands of words to describe every single thing that happens to the characters over the course of two or three days. That's the only real problem I had with Worm, and you can tell that the author also saw the problem , although I think he overcompensated by doing the massive time skip.
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Jan 7, 2017 08:43
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Ghetto Prince posted:Serial literature absolutely needs an ensemble cast and dozens of secondary characters, but I think the update demands of web serials makes them trend towards bogging down into little details that keep the plot from moving on, or spending tens of thousands of words to describe every single thing that happens to the characters over the course of two or three days. I'd also wager that the way it is published - as updates a few times a week - is what necessitates the constant sense of drama and escalation, which also kind of sucks. It was most obvious in Pact.
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Jan 7, 2017 08:57
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I really liked Pact, but the non-stop escalation made it sort of exhausting. Even in Worm there were some chapters that were just people sitting around talking, or shopping, or doing stuff around their base. Every once in a while the reader needs a little break from horrible things happening.
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Jan 7, 2017 16:26
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I've read most of Worm now (maybe? dunno feels like I've read a lot) but the scale of the conflicts has gotten sort of massive and most of the plot hooks that got me initially interested have been resolved or dropped. Are there any other good superhero web serials? I've been looking at topwebfiction and it seems like half the front page is in the genre but it also seems that it's all kind of garbage by comparison. Just clicking titles at random I found some of the most awkward 'urban youth' dialogue I've ever read, an extremely overt gary stu self-insert guy in a laughably sexist setting, and then some sort of weird incest rape scene that made me stop reading about two paragraphs in and also decide to stop clicking things at random... Does Worm just tower above every other web-serial in terms of quality or do I just have terrible luck or something? Is there something else I can read that's in the same ballpark as worm in terms of quality?
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Jan 26, 2017 17:54
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Super Powereds and Citadel are probably the best superhero web novels aside from worm. If you're interested in a more fantasy bent, The Gods Are Bastards and A Practical Guide to Evil are both pretty good.
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Jan 26, 2017 17:58
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Pigeotic posted:awkward 'urban youth' dialogue
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Jan 26, 2017 23:51
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I'd like to state for the record that The Gods are Bastards' latest round of technobabble is wearing on my last nerve. "Why" can be an interesting question. "How" rarely is.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:36
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A science god wizard did it, now get back to corrupting the Emperor into sinister Eserite dishwashing rituals.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:58
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Autonomous Monster posted:I'd like to state for the record that The Gods are Bastards' latest round of technobabble is wearing on my last nerve. Yeah it's really disappointing. The story has been great for so long but it's been veering off into "what the gently caress are you even doing author" territory for a bit now. The absolute worst thing in any sci-fi or pseudo-sci-fi is when the writer(s) try to come up with plausible sounding explanations for future (magi)technology that isn't grounded in any current science and it just comes off as bullshit. Plus this story has been like 95% about the characters and character development and their interactions with each other, I don't give a rats rear end about this stuff.
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Jan 27, 2017 18:11
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Is wildbow ever coming back to Worm? Wasn't he supposed to start doing the sequel in 2016?
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Feb 2, 2017 01:44
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TOOT BOOT posted:Is wildbow ever coming back to Worm? Wasn't he supposed to start doing the sequel in 2016? When he's done with Twig, AFAIK.
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Feb 2, 2017 02:39
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Yes, he's already started writing prep work for Worm 2.
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Feb 2, 2017 03:39
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TOOT BOOT posted:Is wildbow ever coming back to Worm? Wasn't he supposed to start doing the sequel in 2016? The plan was to start with Worm 2 after Twig, and in the mean time he is editing Worm for actual publication.
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Feb 2, 2017 11:59
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He's been editing Worm for several months already. He's also got two other things he's working on.
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Feb 2, 2017 18:55
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The Shortest Path posted:Yeah it's really disappointing. The story has been great for so long but it's been veering off into "what the gently caress are you even doing author" territory for a bit now. The absolute worst thing in any sci-fi or pseudo-sci-fi is when the writer(s) try to come up with plausible sounding explanations for future (magi)technology that isn't grounded in any current science and it just comes off as bullshit. I recently binged through on TGaB and caught up just in time for the current arc to start. I liked the Trissiny arc before it and the series was at its best when it had the whole Western + Magic frontier feel to it. The current arc in contrast has me bored out of my mind. I feel this is one of the biggest pitfalls with the series being a one-man-show kind of thing - it desperately needs an editor who can sit down with the author, point at the website banner that has "High Fantasy Western" written on it and talk him out of jamming Science fiction into it. Hopefully it'll get better, but I think I hit a really bad spot to catch up with the series.
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Feb 3, 2017 18:24
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Piell posted:Super Powereds and Citadel are probably the best superhero web novels aside from worm. If you're interested in a more fantasy bent, The Gods Are Bastards and A Practical Guide to Evil are both pretty good. Like a week late(got distracted reading something else) but thanks for pointing me at these, I've just gotten through book 1 of Super Powereds and it's been a fun ride so far. My only gripe is that it seems to be entirely set in a school which seems a strange choice for a superhero story, a result of the author writing what he knows I guess? It doesn't hold the story back too much I don't think though. At any rate thanks for pointing me towards it and giving me something to do with my free time. I read the first few chapters of citadel too and it also seemed to be set in a school / training facility type thing so maybe it's a genre staple?
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Feb 4, 2017 08:38
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Lamquin posted:I recently binged through on TGaB and caught up just in time for the current arc to start. I liked the Trissiny arc before it and the series was at its best when it had the whole Western + Magic frontier feel to it. Yeah... Everything up until the point where it started going crazy is great. One of my favorite things I've read in a very long time, and I too liked the Trissiny / Prin arc before this one. Those two and Tellwyrn are my favorite characters, though the others are all also great.
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Feb 4, 2017 14:06
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So there's a new chapter of the Practical Guide to Evil up and I think the Tyrant might be one of the best characters, or at least the Tyrant viewed through the lens of his new 'advisor'
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Feb 10, 2017 13:48
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So i read worm a year ago and I loved it. What else is good? Practical guide?
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Feb 12, 2017 20:33
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Twig is good!
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Feb 12, 2017 22:06
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The poo poo I see posted most often is: Mother of Learning, Unsong, Practical Guide to Evil, The Gods are Bastards, Zombie Knight, A Hero's War.
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Feb 12, 2017 22:23
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Nettle Soup posted:Twig is good!
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Feb 12, 2017 22:23
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Feb 12, 2017 22:26
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