Questland

Questland by Carrie Vaughn, 296 pages

Eccentric billionaire Harris Lang has made his money on tech innovations, so literature professor Addie Cox is more than a bit confused when Lang's people contact her for a super-secret project. Turns out that they need her geek bonafides to infiltrate a private island that Lang created as a high-priced destination for fans of fantasy realms. Yup, on Insula Mirabilis, Lang has created a land full of dwarves and elves and just ripe for questing — the only problem is that one of Lang's project directors has gone rogue, cutting off contact with Lang's headquarters and pulling a force field down around the island that has killed the crew of a Coast Guard vessel that was attempting to check in on the island. And from what Addie gathers, that rogue director is probably her Elvish-speaking ex-boyfriend Dominic.

If you combined Jurassic Park and Ready Player One, and then subbed in dragons and unicorns for all the dinosaurs and VR headsets, you'd probably get something like this book. It's fun and full of references to Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien, Narnia, and a whole host of RPGs and Renaissance faires. Is it the best book ever? Nah. But it's a boatload of fun and well worth the read for fans of fantasy.

Our World

Our World (the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, vol. 2). 262 p.

This is the gamemaster-oriented book for the Dresden Files rpg. It discusses various factions that characters might belong to and describes the setting of the novels--Chicago--in game terms. The bulk of the book, however, is given over to write-ups of most of the characters from the novels, translated into game terms. There's nothing like reading lots of stat-blocks to teach you a system's rules for character building! And since I'm pretty familiar with the novels, it's also intersting to see how a particular character translates into stats. As a side effect, it's making me want to re-read a lot of the novels, especially the earlier ones.

Your Story

Your Story (the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, vol. 1). 402 p.

This rpg (role-playing game) uses the FATE system to adapt the Dresden Files novels of Jim Butcher into a playable game setting and system. I was somewhat familiar with FATE before reading this, and I enjoy the DF novels, so I was looking forward to checking out this implementation. I'm impressed; the setting is both very faithful to the books (Butcher was involved with the game design) and eminently playable without having to reproduce the plots of the novels. Particularly elegant was the way the designers used the refresh mechanism as a thematic element and as a way to balance characters against one another. The magic system is complex but looks very flexible, which is the way to go if you don't want to end up with huge spell lists like you have in old-school D&D.

(An aside: yes, this is a rulebook for a game, not a novel. But I read every word, cover to cover, so I get to claim it as a "book read"! Also, if anyone is actually interested in system details, I'd be glad to go into more detail, but I don't think this blog is quite the place to do so.)