Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends

The Story So Far

Planescape was…

Hang on, let me back up a bit. Okay, maybe a little further.

Dungeons & Dragons has this concept called Alignment. On the surface it’s a simplified way to describe how a character acts, filtered through a very Gygax-style overly-complex solution. You have two spectrums: Good vs Evil, and Lawful vs Chaotic, with a Neutral step in between for each, making a 9-space 3-by-3 grid. So you get things like Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Good, Neutral Evil. Like a lot of concepts from the original flavors of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s both overly-complex and overly-limiting. You’re supposed to pick one for your character that informs and limits how they act. Everyone picks “Chaotic Good”, the adventurer alignment: “I’m helpful but don’t tell me what to do”. But it sort of seeps into the cracks of the rest of the game. Monsters have alignments. Spells work with them. There used to be secret languages for each alignment.

And then, at the back of the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, there’s two absolutely madcap pages labeled “Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence.” In this, Gygax outlines the cosmology out beyond where the game world normally takes place. The “real world” exists on something called the “Prime Material Plane”, which is surrounded by both the Outer and Inner Planes.

A Plane is something like the nine realms from norse myth, or an alternate dimension, but governed by different rules. The Inner Planes are primal forces: positive and negative energy, the elements. The Outer Planes, however, build outward from the alignment chart. 15 “Planes” extend outward from the Prime Material, one for each of the alignments (other than Neutral-Neutral), with a half-step between each. These are the outer dimensions where supernatural and god-like beings live, each tied to an Alignment. You can squint and see what real world mythology they’re each tied to—there’s Valhalla, there’s Dante’s Inferno, Limbo, Olympus, Christian Heaven, Hades, and so on. It’s a perfect distillation of the D&D ethos—all mythologies are included and equal, there’s a complicated chart, and you can fight them.

To round out the cosmology, the Inner Planes were connected to the Prime Material by the Etherial Plane, and the Outer Planes were connected by the Astral Plane. There’s an implication that there are more than one Material Plane, representing… parallel universes? All this was illustrated with a diagram out of an alchemist’s rantings, or a two-dimensional version of that orrery from The Dark Crystal.

Then, a couple of years later Jeff Grubb turned this into an entire book called The Manual of the Planes. This blew those two pages out into something approaching an actual setting. Each plane, outer and inner, got a full description, and there were monsters, encounters, rules for how spells worked. As a key detail for later, this book added a 16th “true neutral” plane, the Plane of Concordant Opposition, which acted as the center of The Great Wheel of the planes, with the other planes extending out from it, which also had an impossibly tall unclimbable spire at the center. (The axel of the wheel?)

What was all this for? The Planes solved, basically, three problems in D&D:

1. Mostly, this described where the deities that clerics got their spells from physically lived. It was a universal explanation for where supernatural or paranormal entities came from. Gods, Demons, angels, elementals, ghosts: they come from a plane. And, it did this in a way that didn’t elevate one particular mythology or religion over the others. All real-world religions and supernatural creatures had a place to go, which you could use or ignore as you liked.
2. It was where high level characters went when they needed a new challenge. Too powerful to clear out yet one more keep on a borderland? Travel to the Outer Planes and treat Dante’s political satire as an endgame dungeon.
3. It provided a way to move between campaign settings. Want to use your Grayhawk characters in a Mystara game? Lemme tell you the good news about astral portals.

Maybe most critically, this was also the blanket answer for where demons (chaotic evil) and devils (lawful evil), came from. (The Abyss and The Nine Hells, respectively). Because of course, this was the height of the Satanic Panic in the mid-80s, and having a place in the game that was specifically where Satan lived was a bad look. When the 2nd edition of AD&D arrived in 1989, all this got swept under the rug.

While this kept all the weird mythology stuff out of the sight of the Mrs. Lovejoys of the world, this left the game without a place for high-powered characters to loot, or a way to travel between settings. The solution to this was the original Spelljammer. Spelljammer replaced the mythological outer realms with a science-fantasy “boats in space” approach. The different campaign settings were now planets, each in their own solar systems. Each solar system was enclosed in a “Crystal Sphere”, each of which in turn was floating in an infinite sea of “Phlogiston”. “Spelljammers” were magic-powered ships that could travel between the spheres. Implicitly, this was all taking place inside the old Prime Material Plane, leaving the old cosmology unmentioned but still usable.

By the mid-90s, the “satanic panic” was down to more of an “impish concern”, and Spelljammer hadn’t sold super-well. There was a desire to “bring back” the old planes cosmology. Rather than do this as a standalone esoteric sourcebook, the decision was made to promote the planes to a “real” campaign setting.

But also, AD&D’s simulationist, rules-heavy, combat oriented approach had fallen out of style. It wasn’t “The Game” anymore, not the way it had been a decade earlier, and there were a mounting number of games that weren’t just looting castles one ten-foot square at a time. There was a cambrian-style explosion of new games at the start of the decade—Over the Edge, Ars Magica, Feng Shui, to name some examples—built around figuring out the minimum viable number of rules for a game like this, and refocusing on the “role playing” part of RPG.

