Platypus of Truth

Recently, I've been re-reading one of the stranger works of C.S. Lewis, Pilgrim's Regress .  Pilgrim's Regress was Lewis' first attempt at trying to explain his new-found faith in literary form.  Following the lead of Puritan writer, John Bunyan, Lewis decided to recast his own Christian journey as a work of allegorical fiction.  Lewis and his friends promptly decided that the work was a failure, but that didn't keep him from other imaginative forays into the world of literature. Looking back on the work, Lewis decided that its major fault was two-fold: obscurity and a lack of charity.  As to a lack of charity, Lewis knew better than I do -I can't detect anything particularly spiteful.  As to obscurity, that hits nearer the mark.  However, if you are familiar with the intellectual climate of first third of the 20th century, then the book is actually quite a romp.  Even if that's not the case, there are still many elements of Lewis' spiritual journey...

My reading through the Exalted core book continued this week bringing me all the way up to "Character Creation."  Surely, I thought, the book must bog down once it gets to the rules. Now, by way of preface, the rules are always my least favorite part of an RPG.  I can never seem to master all those numbers and sequences just by looking at them in a book.  The only way I ever learned to play Exalted , D&D , Warhammer , or even Munchkin was by playing the game and having an experienced player talk me through the process.  I was surprised, then, at what a great job the writers of Exalted did in presenting the rules. The basic rules are laid out as if were following two characters through and actual scene.  As Smith and Koi encounter each new obstacle in their quest to find and translate a coded message we get to see how the various rules would be applied, what would be the result of a hypothetical role, and how player and story-teller would narrate the ev...

Well, we're now up to 200 literary meditations here at The Platypus of Truth.  It's been a much quicker trip through the second hundred than the first hundred.  I think much of that can be blamed on the last two "Summers of Shannara," but hopefully there's been an increase in more intellectual fair as well.  Whatever fair you're here for, Great Books or pulp fiction, I hope you'll be able to find plenty more of in the next 100 editions of "The Platypus Reads." Self-congratulations aside, let's move on to today's book: Exalted .  Exalted is the core rulebook for Whitewolf publishing's "Age of Sorrows" line.  I used to play this back in grad school when everything Whitewolf put out was eagerly gobbled up by those jaded with dungeon crawls and D&D.  In contrast to other systems, the Storytelling System was much more fluid and dependent on those playing the game than on the rules.  Not everyone likes that, but I loved it....