Does Whatever a Spider Might

Spiderlight is out today! And getting some very nice reviews, for which I and all the little spiders are properly grateful. The book gets a mention in Leah Schnelbach's "fiction's greatest spiders" article here (can you believe someone beat me to that article?), I sneak into Barnes & Noble's new release list (along with Emma Newman's new Split Worlds novel, about which […]

Shiny and New — stuff coming this year

I am up to my eyeballs with stuff right at this moment, principally Tiger & Wolf book 3 (tentatively The Hawk and the Hyena? Does that work? I keep thinking "handsaw" Beats "The Owl and the Pussycat" which was the working title for a while) but however I take a break to bring you Tidings of Good Things. Or possibly […]

Settings out for Adventure

There was a to-and-fro on Twitter recently about RPG systems and book settings that got me thinking about the idea again. I've often thought about turning Shadows of the Apt into an RPG — it would give it a pleasing circularity, if nothing else, given the world's origins. There are a lot of very good worlds out there […]

I am Dungeon Master…

Typing that quote from the old cartoon, it occurs to me that, if you’re a bunch of kids lost in a hostile and alien world, hearing that from a little bald gnome is probably more reassuring than from an enormous bearded guy. Following up on my previous post about the release of D&D Next/5th Edition, I can now report […]

The Fifth Iteration: first impressions of 5th ed D&D

Firstly, if pen and paper RPGs are of no interest to you, then neither will this be. I'm gonna get old school geeky, and I'm not ashamed about it. I don’t do reviews, of course, and these days I don’t honestly get to play tabletop RPGs much of at all, because everyone I know these days is grown […]

The MMOs of yesteryear

TIme for something relatively trivial. I like MMORPGs. They're the game genre I've spent most time playing for the last seven or eight years, with occasional excursions for Skyrim, Portal 2 and a few others. When I started off there was a small number of them (1) and I played just the one. Now there seem to be hundreds and […]

The Last of the Maelstroms

OK, professional hat on first: expanded Fantasycon schedule now reads: Friday 8pm — Mass author signing. Please come along to this. Last time I swear there were more authors than readers. Stephen Hunt and I sat there like lemons. Saturday 29th 10–11am — Too Much Reality panel. 10am is also the launch of the Ancient Wonders anthology containing […]

To Boldly MMO

So, being as The Air War is out in 2–3 weeks and I'm doing Edge Lit next weekend (1) the time is obviously ripe to talk about game design in MMORPGs. (1) With my first ever workshop, no less, about which I am bricking it. Role-playing in computer games came up briefly as a tangent in my […]

Films v Games

Thieves later, films now. Or: not film. This is just something that I've started noticing, and it's hard to ignore. There's a lot of fuss at the moment about computer games eating into the profits of the film industry — just the same fuss, as MovieBob has pointed out in his Studio System set of articles, as […]

Minsc, Might and Morrowind

The Eye of the Beholder fond mockathon I did a while back started the memories flowing regarding computer RPGs (of the single rather than the MMO (1) variety) that I've had fun with. Now Fantasycon's gone and the Reading and London signings are still coming up, here are a few that I recall having some real fun with back […]