But the big one was Vampire: The Masquerade. Less rules, more roleplaying, dark urban fantasy. And, relevant to our current purposes, each character chose a “clan”, each of which was based on a Vampiric archetype (the dracula ones, the nosferatu ones, the anne rice ones, the lost boys, and so on). The clan wasn’t a character class so much as a set of hooks for roleplaying, an archetype for what your character acted like, not what they could do. It was that alignment chart, all grown up.

And this all dovetailed with everything else that was going on in nerd subcultures in the 90s, by which I really mean the goth scene was on the rise and The Sandman was huge.

And so, the mission: put D&D back at the forefront of RPG design, reboot the Planes as a gameplay location, with characters joining Vampire-style thematic groups while journeying across landscapes that looked like Sandman cover art.

The result: Planescape.

It immediately had a distinct feel as soon as you looked at it. The art was unlike anything on any other RPG product, a sketchy near-cartoony surrealist look that was immediately evocative; something between a goth Dr Seuss and Brian Froud’s concept art for Labyrinth. The logo had a weird spiky lady in it that looked like a mythological character from a mythos you’d never heard of. Even the fonts and page layouts were distinctive. The message was clear—this wasn’t a D&D book, this was a Planescape book.

The distinctivness continued once you flipped it open. (Or rather, slid open the box set). One of the signature features inside was “The Chant”, a set of slang and dialect that planar natives used; it only sounded strange to you on account your being a clueless berk, but don’t worry, you’ll be a savvy cutter no time. Unlike the house standard voice in other products, Planescape was written in a casual tone, the voice of an experienced adventurer welcoming you out of the prime and into the big leagues of the planes.

All the Planes got new names. These were their real names, you understand, the names back in the old Appendix IV were what the uneducated primes called them. As such, the “Plane of Concordant Opposition” became “The Outlands”, and the top of the infinite spire we now find Sigil, the City of Doors, a city built on the inside of a giant stone torus; which was also called the Cage because the only way in or out is via a planar portal or gateway. Sigil acts as the player’s home base, the place you bang around between adventures.

The city is ruled? controlled? by the enigmatic Lady of Pain—the spiky face in the logo. But she’s more of an absentee landlord than micromanager, so the city is run by The Factions. There are fifteen of them, roughly corresponding to the fifteen Outer Planes. But, they also all have a distinct philosophy. Like the vampire clans, it doesn’t take a lot of work to map the factions to their real-world counterparts—there’s the socialists, the fascists, the atheists, the libertarians, the discordians. (It was the 90s. Vampire had those guys too.)

Like in Vampire, every player had to pick a faction, and like vampire they were written so that everyone reading immediately had a favorite, but everyone had a different favorite. There weren’t “good ones” or “bad ones”, just a spectrum of stuff different people thought was cool. (Vampire is always cited as the direct inspiration, but I suspect the Factions also owed as much to the Houses and Clans from Battletech.)

This foregrounding of philosophy extended outward through the game: the rules posited that while the Prime Material Plane was governed by physics, the “physics” of the Outer Planes was philosophy, that belief and ideas were what underpinned those realities. The lead developer, David "Zeb" Cook, described the setting as “Philosophers with Clubs”.

It was fun, and different, and expansive without being overwhelming. While a lot of D&D specifically can feel like a copy of a copy of a copy of either Tolkien or Howard, this was something else, something absolutely unique, something D&D had that nothing else did.

The usual complaint from people that didn’t like it was that it was a better read than it was a game; which was occasionally fair: there are NPCs who communicate entirely through rebuses, which is great to read about but really, really hard to roleplay. (“It, uhhhh, puts up a rebus that, ah, can you roll, okay it means ‘you need to keep moving, citizen.’”). But if it was your jam, it was your jam.

It also served as the setting for one of the best-regarded D&D computer games, Planescape:Torment. Torment tended to be a lot of people’s first encounter with the setting, especially after the setting went out of print but the game stayed around in places like Steam or GoG. (That’s a gun I just hung over the mantle, by the way.)

It was glorious. In case this isn’t coming though from the fact that I’m over seventeen-hundred words in and haven’t talked about the new book yet, the Planes are my absolute favorite thing in D&D, and I think Planescape is the single best thing the old TSR ever published.

When 3rd edition came along at the turn of the century, Planescape, along with all the other boxed-set campaign settings got put in the attic. Both 3rd and 4th edition did anemic Manuals of the Planes that gestured at planar adventuring, but mostly left Sigil and Planesape as an easter egg or sidebar. The 5th Edition PHB has four pages at the back labeled “Appendix C: The Planes of Existence”, which is a surprisingly comprehensive summary of the built up material to date, but like the old original Appendix IV, was more teaser than gameplay resource.

As the fifth edition game trundled on, “new Planescape” was a persistant rumor. Which bring us to today, one the last new products released for “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2014)” before “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2024)” is released: the long rumored New Planescape.

