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xcheopis posted:All three are just mobile packs of protein. Frankly, so are you and I, what's your point?
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Oct 7, 2020 05:44
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juggalo baby coffin posted:rats overall get a bad rap in society. i think a lot of people think that mice are like what rats are actually like, whereas real mice are way too tiny and they piss constantly cause they dont have a valve on their bladder to stop piss coming out. whereas rats are clean and theyre bigger and more cuddly. My parents' gym is in their basement and the "ceiling" is just paper stapled over the insulation and there are piss marks all over and I assumed it was just mice being assholes. That's much funnier.
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Oct 7, 2020 13:15
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Resurrecting this thread to say that I picked up Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser on multiple folks recommendations and it's loving rocking. It's like the best of Conan and Lovecraft minus the lovely writing, racism and sexism. It reads like the coolest D&D campaign ever.
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Oct 13, 2020 17:51
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Ohthehugemanatee posted:Resurrecting this thread to say that I picked up Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser on multiple folks recommendations and it's loving rocking. It's like the best of Conan and Lovecraft minus the lovely writing, racism and sexism. It reads like the coolest D&D campaign ever. it reads a bit like dd campaign, and it also has lovely writing, racism and sexism
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Oct 13, 2020 18:16
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ChubbyChecker posted:it reads a bit like dd campaign, and it also has lovely writing, racism and sexism poo poo, it gets bad? I'm one book in and so far no one seems to care about race and the women characters have agency which is worlds beyond Vance. I've been going through old school fantasy recently so maybe my standards are just incredibly low.
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Oct 13, 2020 19:04
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Ohthehugemanatee posted:poo poo, it gets bad? I'm one book in and so far no one seems to care about race and the women characters have agency which is worlds beyond Vance. I've been going through old school fantasy recently so maybe my standards are just incredibly low. i listened to the first few, and women are treated like they usually are in sword & sorcery books. and racial differences are exoticized. like, it's not on conan level, and definitely not on lovecraft level, but there's some still e: the first few chronologically. i think they were published in the 70s, haven't listened to the earlier material yet
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Oct 13, 2020 19:13
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Fafhrd should have listened to his mother, I tell you hwat
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Oct 13, 2020 19:17
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:I'm rereading Dark Lord of Derkholm because of this thread and it's delightful. I love Diana Wynne Jones. By the way, this does have a sequel (Year of the Griffin) but I did not enjoy it quite as much.
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Oct 13, 2020 19:30
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:By the way, this does have a sequel (Year of the Griffin) but I did not enjoy it quite as much. It's also a sort of spin-off from her book "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel" which is written like a travel guide. It's okay, nothing amazing. "Year of the Griffin" wasn't great and honestly all I remember is that it focuses on one of the younger griffins, but "Darklord of Derkholm" is so much fun.
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Oct 14, 2020 02:56
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i knew there was something i missed lmao They never specified that the milk came from a cow, and Redwall was full of other mammals...
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Oct 14, 2020 03:53
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there wolf posted:They never specified that the milk came from a cow, and Redwall was full of other mammals... Makes sense, since the last time a cow came by Redwall it got covered in cow poo poo.
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Oct 14, 2020 03:56
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there wolf posted:They never specified that the milk came from a cow, and Redwall was full of other mammals... 
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Oct 14, 2020 03:59
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ChubbyChecker posted:i listened to the first few, and women are treated like they usually are in sword & sorcery books. and racial differences are exoticized. like, it's not on conan level, and definitely not on lovecraft level, but there's some still I think the earliest Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories were written in the 40s iirc but I don't know when they saw publication
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Oct 14, 2020 04:24
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I would bet money there was a lesser Redwall book where the heroic Cowlord Bertram the Wise fights against Selim the Stoat and Zara the Weasel Queen to defend his giant barn against the vermin who wanted to steal the milk for the dibbuns.
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Oct 14, 2020 04:30
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Except for the horse in the first book (which is one of the MANY continuity issues), there weren't any properly scaled animals. To use RPG terms, shrews, sparrows, and mice are small, Badgers and birds of prey are Large, and every other species (from rats to otters) is somehow Medium. The explanation for this is after the explanation for opposable thumbs. Edit: And the fish, who are giant-size compared to the mice. How big was that Abbey pond?
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Oct 14, 2020 04:51
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Cobalt-60 posted:Except for the horse in the first book (which is one of the MANY continuity issues), there weren't any properly scaled animals. To use RPG terms, shrews, sparrows, and mice are small, Badgers and birds of prey are Large, and every other species (from rats to otters) is somehow Medium. The explanation for this is after the explanation for opposable thumbs. The main villain in Mossflower, the second book, was a huge wildcat, who was supposedly much larger than any of the other creatures.
