Weekly Book Recommendations (July 12)

This week's reads

Knave Second Edition: I was in Ben Milton's Kickstarter for this hyper stripped down version of D&D for OSR play. I gotta admit that for what it is designed to do it is pretty sweet. Milton designed the game to run for 5th graders (about 10-11 year olds for those of you not in the states), and honestly with the inclusion of another adult GM at the library I kind of want to start next school year shifting over to Knave and run Tomb of the Serpent King followed by cobbling stuff from the Dyson Logos map set I just Humble Bundled. Lots of the book is random tables to provide inspiration or specificity on magical or weird things at the drop of a hat, and that's great. I'm not 100% sold on the magic systems, but they make sense internally and produce an interesting world, so I'm not gonna kvetch.

Astro City: The Dark Age (which is in two volumes): This was originally meant to be the second volume of Marvels which didn't focus on Phil Sheldon (the sequel that did continue to focus on Sheldon did come out, and it's much less intricate than this), eventually making its way to Astro City. It's a solid read on it's own - a little overlong perhaps - but there's an extra layer of fun in tying each of these back to their birthplace Marvel plotlines. It's obvious that the Blue Knight is the Punisher, for example, but the whole sequence at the end of book 3 I was sure was tied to Serpent Throne stuff from the Avengers originally, through Busiek's redacted notes, was meant to take place in the Hellfire Club during the Dark Phoenix plot. I think it works better here then it would have in Marvels volume 2, because the creative team was able to make up what they needed to move the story forward and not be locked into the continuity (even if playing games with that continuity is it's own sort of fun). 

Astro City is a great resource for anyone trying to follow the V&V mold and build a campaign from scratch. All of the characters are very distinctly their own things while still being recognizable as their comics inspirations. Once they're set, Busiek plays out their stories in a logical way, taking them further from their inspirations, just as your own campaign would do. He locks down hard points in the extensive history early on, and then comes back and builds on them piece by piece as needed. Time passes, characters change and grow. Most game worlds (and independent publishers) have their own Superman, their own Batman, but none of them feel as well realized to me as Samaritan and Confessor. Check these out if you haven't before, if only for game inspiration.