Planescape 5e

The new Planescape follows the same format as last year’s Spelljammer: a slipcased set of three books: a setting overview, a monster manual, and an adventure. It solves one of new Spelljammer’s biggest shortcomings, in that the adventure and setting book are now 96 pages instead of 64, so the combined page count is the same as one of 5e’s larger standalone books, meaning it’s not cramped the way Spelljammer was. Also, they make the very savvy call to focus entirely on Sigil and the Outlands, leaving the rest of the planes alone.

So here we are! 45 pages detailing the insides of Sigil! Write-ups on the factions! A two-page spread for each gate down in the Outlands! A two-sided poster map! Modrons on the cover art! Finally, right?

I’ve got really mixed feelings about it.

Let’s start with this: The berks put the chant in the dead book. The “pirate talk / thieves cant” slang was one of the signature features of the original, solidly establishing that this took place somewhere else. There was always a vocal minority of people that didn’t like it, but those people didn’t like anything else about it either. And it’s just… not here. The text of the books is written in the same neutral house style as all the other 5e books. There’s no glossary of “planar slang” at the end. In the adventure, the first NPC you meet on the streets of Sigil uses essentially the entire slang dictionary in one sentence, and then someone else shoos them away with with an apology for the crazy person, and from that point on everyone else sounds just like every other D&D NPC, which is to say, just like Jack Kirby’s Thor. Reading it, there’s an immediate chill, as you realize that the setting whose signature feature was being different from everything else has been brought back, but lost something along the way..

The same thing applies to the art. Planescape used to have a distinct, stylized art style—there was no mistaking a Planescape book for something else. And here, everything is done in the same house style as the rest of 5e. It’s good art. It’s really good art. But there’s the Lady of Pain on the cover, looking like every other piece of 5th edition cover art. Seeing characters or locations from the old game rendered in the modern, standard art style was strange, like seeing someone you went to high school with after years and years and discovering they’d had some ill-advised plastic surgery. “They looked fine before, why did they do that to themselves?”

The distinctive fonts are gone, the text and layouts looking just like every other 5th edition book. Even the old logo is gone, replaced by an unadorned “PLANESCAPE” in big capital letters in the same brand font.

But okay, so the detailing is gone, what about the core content?

Let’s talk about the Factions. There’s only twelve of them now, some old ones, some revised, weirdly decoupling them from the outer planes. And they’re optional. There’s one new Character Background which is basically “belongs to a Faction” with a list of what skill gets a bonus based on what Faction you pick. There’s even a sidebar on how to make your own faction, which is cool, I guess, but broadly misses the point. The faction writeups clearly think of them as groups the players will interact with, but not join. Some of them are clearly bad guys now. You’re not really expected to pick a favorite. (And my old favorite isn’t there anymore, which is the real lemon juice squeezed into this papercut.)

And then there’s the included adventure, “Turn of Fortune’s Wheel.” There’s a mystery that takes the players on a tour of the Gate Towns along the edge of the Outlands, which is a great structure to get a buffet-style sampler plate of the planes without having to leave the Outlands. There’s a multi-planar casino! The central mystery is actually interesting. It even serves as a stealth sequel to the 1997 module The Great Modron March.

But yeah, this is where I start a paragraph with the word “but.”

Because the title of the box set is not “Planescape”, it’s “Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse”, and “multiverse” means a different thing in 2023 than it did in 1997. So for the adventure you roll up three versions of your characters—the versions played by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, if you will—and your character “glitches” between them. It’s not a terrible mechanic, and kind of a cool premise, but that’s not the kind of multiverse we were talking about?

And, this is where I sort of chuckle and shake my head, the adventure has the exact same beginning as Torment. And I mean, exactly the same: you wake up on a slab in The Mortuary with amnesia, and there’s Morte the talking skull giving you a hard time. The central spine of the plot is to find out who you were, and why you keep coming back to life when you die. It’s the same set of ideas as Torment, just less interesting.

And I get it. I get it. Here in the twenties, if someone under 40 has played Planescape, they played Torment. And more importantly, they played the first 20 minutes of Torment, because a slightly buggy crunchy AD&D CRPG from the late 90s is basically unplayable today. Not technically, DosBox has you covered, but too much time has passed for those mechanics. So all most people know about Planescape is that there’s a weird morgue with a talking skull in it. So, yeah, you put that in. Sure you do.

So we end up with the “go anywhere do anything” setting going the same places doing—literally—the same things. It’s got that big franchise relaunch style where it spends a bunch of time covering old ground, gesturing at things going “hey, remember this?” Even when it drops the occasional deep cut, like an oblique reference to the original Planescape finale, Dead Gods, it manages to feel more patronizing than anything. The title of the second chapter of the adventure is “Philosophers with Clubs”, although the content of that chapter contains neither, but hey, ‘member when Zeb Cook said that?

And I haven’t even mentioned the walking castle thats blatantly just “Howl’s Moving Castle.”

Its’s high quality, well done. I found it all genuinely upsetting.

