* Imagine my surprise when the Chicago Public Library actually had Cherie Priest's two monster novels, Fathom and Those Who Went Remain There Still, sitting on the shelves like they belonged there. When they so clearly belonged on my shelf, but in lieu of that I checked them both out and read each one in one sitting. Those Who Went Remained There Still took about two and a half hours, or just about the time it took to roast a 7-lb. pork shoulder, and it is a pure and beautiful Kentucky bug hunt of a novel flashing between Daniel Boone vs. the World's Worst Harpy and the feuding descendants of one of his men vs. Well That Would Be Telling. Priest had me at "Daniel Boone," but even those who fancy themselves immune to his frontier charm will likely fall for her "Manly Wade Wellman, Only Scarier, And With Better Narrative Control" tale, a veritable crick-and-holler Beowulf.

Fathom, meanwhile, felt like Tim Powers. There are some writers, Powers towering among them, who can deploy actual history and make it sound like the finest spun fantasy fiction. Despite knowing nothing of Bok Tower Gardens or indeed Edward H. Bok, when he entered the story I somehow immediately knew that Priest hadn't made anything up. Possibly including the earth elemental. That's hard-core fantasy writing, there. The rest of the book becomes a mounting proxy war between said earth elemental and the "water witch" Arahab, who wants to awaken Leviathan. You heard me. The monsters are their proxies: the (fictional?) pirate Jose Gaspar and two cousins captured in Thirties Florida. Priest's hand with setting, meanwhile, is almost as good as her hand with history. Wellman and Powers is a hard enough mix to handle without her stirring Lovecraft into the mix.

Somebody please tell me that her Eden Moore novels aren't quite that good.

* Speaking of elemental proxy wars, my Nobilis campaign is officially off the ground. It's based around the concept supplement I pitched to James Wallis Way Back When, called "American Dreaming." (In my mind, the cover is the same as the Nobilis Big White Book, except the half-face statue is the Statue of Liberty.) The players are the Powers of Entropy (no relation), Hope, Apocalypse, Secret Knowledge, and Texas, under the Imperator Croatoan. Their Chancel? Warehouse 23, of course, just where John Dee and Walter Raleigh built it, on Roanoke Island. It should be fun; if anyone has any really good Nobilis resource Web pages to point me at, I'm happy to look.

* For robin_d_laws and any other interested parties: My Cthulhu 101 chat is finally up at vocalo.org. Forty minutes of excellent talk with Luis, on Cthulhu, iconic modern horrors, and scary movies.

* I also checked out a swath of early Eric Ambler novels, having finally read A Coffin For Dimitrios this summer only to discover the missing link between E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Le Carre.

* Upcoming posts will dissect the new and unsatisfactory Prisoner series, the works of spy novelist Alan Furst (which I'm one book short of finishing), recipes for pork-shoulder-bone-enabled rice and beans and for harissa-enabled North African eggs-in-purgatory (if successful), and the process behind (and lessons ahead of) Tehran: Nest of Spies, my new release for The Day After Ragnarok. So watch this space!

For the curious and the doomed, I've got two long-form audio links to share:

* My WBEW interview is up here. I come in right around 61:00, and host Luis Perez and I talk about The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated and about American history from 1754 to 1787 for an hour. Hopefully, they'll have me back and we can get to the 19th century next time.

I should mention that I had a brief blackout on Henry Knox's first name -- I think I called him "Benjamin" for some reason. So, it's
"Henry." Luis also let me plug some games, too, so that was neat.

* macklinr also let me plug some games on our traditional "wrap-up" final podcast at GenCon, this time incarnated as the last episode of This Just In ... From GenCon 2009, guest-starring podcaster emeritus ptevis. In my pre-emptive defense, it was 1 a.m. on GenCon Monday, and we were all drinking.

Back from Origins today, and between my aching feet, piled-up work, and general sleep-dep, tonight was all about lying around with mollpeartree and watching Wanted. Oh, Angelina Jolie -- how you taunt me.