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Oct 14, 2020 22:33
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CynCyanide posted:It's also a sort of spin-off from her book "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel" which is written like a travel guide. It's okay, nothing amazing. "Year of the Griffin" wasn't great and honestly all I remember is that it focuses on one of the younger griffins, but "Darklord of Derkholm" is so much fun. Someone gave me the Tough Guide to Fantasyland when I was a fantasy obsessed 12 year old and tbh it ruined the genre for me in the best possible way by laying out the ridiculous clichés of fantasy writing in a funny, child-accessible way. I was disappointed by the Dark Lord of Derkholm, I thought it was a weak book from such a great writer, especially when you hold it up against stuff like the Chrestomanci books. One book of hers I found pretty enjoyable, although no idea if it holds up now, is Deep Secret. It's a very different take on fantasy to the standard quasi-medievalism setting, and is partially set in a sci-fi/fantasy convention on normal planet Earth, and she mines a lot of fun out of the fact that the protagonists keep getting away with magical stuff in public because people think it's LARPing or cosplay. Also I only ever read one Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser short story, in an anthology, and the main antagonist of that was a sexy naked girl, repeatedly referred to as a child, called "child" by the protagonists, and described in terms of her extremely youthful, childish looks, that both the characters explicitly wanted to gently caress, to the degree that it made me wildly uncomfortable even as a dumb teenager, so idk about that series not being as pedo-sexist as the fantasy average.
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Oct 15, 2020 16:21
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Committed to a thing for the horror month. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3944412
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Oct 17, 2020 19:04
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https://boingboing.net/2020/10/19/margaret-weis-and-tracy-hickman-sue-wizards-of-the-coast-after-it-abandons-new-dragonlance-trilogy.html Weis and Hickman are saying that Wizards of the Coast told them to write a new Dragonlance trilogy but canceled it in August. This thread? Started August 20th. Is it responsible? The world may never know.
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Oct 19, 2020 21:40
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muscles like this! posted:https://boingboing.net/2020/10/19/margaret-weis-and-tracy-hickman-sue-wizards-of-the-coast-after-it-abandons-new-dragonlance-trilogy.html good riddance
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Oct 19, 2020 21:43
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muscles like this! posted:https://boingboing.net/2020/10/19/margaret-weis-and-tracy-hickman-sue-wizards-of-the-coast-after-it-abandons-new-dragonlance-trilogy.html I have no feelings about Dragonlance, as I avoided it entirely, but I have to say I appreciate this sentence from a technical English perspective: quote:Weis and Hickman created Dragonlance, set within the broad ambit of WoTC's Dungeons & Dragons role-playing franchise, in the 1980s. "Ambit" is not a word you see often.
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Oct 19, 2020 21:47
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I have no feelings about Dragonlance, as I avoided it entirely, but I have to say I appreciate this sentence from a technical English perspective: i liked excoriated
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Oct 19, 2020 22:12
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I very very recently tried to re-read Dragons of Autumn Twilight and I couldn't get through it. It really suffers from being a retelling of a DnD campaign, including the DM stand in character rushing the Pcs along and one hobgoblin critically failing a roll and impaling himself on Tanis' sword. It was good for my first blush with swords and sorcery outside of Tolkien at like 9 or 10 though. I was super into Gundam Wing at the time too so stories about soapish interpersonal friction set against the backdrop of larger conflicts must have just been my thing then. Someone brought up the Darksword "trilogy" (3 novels and a gamebook) and I think it's a lot better. They set it in a magaocracy split into castes depending on what kind of magic you could naturally preform, which is kinda whatever on its own but society there treats magic as if it's life itself. Which makes things very difficult for the occasional person born without any magic. They're considered "Dead" and are usually killed. They live in a kind of weird fantasy trope land but with some modern conviences in. I seem to remember a clever magic escalator at one point. The Empress and Emperor are expecting their first child and of course he's born Dead, which would have been the end of it only a woman who recent lost her baby nabbs him and hides out in some rural village while raising him as her own. Which doesn't turn out too well because people eventually cop that this young man can't magic any seeds into the ground and his "mother" has been helping him hide it. There's also a group of magic-users who are casteless and don't have any particular aptitude. They however are able to supply everyone else with magical energy and because of that are a powerful religious organisation. The second main character is one of these (a Catalyst) who has never quite felt at home in the church and never rose through it's ranks over some...slight heresy.. I think he did maths when he was a teenager or something. Anyway it's a fun, weird world they built for it and it's interesting in that your two pov characters can't do magic in a world where it's so so so important. Also I remember thinking that Joram? (the Prince) is a loving rear end in a top hat but I was still looking forward to him ruining some Atlantian magic-utopia.
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Oct 19, 2020 23:44
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muscles like this! posted:https://boingboing.net/2020/10/19/margaret-weis-and-tracy-hickman-sue-wizards-of-the-coast-after-it-abandons-new-dragonlance-trilogy.html I'm glad to have done some good work in this terrible year
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Oct 31, 2020 16:31
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I just cannot imagine a Weis and Hickman Dragonlance book written in TYOOL 2020 being anything but cringeworthy and I'm completely unsurprised if Wizards editors took a look at what they'd turned in and decided "Nope".
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Nov 1, 2020 00:39
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TBH the Dragonlance books are just fine if you're a sixth grader who just wants to read something with a dragon on the cover. Maybe that entire demo has been swallowed by YA, I dunno.