To be clear, theres nothing in here that's actually bad. It is, to coin a phrase, "perfectly cromulent", a solid-if-uninspiring update of an out-of-print setting to current corporate standards. The game my kid is in at jr high dropped everything they were doing and moved to this the second it came out. Walking though portals to fight new kinds of monsters is still cool when you're twelve, no matter what the art looks like. And, believe me, I understand there's a difference between "biggest release of the year for the most successful product line from a multi-billion dollar company" and "crazy swing for the fences from a nitche company that's going out of business."

But, I don’t understand the point of doing a new Planescape if you’re going to make it the same house style as everything else. Why not just do a new Manual of the Planes? The mechanics were never the point, what little of them there were. It was all about style and vibes, and all the style and vibes are gone.

And you know what? That’s my whole review. They took the most distinct, unique setting they ever had and sandblasted it until it was the same as everything else. Why bother? Why bring it back if this is what you were going to do?

Maybe this is just old guy grousing, and kids who find this for the first time in their teens will spend the next two decades dreaming about Sigil like I did. I hope so?

(This is where I casually mention inside some parentheses that DriveThroughPRG will do you a print-on-demand copy of the original for thirty bucks.)

However, Hasbro’s new Planescape isn’t the only game in town for extra-planar adventures in D&D…

Path of the Planebreaker by Bruce R. Cordell, Monte Cook, Sean K. Reynolds

Monte Cook was on the original Planescape team, then was one of the co-designers for D&D 3rd edition. He’s been running his own company for most of the 21st century, these days mostly knocking out new games based on the system he designed for his signature game, Numenera.

However, he also has an almost supernatural ability to release a product for D&D right before Hasbro does a version of the same thing, so last year just before the new Planescape was announced he did his own “Planescape for 5e”: Path of the Planebreaker.

A cursed moon—The Planebreaker—crashes from plane to plane, traversing the whole of the multiverse. The trail it leaves behind can be used as a road to travel the planes, assuming you have the right key.

The book outlines dozens of planes that the Planebreaker has crashed through, and in keeping with Monte Cook’s style, they’re all weird as hell. The Planebreaker itself, and the city of Timeborne on it, is a very cool “home base” location. It’s a very Monte Cook product: weird places? Check. Mysterious plot hooks-a-plenty? Check? Cool magic? Check. More than anything, this really fills the niche the planes used to have of “weird places high level characters can go and loot”. It’s the ideal sort of product to click into an existing game to blow out the horizons. The Planebreaker appears in the sky, shenanigans ensue.

You can tell everyone working on this knows how the D&D Great Wheel cosmology works, and while this doesn’t interact with it, it doesn’t contradict it either. These are the weirder planes further out from the ones near Sigil.

Great stuff, I really enjoyed it.

The Book of Ebon Tides by Wolfgang Baur & Celeste Conowitch

Meanwhile, Wolfgang Baur, who was also on the original Planescape team, also started his own company, Kobold Press (after writing the single best book for 3rd edition D&D, The Book of Roguish Luck, for Monte Cook’s old company). Legend has it that he pitched a Plane of Shadow book for the original Planescape back in the 90s which went nowhere. Two decades on, he finally wrote it: Book of Ebon Tides. And look, that’s pretty much the whole review: “Wolfgang Baur finally wrote his Shadow book.”

It’s pretty amazing. Here, the Plane of Shadow is reimagined as a dark counterpart of the real world filled with fay courts and shadow creatures; it’s Midsummer Nights Dream set in the dark world from A Link to the Past. Weird forests. Shadow goblins. Shadow magic. And you can play an anthropomorphic bear. This is the kind of book where every single page has something on it where you go “wow, that’s cool.” There’s a whole flock of character options, new races, new spells, every characer class gets a new shadow-themed subclass. The Book of Roguish Luck had this very cool “shadow thief” class for 3rd edition, and I was really hoping this would have an updated version. Oh yeah, that’s in here. And then some.

It’s full of hooks for Kobold’s home setting of “Midgard”, but that stuff is easy to strip out or sand down, and this also could click incredibly easy into any other campaign. I tend to buy books like this so I can loot them for other games, and I am going to be looting this one for years. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to scrap the game you’re currently running, drop it on the table, and tell your players, “so, we’re doing this now.”

Young Adventurer’s Collection: Places & Portals

The Young Adventurer’s Collection is a series of books Hasbro has been putting out aimed at younger readers that introduce the concepts of D&D without any of those pesky rules getting in the way. They’re perfect if you’re say, a mid-40s RPG nerd with a tween-aged kid whose really into this whole D&D thing but needs a softer onramp than the PHB. Places & Portals is the latest, covering, like it says, other places you can go. It hits the high points of the planes as a concept, but mostly I bring this up because it also has a chapter on Spelljammer. When the Spelljammer box came out last year, there was some debate about whether the “Doomspace” in the included adventures was really supposed to be Dark Sun in disguise? Well, Places & Portals came out first, and has has the same map of the Astral Plane as the Spelljammer box, except the solar system labeled “Doomspace” in Spelljammer is called “Athasspace” here. As a long time fan of that setting, I love that they collapsed the dark sun and dropped Athas into a black hole. Perfect ending, no notes.