But even better than Angelina Jolie in tight leather on the top of a speeding El car in Chicago shooting around corners was winning the Best Non-Fiction Work of 2008 Origins Award for Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. This was especially gratifying, as it's my first Origins Award for a project that was substantially my work -- although I have no delusions about righteousfist's crucial role in the book. And, indeed, I also owe many thanks to you kind folks, for reading the Tour in its initial form in these pixels, commenting, improving those posts with suggestions, and (speaking of suggestions) suggesting I collect the blog Tour into a book in the first place. So thank you all very much.

You can see a short film by wordwill on the Award here. It's a delicate little tone poem of a piece, and speaks volumes of the quality of his friendship (and his narrative skill, even in such glancing, almost calligraphic form). Given that wordwill and jtidball were also nominated for their superb ludoparemiography Things We Think About Games, I can't tell you how much it means to me that he put this together.

I was also deeply touched by my warm reception at the "What's New With Pinnacle" seminar, which Shane Hensley generously invited me to attend. I am not used to being applauded for thanking potential customers and making a potential product announcement. (Not even for anything specific, just: "Day After Ragnarok won't be my last Savage Worlds setting.") Savage Worlds is a great game, and if the audience at that seminar was any indication, it breeds great fans. And there was a song. Two songs.

Let's see, what else? You saw righteousfist and the game playwrights at the fantastic Burgundy Room, where I think the highlight this year was probably the Roasted Lamb Lollipop with Lemon-Fontina Enriched Risotto, Black Walnut Pesto and Red Pepper Relish. Unless it was the Asparagus, Pattypan Squash, Baby Zucchini, Raddichio and Smoked Mozzarella Ravioli with a Madeira Reduction.

I got some more half-price Osprey Books, did a podcast and a bit, helped out at the Hero Games booth (and as always, many thanks to dtwatts for his hospitality at booth and hotel), and chatted with a host of good friends. I love this convention, and after four successive lunches at North Market (with Jenni's Ice Cream for dessert each time), and a pint mojito or two with rockin' yukon_jack, I love this city.

Can't wait to go back next year.

* Have I mentioned my next children's book here? I think I may have -- it's The Antarctic Express, a mashup of At the Mountains of Madness and The Polar Express. Well, you can see a lot of the art for the book, in various stages of completion, at the blog of the book's artist, Christina Rodriguez. I have been extraordinarily fortunate with the artists on these books, I gotta say.

* Speaking of art, I've got Mike Perry sketches from Day After Ragnarok to show off, too.

* Also, the energetic Aron Head at the blog Ideology of Madness (where, "If we geek about it, we speak about it") has not only posted an interview with me, but is hosting a contest to win a copy of The Day After Ragnarok in PDF and print. There's some Nathan Furman art from that book there, too, if you're unsated. The giant is particularly neat, methinks.

* And I don't think I've mentioned the map in these pixels yet, have I? The final version has a few tweaks and modifications in it (Yes, I know "Okhotsk" is spelled wrong...) but this should give you a nigh-finished taste. Plus, I do so like linking to maps at the end of a bunch of asterisky plugs.

Which is to say that I know I owe you good people many, many posts, but I'm happier than I can tell you to announce that my "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" meets "Quatermass and the Giant Snake" Savage Worlds setting, The Day After Ragnarok, is finally available from Atomic Overmind.

The print version will be at Origins, we devoutly hope, but surely you all are the kind of savvy, Web 2.0-enabled consumers who will rush right out and get it in PDF.

* I've been hired by gmskarka as line developer of Adamant Entertainment's upcoming line of licensed Call of Cthulhu products. First up: This Scepter'd Isle: Call of Cthulhu in Elizabethan England and Shadows of the Red Hand, a gangland Chicago setting book. So that should be fun.

* I've been nominated for two Origins Awards: for Trail of Cthulhu (Best Roleplaying Game) and Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales (Best Non-Fiction). Given the high caliber works on display in both categories, this is one occasion where it actually is just an honor to be nominated.

* Topically drifting back to La Belle Cité, tomorrow gbsteve and I go in search of Nicolas Flamel's house. And I, most likely, gawp like a tourist the whole way there. I shall have to dine alone that night, as the worthy Dempsey will be deserting me in the afternoon to go to a creative writing class in London. The Rue d'Auseil will have one last chance to draw me into le void cosmique.

