Platypus of Truth

The Farthest Shore  concludes the original Earthsea Trilogy. Le Guin has come back and added a further two novels after a long hiatus, but I'm never sure how I feel about their incorporation into the original set. Even The Farthest Shore  has differences in tone from A Wizard of Earthsea  and The Tombs of Atuan . For one thing, it seems as if Le Guin had encountered the works of J.R.R. Tolkien by the time she wrote The Farthest Shore  and that The Lord of the Rings  exercised a subtle, pervasive influence on both language and content. I was waiting in the penultimate chapter for Sparrowhawk to say to Arren "I'm glad you're with me, Lebannen, here at the end of all things". Whatever Tolkienian echoes there might be, however, The Farthest Shore  is still firmly a work of Ursula K. Le Guin. The world is her own, and she is in full command of it as Sparrowhawk and Arren go in quest of the force that is destroying all of Earthsea. No where is this more evident...

Never mind the Mi-Go... My skills-of-a-photographer still leave something to be desired, but here is my first-draft of the miniatures from Fantasy Flight Games' Mansions of Madness . I've supplemented the base set with all sorts of do-dads from my Warhammer collection and some old museum souvenirs I had lying around the house. Points if you get the inside joke with the cultists (aside from the obvious Cthulhu reference).

June is usually the month when I get most of the year's blogging done. This June has been full of distractions, so here I am at the end of the month just putting together a post on Summer Reading. Every summer I put together a prospective reading list. At the end of each summer, I award the best of those books the Seven Heavens of Summer Reading awards in honor of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia . So what's made the list so far? First off, I finished up a little more reading on the Salem Witch Trials with Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare , a book I found excellent but ultimately unpersuasive (especially because I was uncertain of what exactly the author was trying to persuade me). A more satisfying read was Escaping Salem  by Richard Godbeer about the witch trials in my own back yard (Fairfield County Connecticut) that I never knew about. Godbeer manages to treat his subjects as real people inhabiting a real time and place without the sanctimonious rush to j...

Fantasy Flight has produced an entire line of games dedicated to a New England author who dedicated his life to the study and praise of New England -it's like a dream come true! So here is the newest iteration of Platypus Gaming, Mansions of Madness , a dungeon crawl based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The first thing I noticed about the game, right from the moment I opened the box, is the high art production value. Every element of the game is beautiful and represents a united aesthetic. Tone is such an important element in Lovecraft's short stories and deft art direction creates a consistently lovecraftian tone from the get-go. The second thing I noticed, while perusing the rule book, is that unlike many other dungeon crawls, Mansions of Madness  is truly adversarial. The game is set up to evenly match investigators (protagonists) versus the Keeper (antagonist) and let them duke it out for the victory. There's no issue here of a capricious "game ordinance direc...