Books in December 2024

December 2024 saw me reading 10 books for a total of  2,362 pages. This month saw a spike up in the number of roleplaying books that I read, but there was some excellent fiction and non-fiction along the way.

I read His Majesty, The Worm, which was fascinating as a design exercise. Using tarot driven mechanics it codifies and structures dungeon-crawls in a very interesting way. There's a lot of ideas to unpack in this and I can see myself dipping back into it. It's beautifully presented and structured, but I can't see myself bringing it to the table in the near term. I think that this one was more of an inspiration.

This Ship is a Tomb is a procedurally-generated depth crawl into a starship that has been thoroughly corrupted by evil otherness, very much in the style of the film Event Horizon. Naturally, it's for Mothership but it could easily be hacked to another game engine. I could imagine using this but part of me wonders if One Breath Left (which I reviewed previously) would be a more pragmatic way to scratch this itch.

Metro: Otherscape is the core book for the new game setting from the publishers of City of Mist. It's very well written and the evolution of the game engine makes it much more slick, but I'm not certain that I will love it as much as its predecessor. It will be interesting to get this to the table at Revelation. What I've seen I like, but it will be good to explore this in play.

I also did a complete re-read of Far Horizon as I ran it on 30th December 2024.

The bridge between roleplaying and non-fiction was Shannon Appelcline's excellent history of the Traveller roleplaying game, my forever game, This is Free Trader Beowulf. A Christmas present, I devoured it all in a single day. Recommended if you love Traveller.

The other non-fiction (audio)book I went through was Say Nothing (Patrick Radden Keefe), which was a fascinating and chilling insight on the Troubles. I may watch the Disney+ version if I get a moment, but the book is a skilful journey through how the dynamics of the asymmetric conflict changed and escalated.

I also read several fictional books. Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice was a worthy new George Smiley story. The style was different, but there were enough echoes of his father's writing and approach to not feel jarring. I loved the way that this was done but I do hope that to doesn't stop Harkaway continuing with his own books, as I find his science-fiction (for example, Titanium Noir) excellent.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia always delights, and Signal to Noise was no exception. A group of teenagers in Mexico find a way to cast magic, which brings consequences. The tale is told looking back some years later and is definitely worth a look.

Devil's Day, by Andrew Michael Hurley engaged me more than Starveacre in the end, but it's a dark tale of life at the edge of civilisation.

The final book was a standalone Polity novella by Neal Asher, Jenny Trapdoor. It's not one to read if you suffer from arachnophobia but otherwise it's quite good fun and was a good page-turner for the end of the year.