My eulogy is here.

If you're interested in The Day After Ragnarok, my upcoming "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" meets "Quatermass and the Giant Snake" setting for Savage Worlds, I answer a number of fan questions on that very topic at the Atomic Overmind blog site, here. (There's more previews throughout the blog, too.)

Just think! Answers about Ragnarok, and you don't even have to trade your eye to Mimir for them!

* Plus, as a special added bonus, 45 minutes or so of me rambling on -- with Brian Isikoff, foxbat, and chrishanrahan -- about DunDraCon, large-format gaming, and the wonderfulness that is Kevin Allen, Jr's Sweet Agatha, is available for your listening pleasure, as the latest 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction has been up for a while now. I've just been delinquent in plugging it. Shockin', I know.

Keith "Doc" Herber, author of many marvelous Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns -- The Fungi From Yuggoth, Spawn of Azathoth, The Trail of Tsathoggua and much more besides -- died early this morning.

It wasn't all globetrotting horror. Herber's Return to Dunwich revisited Lovecraft's questionable town and provided unpalatable answers, in one of the two or three best books ever written for the game. In that book, Herber took his place with Ramsey Campbell as a chronicler of the human half of the Mythos; it's a paean to despair more immediate than some purists' disdainful "cosmicism" would allow. (And it has giant monsters in it.)

Doc also helped design "Raid on Innsmouth," one of the most revolutionary scenarios ever for any game; and his "Haunted House" is a dungeon crawl to make the saints weep. He wrote the first Clanbook: Tremere, which is considerably better than you'd expect, even if you were expecting something by Keith Herber.

He left game writing for years, fed up with the myriad miseries attendant on it. And then he got back in, starting Miskatonic River Press to publish Mythos-related books and games.

A little while ago, he sent me review copies of his two latest books. Full reviews of both remain forthcoming, but I can tell you that if you play Call of Cthulhu you won't regret going ahead without me and getting New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. Doc contributed one of the six scenarios there, set in "Foxfield."

And even if you don't play, do pick up his newly re-issued Dead But Dreaming, an anthology of Mythos fiction edited by Keith Herber and Kevin A. Ross. It's among the best Mythos anthologies ever published; it's almost certainly the best one of the decade. Adam Niswander and Ramsey Campbell are only the highlight names.

But the name that means the most, the guarantee of quality, of actually caring what goes between the covers -- that name is "Keith Herber."

[ahem]

The Veritable Key of Solomon

edited by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine
Llewellyn Publications, 2008, $65
446 pages, hardback, black and white

Opening grimoires at random is probably not the wisest thing one can do, but in this case, the results were worth it:

For games of chance, you could draw the Characters under the auspices of Jupiter, being one of the more fortunate amongst the Planets, as well as the ones under Mercury, because Jupiter governs all sorts of riches.

The design for the Talisman I am giving on the following page will, therefore, be extremely effective for adding luck to games, especially if you work on it under a Constellation of Jupiter not in any Opposition to Mercury and that it is dominant in the Heavens and in a friendly aspect with Venus.

This doesn't mean "roll up your character while the GM is watching, and you'll probably get away with more, but make sure your girlfriend knows where you are all night," although reading it the day after Daylight Savings steals an hour of my sleep, it sort of seemed like that. What does it actually mean? Well, it means: If you want to cast a Luck in Gambling spell, do it at a time auspicious for Jupiter, not crossed by Mercury; Venus will give you a bonus. In short, it's GURPS Cabal. For reals, yo.

This is one of the three Keys of Solomon that Skinner and Rankine have translated, footnoted, and goosed into this single volume -- a veritable Key of Solomon indeed. The Key of Solomon, for those of you who came in late, is probably the single most important grimoire in post-Renaissance European magic, and it's so famous that S.L. MacGregor Mathers picked it to sew together from a slew of manuscripts in the only previous English edition.