Journeys through the Radiant Citadel

But lets loop back around. Before the new Planescape, before the new Spelljammer, Hasbro put out a book called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. This was one of the adventure anthologies they do every other year or so, and has thirteen short adventures, most of which could work as a one shot. The signature feature of this book, though, was that it was entirely done by people of color.

The Radiant Citadel is an ancient magical city floating out in the Etherial plane (positioning this as both an anti-Spelljammer and anti-Planescape), and each adventure takes place in one of the locations the Citadel has a portal to. Are these locations other planes, other worlds in the prime material, somewhere else? The book is ambiguous about this, to its benefit. There’s no overarching cosmology here beyond “the universe is vast and wondrous.”

These locations and adventures all draw from world mythologies and traditions other than the warmed over Tolkien/Howard we were talking about. But they’re not just “the asian one” or “the indian one”, they’re all riffs and combinations of ideas, pulling from a far wider pool than D&D traditionally has. They all feel new. Each adventure is a tiny gem, sketching out a world outside the confines of the few pages they have. And these aren’t just dungeon crawls with a different skin, there are puzzles, negotiations, diplomacy. Most of the adventures center around arriving in a new place, figuring out how that world works, and then using that knowlede to solve a problem or help somebody. It’s probably the best book Hasbro put out for 5th edition. Yes, it's better than the new Ravenloft.

Forget the editorial failures of the new Spelljammer or the sandblasted new Planescape: this is what D&D should look like in the twenties. This. This is what I wanted from Planescape, this is what attracted me to the old Planescape as a teenager. A glorious mashup of world cultures and mythologies, evocative art, neat ideas, adventurers going to weird places and doing cool stuff.

In conclusion, the new Planescape is fantastic: it’s called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Strongest possible recommendation.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 4—RPGs

Paranoia (2023)

Everyone knows (at least) one of those people that are not themselves funny, but love something funny a little too much, which they can–and do—quote at length. In my age cohort, this was always Monty Python, or The Princess Bride, or Ghostbusters. People who’ve replaced having an actual sense of humor with memorizing the Dead Parrot Sketch or something, and as you listen to them shouting “Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam” for the umpteenth time, you think to yourself, wait, was this ever funny? Because they don’t really know what made it funny, and so they can’t themselves replicate it, and drained of the performance, there’s nothing really there.

The new edition of Paranoia is like that. The authors love Paranoia—LOVE IT—but can’t seem to actually convey whats so great about it. It’s page after page of the authors directly saying “this is the funniest thing ever wowee” without actually getting to anything, you know, funny?

Making this worse, they seem vaguely aware that “satire” is a thing, but don’t know what that means or how to do it. Mostly this is because they don’t have a take, they aren’t satirizing anything specific, just sort of vaguely gesturing that dystopias are bad? The back cover blurb ends with: “And here it is, a brand-new edition for the modern world. Surely there is nothing happening these days worthy of satire, right?” But… there’s nothing in here that does that? There’s plenty of targets from the current era, but the game sticks to enervated versions of the stuff that was there back in the early 80s. Even the core joke, that Friend Computer was so determined to fend off Communism that it built a perfect communist society, seems to have blown past them.

The result is a zombie, Paranoia-shaped game that just leans into the slapstick, “it’s funny when the players kill each other” parts. And yes it is, but that’s not the whole game, guys.

Of course, the memory cheats, so I dug out my copy of the original first edition Paranoia, and yep, that still slaps. That’s written by people with a Take, a solidly anti-Reagan/Thatcher satire with things to say. Friend Computer says to keep playing the original, citizen. Maybe it’s okay for some art to stay in its time, and not get a “brand-new edition”.

Kitty Noir

My kids aged out of Magical Kitties Save the Day basically the exact moment it was released, which was a bummer, because it’s a really neat younger-kids focused RPG. I happily backed the kickstarter for Kitty Noir, their film noir/golden age science fiction setting, hoping it would give me a way to age up the material a little. Spoiler: not so much.

Like all Magical Kitties books, it has the format of a kid’s picture book, with gorgeous art and great layout and design. The contents are a fun pastiche of film noir tropes while keeping them safe for an under-ten crowd. My one complaint is that its a little thin content-wise, there isn’t much here that you couldn’t freestyle after binging Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, just to pick two random movies I can see from where I’m sitting.

Still, it’s a fun expansion to a fun game.

If I Were A Litch, Man by Lucian Kahn

It’s a box with three Jewish-themed RPGs. In the first—“If I Were A Litch, Man—you play a group of litches arguing about best way to defend the community from rampaging paladins. The second—“Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzva“—takes place at a Bat Mitzva party where one of the guests is turning into a vampire. The third—“Grandma’s Drinking Song”—is a singing game about a family of bootleggers during prohibition. They’re all amazing.

That said, there’s this new generation of extremely rules-light narrative/improv-heavy games that I really, really like, but do not know how to play. I don’t mean that in some kind of facetious “needs moar maths!” way, I mean I read the book and go “wow, that’s the coolest damn thing, but I genuinely don’t know what to do here.” Not a bad thing, to be clear! I’m glad the drama kids found our hobby and rescued us from the applied maths dorks, I just have a lot to unlearn. Back when I was in junior high, the cutting edge of RPG design was THAC0. I’m riven with jealousy that the kids today instead get things like this.

