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Arthur reviews the Cadwal Chronicles series by Jack Vance, and makes a case that this is where Vance lost it.
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Oooh, pictures! Check you! It's so tragic when things jump the shark. I don't read 'serious' (serious is a bad word to use in this context but I don't know what else to use - basically I mean books that *don't* have an ex-prostitute gay wizard n the front) sci-fi/fantasy as much as I you do, or, indeed as I ought, so my only brush with Vance has been Dying Earth which I absolutely adored. Bizarrely, for one who tends to struggle with such things, I'm madly into the Dying Earth roleplaying game as well, I think because it's completely random and wearing a hat is important.
The Dying Earth RPG is excellent. I need to get the supplements for Cugel and Rhialto-level campaigns
Dang! That should be *re*reading Araminta Station itself at the end. Obviously I've read all of them, I wouldn't have been able to do the review otherwise.
I'd edit that, but it'd make the article disappear.
Double dang. The comment-eating bug is back. My first comment should have read "The Dying Earth RPG is excellent. I need to get the supplements for Cugel and Rhialto-level campaigns
It's the semicolon. It's the bloody semicolon. The comments box doesn't understand semicolons and hates people who do.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that I already have the book for Turjan-level stuff, and it does an excellent job of expanding the system without making it overwhelmingly complicated, as well as tweaking the atmosphere to make things more like the first book. The best thing about the Dying Earth RPG is that you could tweak it to make it a Lyonesse RPG, or a Cadwal RPG, or (if you're mad) a Ports of Call RPG, since all of Vance's worlds work on very similar ideas.
Correction made! Rami's is in Brussels at the moment where they don't have technology but as soon as he gets settled he's going to be implementing a lot of cool stuff for Fb so we can all jump on him then with our ferocious demands for punctuation. And that would be why the Ferret never eats my comments, I'm not literate enough to use semi-colons in my comments.