As you can tell from the phrase "slew of manuscripts," there were a bunch of different Keys around; one of the great features of Skinner & Rankine's volume is that they provide a lengthy and scholarly introduction discussing the four main families of Keys (and the fifteen separate "text-groups" descended from one or another copy). This volume prints entire mss. of three of those Families; ratmmjess will thrill to the notion that at least one of these three manuscripts almost certainly belonged to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and appears in the novel Zanoni, which is what started the fad for Solomonic grimoires that caused Mathers to hocus together his own version. (In further delightful synchronicity, the Chicago publisher L.W. deLaurence pirated Mathers' edition and inserted ads for his own tie-in merchandise into the spells!) Most of this material doesn't appear in Mathers' Key, although Skinner & Rankine include a few of Mathers' greatest hits ("Of the Experiment of Invisibility," "How to Prepare Extraordinary Experiments and Operations," etc.) as a kind of appendix to their first Key in the volume.

So the Key is famous, and important. What's it good for? Well, assuming you want to conjure up angels and planetary spirits and just a few demons, it's good for that -- or, at least, no worse than any other grimoire is. (Except maybe the limited-edition version of this volume from Golden Hoard, which has color plates instead of black and white ones. If color is important to your conjuring needs. But if you can afford that version, you hardly need to be dickering with spirits for hidden treasure.) Otherwise, it's fascinating inspiration for games -- Lovecraft's six or seven Necronomicons pale in comparison to the 144 (and counting!) versions of the Key that Skinner & Rankine have identified. Each one with slightly different pentacles, recipes, instructions, and invocations -- maybe this one in Czech has the right pentacle, but only the 15th-century Greek version (the oldest one known to exist -- the Key likely entered Italy from the Byzantine Empire, either right after 1453 or right before) has the correct invocation. Imagine trying to assemble one working Necronomicon from a hundred parenthetical, partial, mis-translated, mis-transcribed versions. (Not even including the ones featuring product placements by canny Chicago hucksters.) This, it seems, is how to occult a tradition.

Into this morass, Skinner & Rankine stride swinging. Their footnotes are almost uniformly excellent; I can't vouch for the translation (not speaking French or knowing the original), but it certainly reads properly grimoire-y. The pentacles are plentiful, as they should be, and the editors even include the original illustrations drawn by the scribal copyist, a French scribe from a landed family named Fyot. Msieu. Fyot was apparently sitting and copying demon-calls by hand during the Reign of Terror -- not these specific demon-calls, as these mss. date from 1796, but still. (Said illustrations contain a lot of insects and bugs, by the way. Just saying.) The actual magic is probably way too much of a muchness for games per se, although it can certainly serve as flavor-text and inspiration. Just like some game books, in other words. If you want a grimoire, this is literally the grimoire. You can't do any better than that -- just tell those demons that King Solomon sent you. And, er, keep my name out of it.

Some of you may have already known about the "old-school" RPG movement, which I discovered about a year and a half ago while I was looking for additional formats in which to publish Adventures Into Darkness. The thing that just tickles me to death is the number of "emulator" games out there -- games that use some combination of the Open Gaming License and the fact that you apparently can't copyright game mechanics, merely their specific description, to create "retro-clones" of the games we all couldn't wait to stop playing twenty years ago. In a way, it's the same sort of thing that Alex Ross and I -- how's that for a misleading name drop -- are doing with our various public-domain supers projects. (The two trends combine, as it happens, with Daniel Proctor's Night of the Living Dead: Revisited, an adventure for the Basic Role-Playing emulator GORE based on Romero's film, which is now in the public domain.)

I'm especially fond of the "alternate history" emulators:

Oliver Legrand's Mazes & Minotaurs comes to us from an alternate 1972 in which Gygax & Arneson were Greek mythology and Ray Harryhausen animation fans rather than Tolkein-Howard-Anderson fans, so the whole hobby takes a big thematic turn toward the legendary Mediterranean rather than the fantastic Northlands variously understood.

S. John Ross' amazing Encounter Critical is more of a "secret history" emulator -- it's a brilliant evocation of the "basement game" circa 1979, complete with IBM Selectric font and awesome art by the GM's best friend. And it's really a remarkable piece of game design in its own right, but then you'd expect that from Sjohn.

And they're both free in PDF! How great is that?

Anyway, all this is by way of preface to the fact that I've got an interview with maliszew (whose Grognardia blog is well worth reading in its own right) up on Out of the Box in honor of the one-year anniversary of Gary Gygax' passing.