I Have The High Ground by Jess Levine

Few things have made me feel more old than the fact that this game is called “I have the high ground”, and not “I am not left-handed.”

It describes itself as “a collaborative two-player dueling game of banter, posturing, and capes” and so it is. But it’s not a fencing game—this covers the banter and drama before things get physical. Each match ends with weapons being drawn and the “real fight” starting. While the title obviously invokes Episode III, the Star War it most closely matches is the duel at the end of Return of the Jedi; if you’re playing this game right, every session ends with two lightsabers igniting and slamming into each other while the Emperor cackles.

The mechanics are, well, they’re rock-paper-scissors, but they’re used to shape the insults, baits, goads, and reparte as the two players score, basically, “making the other player mad” points. It’s only barely a “game” from a classic TTRPG sense, but it’s an absolutely amazing improv drama set of prompts. You probably couldn’t convince the other kids in the jr high Magic: the Gathering club to play this, but you probably could get the drama club to play this every week. Really fun.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 3

Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas by John Scalzi

Redshirts caused quite a stir when it came out originally, and rightly so! It’s brilliant. The premise is straightforward: the junior officers of the Universal Union starship Intrepid start to notice that whoever goes down to the planet with the captain and other senior officers always dies while those senior officers always live, and they decide to do something about it. It was, and probably still is, Scalzi’s best book. The extended riffs on Trek tropes are fun, and then manages to move into a place thats both more meta and more interesting. I recall the length of the codas getting some criticism at the time, but like the Scouring of the Shire, they’re the whole point.

I could have sworn I read this back when it came out, but my copy has vanished over the years, so I impulse bought a new one. I remembered the front half very clearly, but the back half not so much, which implies a variety of funny things.

I have to admit, though, this plays very different in a world with Lower Decks. When this came out in ’13, Star Trek was pretty much dead as an ongoing concern, so metafictional deconstructions had a lot of space to breathe. Now, in a world where the two best Trek shows of all time are currently in production (LD and SNW, for the record,) one of which is covering much of the same ground of digging into the long-running tropes of the franchise, Redshirts stops feeling quite so cutting edge and starts feeling a little behind.vvI’ve not seen Redshirts cited as a specific inspiration for Lower Decks, but I’d be stunned if it wasn’t in the mix. As it is, I spent a lot of time (re?)reading this book thinking, “Boimler and Mariner landed this joke better.”

Still! Great read, and the codas are what make it work. Great, great ending. (When the time comes, I hope LD has one as satisfying.)

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Scalzi’s latest operates much in the same zippy, light-weight “beach read” gear as last year’s Kaiju Preservation Society. The main character unexpectedly inherits his estranged uncle’s super-villain business, hijinks ensue. It’s not his best work, but still a thoroughly entertaining potboiler.

As he’s been very open about, he was clobbered by COVID halfway though the book, and as he put it got “brain scrambled” afterwards, and as such he turned the manuscript in very, very late. It’s dangerous to try and map too much of an author’s private life onto their work, but I feel like you can spot the exact page where he shakes off the Long Covid stupor and says “shit, I have to finish this.” I do not believe for one second that the resolution at the end of the book is what he had in mind while writing the first half, it’s sloppy in a “genius in a panic” sort of way, but it’s still fun.

(And man, I could have sworn I wrote this review already, but damned if I could find it.)

Midnight pals vols 1-3 by Bitter Karella

The print form of the @midnight_pals twitter feed, we find a collection of horror authors (King, Lovecraft, Barker, Poe, Koontz) sitting around a campfire telling stories, with guest appearances by… basically every other author you’ve ever heard of? It’s hilarious when you know who the guest authors are, and utterly inscrutable when you don’t. I loved it. As an aside, more people from the old twitter should just sell a print copy of their tweets?

Complete Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Inspired by the next entry, I started reading Calvin & Hobbes with the kids. Turns out: just as good as you remember.

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson

Oh wait, I already wrote about this: The Mysteries

Dracula Daily by Bram Stoker and the internet

Hang on, I already wrote about this one too: Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 by Elizabeth Sandifer

I am a huge, huge fan of Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum, “An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who”. Essentially, a history of British culture told through the format of “in-depth literary analysis of all of Doctor Who”. Primarily a blog, she’s been updating and repackaging the material into book form. This is a format I wish more bloggers would use; there’s quite a few bloggers I wouldn’t mind picking up a print essay collection from every few years.

This is Volume 8, which covers the period from the disastrous TV movie in ’96 to the first season of the revived show in ’05, with all the deeply weird spin-off material from between those. There’s two threads to this one: what had to happen for the show to finally come back, and why didn’t any of the various previous swings work? (Spoiler: an actually good writer finally got ahold of it.) She’s much kinder to most of this material than I am; none of this stuff was very good, but there’s a lot to talk about, and she always has an interesting take. Due to the scale of the undertaking, there are very few critical works that cover all of Doctor Who. Of those, the Eruditorum is my favorite.