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Nov 1, 2020 00:50
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Deptfordx posted:I just cannot imagine a Weis and Hickman Dragonlance book written in TYOOL 2020 being anything but cringeworthy and I'm completely unsurprised if Wizards editors took a look at what they'd turned in and decided "Nope". Imagining them being like "Boy wizard? I'll show that hack a story about a boy wizard" and the resulting 1500 pages came out super TERF-ey and Mein Kampf-ey. "It was the 2016, the Year of the Chromatic Dragon and the Gender Wars, I mean Kender Wars were just beginning..." NC Wyeth Death Cult fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Nov 1, 2020 |
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Nov 1, 2020 00:59
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The Moon Monster posted:TBH the Dragonlance books are just fine if you're a sixth grader who just wants to read something with a dragon on the cover. Maybe that entire demo has been swallowed by YA, I dunno. I'm pretty sure any contemporary bookish teen used to reading modern YA would be "WTF is this BS?" if given the original Dragonlance trilogy to read.
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Nov 1, 2020 01:17
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Deptfordx posted:I'm pretty sure any contemporary bookish teen used to reading modern YA would be "WTF is this BS?" if given the original Dragonlance trilogy to read. Well yeah, I meant like an 11 year old.
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Nov 1, 2020 01:26
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Glad they're not making another terrible book but at the same time I also want them to win the lawsuit.
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Nov 1, 2020 01:47
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Is there even any money in fantasy novel these days unless it comes from a writer milking a popular series of theirs from the glory days of the pre 2000's?
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Nov 1, 2020 02:00
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Aren't a lot of those young adult trilogies fantasy? You know, the kind that get turned into fairly bland movies.
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Nov 1, 2020 03:37
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Aren't a lot of those young adult trilogies fantasy? You know, the kind that get turned into fairly bland movies. A huge number. It seems to be the default career plan for any budding author: write a YA fantasy/ sci-fi trilogy. Can't fault them since, for a while, every studio was looking for the next Twilight or Harry Potter and 'it could be my turn' would be tempting ...
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Nov 1, 2020 17:02
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The only good book that Piers Anthony shat out was “On a Pale Horse”. I still read it through from time to time.
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Nov 1, 2020 21:57
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I vaguely remember a fantasty/scifi book I read from my father's bookshelf when I was a teenager. It involved a human dude, who was captured, maybe, by aliens and fell in love with some other human breeding stock, she had red hair and super hairy lower legs. What am I remembering?
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Nov 2, 2020 23:01
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Dragonlance is puke but it's fine to read when a teenager and not really ready for something more involved just yet. I got lucky since I had the Hobbit read to me when I was like 5, which gave me a seed for wanting more involved stuff, but I was still happy to eat up a lot of trash as a teenager. The book landscape has changed drastically since the 80s/90s, and kids today have a massively expanded variety of diet for books, Dragonlance is just old old news.
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Nov 2, 2020 23:20
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I have no feelings about Dragonlance, as I avoided it entirely, but I have to say I appreciate this sentence from a technical English perspective: Was it someone in this thread that said the best way to build a child's vocabulary is by reading a bunch of fantasy? Deptfordx posted:I'm pretty sure any contemporary bookish teen used to reading modern YA would be "WTF is this BS?" if given the original Dragonlance trilogy to read. I mean, this was my response even back in the late ninties right when Harry Potter has just come out. Tamora Peirce or Terry Brooks or Terry Pratchett had all produced much better high fantasy books by then.
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Nov 3, 2020 00:16
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tango alpha delta posted:The only good book that Piers Anthony shat out was “On a Pale Horse”. I still read it through from time to time. the only books of his I remember besides the Xanth series was that weird sci-fi/fantasy hybrid series that takes place on a space station or something and everyone is naked all the time since only the richest people are allowed to wearing clothing.
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Nov 3, 2020 00:22
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there wolf posted:Was it someone in this thread that said the best way to build a child's vocabulary is by reading a bunch of fantasy? yeah I've confused a lot of folks into thinking I'm some Harvard-rear end smartie because as a kid I read way too much fantasy and got hooked on phonics with a big vocabulary despite not knowing the difference between their/there/they're when I barely graduated highschool A pretty solid online coaching by a writer and editor for a series of game books I was in a MUchat for got my rear end turned around right on all that at least
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Nov 3, 2020 00:28
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:Maps are helpful if the story involves warfare and political intrigue and characters in-story are actually referring to maps themselves to plan their great conquest. Black August posted:I still appreciate this thread. Reading about Derkholm makes me want to write a story about a Dark Lord's underlings getting a union to back their demands for better treatment. nonathlon posted:Took me a helluva time to catch up with the thread, so I'm belatedly joining in on Spider Robinson. But I knew Robinson was more active as a critic than as a writer. And then he wrote an editorial in a newspaper that was widely syndicated (this would have been late 90's, maybe early 2000s) basically saying climate change was impossible because climate models were "bunk" (and therefore: "climate science is bunk"). That just pissed me off and I stopped paying attention to him.
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Nov 3, 2020 03:04
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