Gosh, is it that time already? My January is simply melting in my fingers. It's a month from DunDraCon, in sunny-ish, scenic-ish San Ramon, California, and my seminar schedule is up:

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14:

City Building 2:30-4 PM
Anders Swenson, Ken Hite, Michael Blum
And another excursion into the intricacies of creating cities of wonder and adventure for adventuring heroes. This time, with an emphasis on what a really old city can be like, even in a modern day scenario.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15:

Ain't it Cool? 10:00-11 AM
Darren Watts, Ken Hite
Two connoisseurs of the gaming scene present a survey of the latest in gaming products for the discerning gamer to take a gander at.

Gender and Genre in Gaming 5:00-6 PM
Frisbee, Sean Patrick Fannon, Ken Hite
DunDraCon's annual excursion into playing the opposite, or offset, sex from the player. Making stereotypes work without offending, or grossing out, the other players; and avoiding negative stereotypes.

I may also try to sneak onto the "Magic: A Historical Discussion" seminar on Sunday at 11. We'll see. And I'll hope to see many of you at the show.

It seems like an awful waste of an LJ post just to point you good people to an interview with me on technoir's podcast, The Basics of the Game, but not a lot else is going on.

Snow covers my city, the New Capital of the World, as is good and right, but it makes getting out and doing things inconvenient. And cold. Which is good for GURPS Horror 4E, at which I'm plugging along. Next up: re-read all of GURPS Powers to see what else dr_kromm has done that I don't need to. I did have the pretty great brain wave of doing up Powers for all the various Fears from the monster section. That should be good.

In response to ratmmjess' challenge of a few weeks ago, I've started re-reading the Smiley novels, which is also good ground-work for the ongoing vampire espionage thriller game. I read them eons ago, and I'd forgotten just how good a writer LeCarre was back in the day, so that's been fun. It's also instilled in me a burning desire to read Declare for the dozenth time, but maybe I'll read that godawful brick by Robert Littell, or my Alan Furst book instead. Once I can get out and do some last-minute shopping, I'll see if there's more Alan Furst lying around used.

No movies to speak of; TiVoed and watched the Will Smith I Am Legend, which is another red-hot brick Akiva Goldsman will be carrying in Hell. You will likely hear my anguished response to The Spirit once I see it in a week or so, although I can bet it will be a threnody on the theme: "Frank Miller has no sense of humor. Will Eisner's The Spirit is good-humored. Discuss." Hopefully, I will be able to ignore Will Eisner at least as much as Frank Miller looks to have done, which may make the movie enjoyable. Cross fingers.

I made French onion soup last night, along with roast potatoes (in olive oil, with kosher salt, pepper, and herbes de Provence) and Craig Claiborne's recommended mushroom accompaniment to venison steaks, which his_regard brought over, along with a bottle of very upscale Chianti. I swapped a glug of that for the dry white that Claiborne recommended, and on Claiborne's suggestion used beef gravy in a jar (!) instead of sauce espagnole, which I didn't make as I don't happen to have five pounds of veal bones lying around. The mushrooms came out better than fine, so there. I swapped about three recipes around for the French onion soup to approach a non-psychotic version, so if you care: ( The Final Version? )

Tonight, I may use up the rest of the baguette on ham-and-Brie sandwiches, or I may make chili, or I may make venison goulash with the leftover steak. More importantly, right about 11:30, Darlene Love sings "Christmas Baby Please Come Home" on Letterman, and it's officially Christmas. Have a merry one, everybody.

* The Principality's loyal ally Atomic Overmind Press has a product page up for The Day After Ragnarok. Check out that awesome "Lancer Paperback I found at a garage sale" cover look. The book wound up being somewhat larger than I had initially thought it would, but I fondly hope it also wound up being somewhat better, too.

* Speaking of wonderful covers, Jerome's lobby-card cover to robin_d_laws' and my Trail of Cthulhu adventure collection, Shadows Over Filmland, is visible here. You can smell the popcorn! For a look inside, specifically at my "Double Feature" essay on the connections between Lovecraftian and Universal Horror tropes, check out this PDF excerpt.