As an aside, she’s just kicked off her coverage of the Whittaker years on the website, having gotten a preview on the patreon, it’s gonna be a banger.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 2

House of X/Powers of X By Johnathan Hickman and others

The X-Men are a weird superhero book, even by american super hero standards. One of the strange things about them is their inability to be mediocre—the X-men are either “as good as superheroes get” or “unreadable trash” with no ground in-between. Compare that to, say, Spider-man, whose spent most of the last 60 years being “yeah, that was pretty good I guess,” with occasional outbreaks of brilliance or clones. This doesn't just apply to the books either: the movies, shows, what-have-you are all either one side of the scale or the other. To put that another way: no one has ever left an X-Men movie without having a strong opinion about what they just saw.

There’s a couple reasons for this, I think? There’s a weird mix of elements: they’re teachers, but also a commando team? In a world full of “regular” super heros, no one likes them? Also, a soap opera? And they’re a metaphor for the dealer’s choice of minority groups. And, the X-Men suffer more than most from the “fighting for the status quo” problem most superheroes have. The upshot is that to make them work, you have to actually have a take, it can’t just be “well, I guess Magneto is up to something again”.

The result is that the’re on this roughly 20 year cycle of someone coming in, having a new take that works, and then Marvel spends the next 10–15 years bleeding out everything from that burst of ideas. Lee & Kirby in the early 60s, Claremont & Byrne in the late 70s, Morrison at the turn of the century.

We’re due for a new spin, and Hickman wipes the deck clear and delivers. He kicked his run off with two linked books, pronounced House of “Ex” and Powers of “Ten”. (All good X-Men runs seem to center around using X to mean 10 in unexpected places.) The core metaphor and premise is pretty straightforward: we’re doing the formation of the State of Israel, but for mutants. (And with the Shi’ar Empire standing in for the United States as the not-so-subtle equipment supplier). This is coupled with a take that basically boils down to: “you know, if all these guys would just work together they’d be unstoppable.”

It’s about as good as the X-Men have ever been, and finally shake off the whole “fighting to protect the ones that hate them” angle: they have their own island now, and you can enter as much anti-mutant legislation as you like. Hickman has a great time riffing on this: Mutants have diplomatic immunity, Magneto is the Ambassador to the US, there are trade agreements. Plus, continuing on the “formation of Israel” angle, the fact that the mutants keep getting genocided gets treated with more seriousness than it ever has.

The layout is also fascinating, mixing traditional comic layouts with infographics, with a design sense that manages to look cutting-edge and and mid-60s at the same time. (Swiss design, coming through.)

The result is genuinely great, but great in the way that you know all the interesting material is going to be drained out of this over the next decade, and all the changes or new concepts are going to be retconned out and we’ll be back to the median-value room-temperature X-Men before too long; there’s a vague itch the whole time reading it thinking “there’s no way they’re going to actually keep any of this.” Which means that they’ve set themselves up for a “Destruction of Israel” story in a bit here, which I’m sure won’t delight all the wrong people.

But, you can’t grade a piece of art down based on what you know other people are going to do with it. As it stands, Hickman has knocked out 400-something pages of as good an X-Men story as there’s ever been. It’s worth enjoying in it’s own right, if for no other reason that he served up my favorite new idea in years: Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Wolverine are just a throuple now. Perfect. See you in another couple of decades, X-Men.

X-Men Epic Collections: Fate of the Phoenix & I, Magneto by Claremont, Byrne, and others

Speaking of those wacky mutants, my son is “exactly the right age to enjoy X-men” years old, so we’ve been picking up the reprints of the greatest hits here and there. And back when I was a kid, this was the Biggest Thing Ever: Dark Phoenix! Jean Grey Dies! Drama! Action! To quote the former galactic President: “Excitement, adventure, and really wild things!”

I hadn’t read any of this in probably 30 years, so I was pleased to see that it mostly holds up? It’s a superhero drama designed to be the most epic thing imaginable to tweens, and it still is.

One thing definitely stood out in hindsight, though. There was a fair amount of behind-the-scenes drama about killing off Jean Grey—the short, short version is that Claremont didn’t want to kill the character, but the editors insisted that she “pay for her actions.” Not to re-litigate 40-year old controversy, but in retrospect it’s so obvious that Jean “had to die” because she was a woman, and they didn’t want any of the female characters to be that powerful. What’s funny is reading this all later you can tell Claremont knows this, so he replaces Jean Grey with the nearly-powerless Kitty Pryde, and then makes sure Storm screws up or gets sucker-punched often enough to keep anyone from noticing how powerful she is too.

42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies

Kevin Jon Davies got started as part of the team doing the Guide animations for the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and turned that both into a friendship with Douglas Adams and a career making documentaries.

