Personable Thoughts

Another year passes, another set of Bloggies is awarded. A round of applause is in order for the category winners, and a flower bouquet and fancy chocolates (perhaps even a bottle of wine) should be prepared for Sacha as thanks for the hard work of hosting, to be presented after the crowning of the overall winner. The Bloggies this year truly presented a bumper crop of blogs, each of them would have been a worthy recipient of an award, but alas, only one could prevail in each category (I guess three if you count silver and copper Bloggies). There are just more good blog posts to go around than there are spots on the podium. This is good for us blog readers, but less so for all the awards hungry bloggers out there. The Bloggies being decided by popular vote after the initial nomination process, there were votes whose outcome I disagreed with, but I guess this is just the curse of not being the median voter. Rather than complain about this, I'm being an adult about it: I'm takin...

Bear with me folks, I'm going to do a discourse. Nobody asked for my thoughts, but what is a personal blog, if not a soap box for me to yell them out anyway. As always, but this time in particular, feel free to tell me that I'm wildly off base, and the things I say are bad are good actually. Recently, I read a post on Gaby Fermi's excellent blog, rolling d6 (go read it, it's good), about the price of tabletop RPGs . Here, she argues that RPG books are not too expensive because they offer a good value proposition in terms of how many hours of fun you can get from a book. While I solidly agree with her conclusion: No, RPG books are not too expensive, I'm not a huge fan of her reasoning to get there. As a preamble, I will just acknowledge that I am writing this from the relatively privileged position of having a job that gives me enough disposable income to buy many more games than I will ever have time to play. I understand that people with lower incomes will of cou...

  While calling Infærnum a big book is perhaps a stretch, the lavish 192 page hardback is certainly not a zine, and these are obviously the only two categories of book and thus it must be a big one. Published by Mind's Vision , Infaernum was originally written in (Brazilian) Portuguese by Caio Romero with graphic design by Raul Rinaldi.  Unfortunately, I think the game suffers from being a translation, sentences are often clunky and unusually phrased in a way that does not feel like an intentional stylistic choice. This is a huge shame, as the book looks great, there has definitely been a significant investment in the presentation, so it would be great as if the crowdfunding could also have paid for another editing pass on the text. Fortunately it is generally clear, so it presents no obstacle to reading and playing the game, it just does not read particularly naturally. The version I read was the deluxe Apocalypse Edition, which is a gorgeous tome, full of colours and with g...