* Would you rather listen to me talk about Lovecraft? Wildclaw Theatre, whose production of The Dreams in the Witch-House I was privileged to introduce on its opening night, has loaded up a holiday-themed podcast on all things Lovecraftian. It includes a brief interview with your humble correspondent; we did a longer one a couple weeks back, but the files were "corrupted." Hmmmm.... If you'd rather read than listen, you can see a transcript of my interview in all my semi-grammatical glory here. And no, I don't know why I blanked on the name "Lankhmar." I must have been "corrupted."

* Did you enjoy MIT Press' Second Person anthology of game design discussions? Then buckle in for Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Robert M. Price snaked the essay I wanted to write ("H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos as One Vast Narrative") out from under me, but I rallied back with an attempt to discuss "Multi-Campaign Setting Design For Roleplaying Games." Plus gems from Scott Glancy, Dave Sim, Robin Laws, Greg Stafford, Monte Cook, Ken Rolston, and many, many more. Check out that Table of Contents, eh?

* And as is traditional, a link that has nothing to do with me: EagleSpeak, a blog about modern piracy. Currently, it's all Somalia, all the time, as might be expected, but it's handy. (Warning to the timorous: its author is of the hawkish persuasion.)

I have been given leave and clearance to announce that I'm working on GURPS Horror, 4th Edition. This is not a major refit, just an up-gun of GURPS Horror, 3rd Ed. to the GURPS 4E rules, but I have been granted 16 or so more pages to footle around in.

The outline is done and approved, and I've pretty much filled up all the new content space conceptually, but if anyone has a really great idea that doesn't involve massive overhauling of the ms., feel free to pipe up in comments. (I'm allowed to tweak things after the outline stage as long as I don't get ridiculous with it.)

Better yet, if you think there's something that Horror 3rd can profitably compress or lose in the transition to 4E, please do sing out now!

Finally, one of the things I'm adding is a new campaign frame. I don't want to go into too much detail (not least because I haven't worked it out in too much detail), but if anyone has a better title than "The Edge of Winterland," I'd love to hear it. It's a contemporary setting with ghosts; "Winterland" is what the ghost-plane is called (as a mordant back-formation from the old Spiritualist term "Summer-land" for the realm of the spirits). I'd like to keep "Winterland" in the title if possible.

And if you got nothing but "attaboys," feel free to leave those, too -- although I expect the upcoming bitter cold will keep me pinned to my desk like a butterfly to a card, every little bit of motivation helps as we move into the season of disordered affect.

The fun parts of writing the kinds of things I write are essentially threefold:

* Coming up with something wild, either out of my own head, or out of sadly unknown other works that I can lift ideas from without recrimination.

* Coming up with new, exciting architecture; better or cooler ways to present those ideas for an audience.

* Discovering new things about the topic once I'm doing the research anyway, things I can add like pinches of saffron and lemon peel to wake up the book's core flavors.

All of those things take time; none can really be done on schedule. For The Day After Ragnarok, my "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" Savage Worlds Savage Setting, it's the second and the third that are making the project such a joyous hell right now.

I've come up with a kind of neat idea for that most dire of creative challenges, presenting setting: the "Savage Shortlist," in which I reveal "The Top Five Places to Get Mercenary Work" and "The Top Five Places To Find A Remote Castle Ruled By A Madman," and so forth and so on. And on the subject of new, exciting things to add to the book, there's nothing that makes a game designer happier than discovering a half-million Nazis legitimately wandering around a setting where you hadn't thought you could put any.

It's painful to have to stop all this fun right in the middle (or, I devoutly hope, right in the 85th percentile) but I really have to write another "Lost in Lovecraft" column for Weird Tales before I go to London for Dragonmeet.

But if you're planning to be at Dragonmeet, in addition to doing proper obeisance to the mighty robin_d_laws, and buying a Rare Preprint of our new Trail of Cthulhu adventure book, Shadows Over Filmland, and watching us divagate on GMing Tips and Investigative Game Design in seminars, and playing wonderful other games run by wonderful other people, ask me about Iowa State A&M. It's totally worth it.