After Douglas Adams died, his collected papers ended up at Cambridge, where they mostly sat in file boxes. This book is a greatest hits collection of what Davies found when he went through them. Like a lot of posthumous collections, it’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating. As an example: there was a long standing rumor that Adams had written an entire first episode to the unmade second season of the Hitchhiker TV show, it turns out that’s true! And this book includes… only the first page. Then, the second half of the book is page after page of unrealized, unfinished projects. Fascinated, but frustrating. More than ever, this book makes me wish he’d had a business partner that could wrangle these projects over the finish line. Or, you know, make sure he got his heart checked out.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 1

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

The Late Bronze Age Collapse is one of those fascinating historical mysteries: about 3000 years ago, essentially every city in the near and middle east burned to the ground, most never to be repopulated. Greece entered the Greek Dark Ages, the New Kingdom period in Egypt ended entering one of their “intermediate periods”. It’s Mad Max, but with sandals and bronze spear heads. So, what happened? Famine, earthquakes, attacks by the mysterious “Sea Peoples?”

To orient this historically, this is after everything we think of as being “ancient Egypt”, but before “ancient Greece.” Whatever historical events inspired Exodus have already happened, and we’re roughly at the same time as whatever really happened at Troy. (And, of course, both “The Bronze Age” and “The Bronze Age Collapse” are both strictly Mediterranean-world concerns, the civilizations in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and indeed even north-western Europe would be surprised to hear there was a collapse.)

Cline does an amazing job sketching out the world of the Mediterranean at the end of the bronze age. Unlike some other places and times in history which can feel like transmissions from an alien planet, the ancient near east is familiar—cosmopolitan, connected, deeply interlinked trade, people have jobs, to the extent that there are art fads, and grecian artisans sail to all points on the Mediterranean shore because Greek-style frescoes are “so hot right now”. And then, it all burns to the ground, and no one really knows why.

After sketching out what the pre-collapse Mediterranean world was like, Cline starts to offer various suggestions about what might have happened, and right about the point you think to yourself, “oh, I get it, this was the cause,” Cline basically yells “you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you!” and whips out some new piece of evidence that disproves the theory.

Fascinating and entertaining, despite not having as clear an answer as anyone—including the author—would like. The ultimate conclusion is that it wasn’t any one thing, it was everything—a century or so filled with earthquakes, climate change–fueled famine, social unrest, attacks by displaced migrants and refugees, and, and, and… with the final result being that the entire sophisticated international order ceased to be. Chilling. In a lot of ways, it’s a real-world historical version of Gibon’s “Jackpot”. Makes me glad I don’t live in a time like that. Now, let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news…

The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again By M. John Harrison

A strange and unsettling book that’s hard to describe. I picked this up mostly because William Gibson was enthusing about it on the former twitter. I confess, it took me months to read the first half, and then I read the last third practically in one sitting.

The best description I can give is that it’s like a book starring the characters who live next door to a Stephen King novel. Strange and disturbing things are happening just out of sight, and the main characters are a little too wrapped up in themselves to notice. As it proceeds, the book moves into a space more akin to Lovecraft (but without the racism) where these things that are happening are too alien for the characters, or the reader, to perceive correctly.

The end was almost unspeakably unsettling. I’m glad I read it. Strongly recommended.

Fast Times In Comic Book Editing By Shelly Bond and a bunch of artists

Shelly Bond was the assistant editor for DC’s Vertigo line in the 90s, and was the last person out the door when DC finally turned the lights off a few decades later. She worked on—basically—everything, and was one of those under-recognized figures, instrumental in Vertigo being Vertigo.

She kickstarted a graphic novel memoir, telling stories about both being in her early 20s in manhattan while also being at the ground floor of an artistic movement. Not every kickstarter turns out to have been worth it, but this one absolutely was.

Snow Glass Apples By Colleen Doran And Neil Gaiman

Snow, Glass, Apples started life as a relatively minor Gaiman short story, later adapted to graphic novel form by Doran. The plot is slender, even by Gaiman standards: what if there was something we didn't know about the story of Snow White, and what if the so-called “Evil Queen” knew something we didn’t? What if the story we know is because the victor gets to write history? (Spoiler: Snow White is a vampire). The plot isn’t the attraction, if you’ve read more than about three other stories you can correctly guess exactly how things are going to go by the end of the first page. The attraction is Doran’s absolutely gorgeous art, turning a fun-if-simplistic “fractured fairytale” into a visual masterpiece. I really, really enjoyed it.

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

Hey, Wait!

Bea Wolf is a surprisingly-accurate retelling of the first third of Beowulf—for kids. Treeheart—the suburban treehouse that all the kids in the neighborhood hang out in is under attack by their nefarious neighbor, Mister Grindle, who can’t stand the sounds of merry-making. Fortunately, a group of kids from the suburb upriver ride their inner-tubes down the sliding-sea to help, led by the steadfast Bea Wolf.

The art is outstanding, but the standout here is the writing: Zack Weinersmith (mostly of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame) does an absolutely incredible job writing a modern, kid-friendly version of the story that keeps the rhythms, alliterations, digressions, and kennings all intact. This is, without question, the most fun I have ever had reading a book out loud to my kids.

Reader, if you’ve got kids in your life and haven’t picked this up yet, go order a copy right now, trust me.