Books Read
Jun. 22nd, 2019 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dsrtao92. Verdict on Crimson Fields, M.C. Planck
Book four of the World of Prime. An engineer from our world (approximately) is pulled into a secondary world that is literally run on the rules of an RPG. It manages to be better than the usual run of such tales; in particular, it is concerned with politics, economics and situational ethics as well as the usual weapon-engineering and warfighting. There's a book five and I shall probably head into it shortly.
Book four of the World of Prime. An engineer from our world (approximately) is pulled into a secondary world that is literally run on the rules of an RPG. It manages to be better than the usual run of such tales; in particular, it is concerned with politics, economics and situational ethics as well as the usual weapon-engineering and warfighting. There's a book five and I shall probably head into it shortly.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-28 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-28 07:10 pm (UTC)I'll look for it. Is it available as a collection?
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-28 07:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-28 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-28 07:40 pm (UTC)Fair enough -- glad I asked. I mostly review stuff when it's complete, so haven't gotten around to talking this up yet.
Quick summary: it's by Keiron Gillen, who is, for my money, the best comics author writing today. (I still buy all of Ellis, but IMO Gillen's a much better writer: comparably interesting ideas and much better characters.) His book _The Wicked and the Divine_ (a study of celebrity-as-godhood, which is just finishing now) is regarded as one of the best of the past decade; his _Uber_ is a horrifying but brilliant study of WWII, through the lens of superheroes as weapons of mass destruction; and volume 2 of his _Phonogram_ trilogy (which takes the idea of "Music as Magic" literally), _The Singles Club_, is one of my 20 favorite graphic novels of all time.
_DIE_ centers on a group of six people who, as teenagers (about 20 years ago), disappeared for a couple of years, and have never told anyone since what happened to them. They had moved on with their lives, but have now been sucked back into the world of DIE -- literally a 20-sided planet -- and have to wrestle with all sorts of horrors, both global and personal, as they find themselves being railroaded through a campaign by the world's gamemaster.
The world building is *fascinating*: Gillen (a hardcore gamer) has deconstructed many RPG (especially but not exclusively D&D) tropes, and rebuilt them in new ways -- our protagonists all have character classes that are sort of skewed-mirror versions of the classic D&D ones, and each issue explores some thematic facet of the form. The back matter (like that of Uber) is worth the price of admission all by itself: he's done a lot of really interesting analysis of the tropes along the way. IIRC it was somewhat by accident that DIE has wound up coming out as a new RPG system -- having done all that research and design along the way, it sort of had to.
_DIE_ is still fairly close to the beginning, so I can't say where it's going. Gillen works pretty much solely in novelistic (that is to say, limited series) form, but his stories range from 4 to 50 issues, and I don't recall him saying yet how long this one's expected to be. I think the first collection is coming out sometime around now, though, and should suffice to give you a sense of whether it's your cup of tea.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-29 12:46 am (UTC)Ah, just read the blog post on this point. He's expecting roughly 25 issues. ("About half as long as WicDiv.")