- You may be amused to learn of the existence of the D&D Lore Wiki, which catalogues 'official Dungeons & Dragons content of every edition, from 1974 to 2024: every monster, NPC, organization, race, character class, magic item, spell, dungeon and place which has ever appeared in an official D&D sourcebook, along with their real-world creators.'
- The MIT Press is putting out an academic edited collection on Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, available to pre-order here. Will it be worth reading? I make no predictions.
- Speaking of that fiftieth anniversary, The Escapist goes over what Wizards of the Coast is planning for 2024 here. It turns out it involves selling more rules.
- If you are hungry for oppressive orientalist filth of the Yoon-Suin variety, I recommend Ernest Bramah's Wallet of Kai Lung, available at Project Gutenberg here. I picked up a first edition at a secondhand bookshop about a year ago and finally got around to reading it; it's a fascinating piece, and will I think be the subject of a proper future post.
- Investigating Censor grows in power and influence. Will this be baleful? Time will tell.
- I have mentioned this before in the Sunday Seven but you have a few more days to enter Ben Gibson's adventure writing contest.
- Brian at The Silver Key has been blogging longer than I have, which is in itself an insanely long amount of time to be pumping words into the ether. His recent post on organising his bookshelf amused me. I do not organise mine at all - partly because I just enjoy looking at it while I try to find the book I want.
Monday 29 January 2024
The Sunday Seven: 28th January 2024
Each Sunday (well, almost each Sunday), I share seven links to items of interest that have crossed my eye across the preceding week. Here are this week's:
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The Wallet of Kai Lung looks really cool, reminds me of Barry Hughart's 1980s fantasy trilogy of a China that never was: Bridge of Birds, Story of the Stone, Eight Skilled Gentlemen.
ReplyDeleteHm ... maybe Jack Vance had read #4?
ReplyDeleteI have good memories of Kai Lung's Golden Hours, though never really connected it to Vance.
ReplyDeleteI note that one of Bramah's other creations was the blind numismatist detective Max Carrados, who had some good-ish radio adaptations.
I guess it's the characters who rob and swindle each other blind while engaging in superficially genteel repartee. Might be traceable back to a common root - translations of the Arabian Nights, or of the Spanish picaresque novel?
DeleteBookshelf organisation reminds me of the time I volunteered to help my friend Zaid organise his. I was one of many volunteers - I don't know how many books Zaid has, but I'd estimate between 5 and 10,000 (well, that's what he had 10 years ago. Nowadays, I dread to think). I arrived late, and at a crisis point. Folks had been organising books by subject, but there were too many tricky calls, and so we pulled everything off the shelves and started again, organising them by the colour of the spine, which seemed the most practical option.
DeleteI like the idea of unordered books, but in practice I've found it leads to far too much time hunting for specific ones.
I seem to manage with it but then again I very, very rarely re-read books, so once a book goes onto the shelf it basically stays there.
DeleteThanks for the plug man! And under no circumstances shelve your books spine in, pages out.
ReplyDeleteAlthough that might give rise to interesting serendipitous discoveries.
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