* Weird Tales is giving away a free issue of their magazine, to wit the July/August issue, which includes among other good things (such as a fine Mike Mignola interview) my "Lost in Lovecraft" column on the Dreamlands.

* As a public service announcement for those not aware of it, The Groovy Age of Horror is my kind of blog. As befits Grooviness, not all images are SFW.

* Everyone has, of course, already seen Luke Burns' McSweeney's piece, "Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure As A Whitman's Sampler Copywriter," but someone is apparently taking it more seriously than most: I present to you, the Choconomicon.

* And finally, behind the cut you can see Savage Worlds statistics for Stalin's army of man-ape hybrids, plucked still-warm from the pages of my current project, The Day After Ragnarok! Verrrry scaaaaarry, eh kids?

( A World Where Apes Evolved From Inevitable Historical Dialectic? )

The subject having been raised by drivingblind in his role as current co-host of my column, I figure I'd get the opinions of the potential customer base herein assembled: Would you pay for collections of old "Out of the Box" columns? In its various pre-IPR incarnations, the column ran from February 1997 to March of 2007, 312 columns in total, about 400,000 words give or take. The possibilities seem to be these:

* The entire run, published in a series of volumes, probably five. Each volume would have roughly 62 columns in it, which would still make it a pretty hefty book; in the 80,000 word range, so 100+ pages even before extranea.

* A single-volume "Best Of" collection, spanning the gamut. It would probably have 120 or so columns; all the Outies, State of the Industry, and other "theme" columns, all of the interviews, and some selected reviews.

Either version would initially be a PDF offering, although Lulu-on-demand might be practicable. I suspect either version would be more work for me (and for Fred) than it looks like, but that's our lookout.

If you would, then, please chime in on the following:

* Whether you think the multi-volume or "Best Of" format would be more interesting to you.

* What sorts of additional material might make a collection more tempting, if any.

* Whether you would actually pay for such a thing -- a hearty chorus of "You must be kidding" would be very useful to me (and not merely as an ego-deflator) as I've got plenty of other things I could be writing, too.

Thanks for your response, whatever it may be!

so•cial ar•til•ler•y: n. A tactic, reinforcement, or other factor in "social combat" intended to resolve the immediate situation completely and overwhelmingly.

"I'm gonna call in a social artillery strike on these guys and get them out of the marina so we can escape." -- "Samuel Vornau," former Swiss bank security-and-surveillance expert played by kaynorr in my current GUMSHOE campaign, 9/9/08

Or am I? The column that used to be headed, in tones redolent with alarums by night, "Kenneth Hite's Out of the Box!" is now returned, like Napoleon from Elba, to the friendly confines of Indie Press Revolution.

For those who prefer to roam the wild steppes of Livejournal for all their Web-columnial needs, it is also syndicated on LJ at: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/outoftheboxipr/

This edition of "Out of the Box" will go forward in the popular blog format of today; each post will be about only one or two games or news items or controversies or what-have-you, while I reserve the long-form columns for topics like The State of the Industry, The Outie Awards, and The GenCon Report.

I have already been paid that most contemporary of compliments, a ten-page (and counting!) flamewar on RPG.net carried out by people who haven't read the new column yet. For the free advertising, I thank everyone involved. For those who have risen to the defense of my columnial integrity, I thank you rather moreso.

"Out of the Box," he said burying what lede there is, has always been a gleefully biased column of game reviews and industry news. Those gleeful biases are my own. They include, in no specific order, "Westerns should have more games about them," "Game designers matter, game companies rather less so," "Elegance is a virtue," and "Call of Cthulhu is the greatest RPG of all time." I have others, which I'm sure a Straussian close reading of my summa can bring out. hygelakthedread knows (and I suspect that waitingforgo suspects) how hard it can be to get me to write good reviews of games I actually like, sometimes. While the specifics of my business arrangements with IPR are up to IPR to reveal, I can say that I am being paid well enough to write good reviews of games I actually like. I am not being paid well enough to write good reviews of games I actually dislike. As there are many more game products I like in any given year than I have slots for game reviews, this has yet to prove problematic. (If it does, I'll write another Tribute to Dice or something.) I know this may not reassure everyone in the world, but I shall bear up somehow.