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NeilNjae
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- NeilNjae
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I can take the text on the wiki and convert it into an epub file of the book. It won't be pretty, but it might be better than reading a website.
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(Quote) In what way?
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I think there's a way to recover them, but I'm not an expert on the game. But also, skills are based on the level of the meters, so you may want some of the meters filled in to have competence in other areas. Unknown Armies is a game of obsessed, da…
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(Quote) The meters cover five areas (Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self). For each, the character has a rating in Hardened and Failed. Every time something bad happens, you roll some dice to see if it affects the character. I…
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(Quote) otion of dread is not quite the same as horror, but they seem to go hand in hand in gaming. (Quote) Generally, if your pull makes the tower collapse, your PC dies. But I'm not an expert on the game.
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(Quote) Is this why Cosmic Horror is a popular genre now? We can play-act the horror, going through the motions of being scared, while we the players/readers are safe with our now-commonplace understanding that "space is big, really big". …
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A couple of problems when it comes to answering this. I'm not a fan of horror generally. That means I don't really know what "cosmic horror" is. (Wikipedia describes it as horror based on the vastness of the cosmos and our insignificance i…
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There wasn't really a character in the book, more a sequence of narration mouthpieces. None of the characters changed during the book and the only real character-influenced choice was to stay in the house and defend it against the swine-people. But…
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As Richard says, there are lots of symbols but I've no idea what any of them is supposed to mean. Perhaps the pig-men are the assault of base urges on the fortress of the intellect, the id trying to overpower the ego? And to back up Richard, I felt…
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The structure: it struck me as being two quite separate novellas that were bundled together for publication economics. The two halves of the book have very little do do with each other. I didn't pick up much different about the prose style, but the…
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A bit of context on where the story fits with the revolution in physics at the start of the 20th century. Where did the idea of "Cosmic horror" come from? This story was written in 1908. Henrietta Swan Leavitt did her work on "stand…
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Sorry, City still hasn't turned up so I've not been tracking here. I'm running the Great Pendragon Campaign at the local club at the moment, so how about some Arthurian stories? My proposal is some of the earliest Arthurian Romances, by Chrétien d…
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Sorry, I'm behind on City. A combination of me not getting my finger out to look for the book, and the library taking much longer than I thought to find their copy and get it to me. I'll dive into the questions as soon as I can!
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How would the book have been stronger if there had been no way for the groups to communicate? I'm reminded of the script-writer's rationale for some of the Doctor Who staples: the sonic screwdriver, the psychic paper, the Tardis translator. They al…
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(Quote) On the other hand, a young woman, full of hormones, and meeting someone who's not a "parent" for the first time... falling for the first vaguely-suitable young man is a plausible reaction.
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(Quote) I think people in the setting fully understand "the birds and the bees" so to speak. The forced pregnancy part at the end of the book is a small, secret project that was running for only a few years, so I can understand that it wou…
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(Quote) Yes, that's a good point. Her breakdown later in the book was heavily foreshadowed.
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(Quote) I think there's more to the book than you give it credit for. I think it raised some interesting questions, even if it didn't do a good job of proposing answers to them. The questions that came to mind for me are: * What is the point of li…
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I think the setting is too constrained, and perhaps too bleak, for long term play. Like @Apocryphal , I think it would work well as a Star Trek like "planet of the week" and questions about Prime Directive and the like. Should you save the…
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The notion of the Exiles was a very weak part of the book. They served no purpose to the narrative, and the in-world explanation for them (different factions on the original ship) was both far-fetched and under-developed. The only role they played …
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I think the key features of hardboiled stories are that "the system" is vast, oppressive, and unassailable. People are broken because they have to deal with the system, and bad things happen because of venal, self-interested reasons rather…
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I thought the characters were reasonably distinct. I had a good handle on what they wanted and why they did what they did. I can't remember names, but that's me. It took me a while to work out Irina was Abby's hallucination. I guess it was at the s…
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Regardless of the "Russian-ness" of Novayarkha, I thought it was a pretty plausible depiction of a community under great stress and hardship. People had to do what they were told or else everyone would soon perish. The control was warrante…
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There was enough there to set up the situation Bonesteel wanted. I thought it was plausible enough, some features pushed the story a bit, but it wasn't a huge part of the book. It wasn't really about the worldbuilding, but the characters.
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Yes, they were clearly a couple who deeply cared for each other. It perhaps started a bit too fast to be believable, but once established I think it rang true. I liked that the friendship side of the relationship was more important than any romantic…
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"Why they bothered" is a key theme of the novel, I think. What is the point of living? And both sub-settings (Novayarkha and Hypatia) are post-apocalyptic. The Hypatia's answer to the meaning of life is to carry out the great work that's …
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I liked that we had two different perspectives on the meeting of the groups. It made the miscommunications and misunderstandings easier for the reader. Anya came across as a bit naive. I'd have thought that someone in her experience, with her job, …
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It was quite fun and mostly rattled along. I liked that the viewpoint characters were mature adults rather than the over-emotional teenagers that are in a lot of fiction. The plotting with the Exiles was a bit ham-fisted. We knew from the beginning…
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(Quote) I think there's something about changing attitudes towards friendship and masculinity. I think the book was from a time when people could be friends, without any expectation of romantic or sexual feelings. Also, men were less expected to be …
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(Quote) I've recently been watching The Avengers, the 1960s "espionage" caper TV series. Some of those plots seem to be updated equivalents of the plot in this book. Small scale, strange weirdness that may have huge implications.