Perfection is worth waiting for. John Harper used the delay to do more playtesting, polishing his RPG system to a fine sheen. What remains is sleek and stylish game of fantasy scoundrels, searching for the next score in a dark gothic ghost-haunted world. This is a tightly focused masterpiece of game design, that demands that you play by its rules.

The system is elegant. State your intent and roll d6s equal to your action rating. Beg for help from your friends, push yourself, or take a devil’s bargain for more dice. Only the highest result counts. 1-3 is a failure. 4-5 is success with consequences. 6 is success, and multiple 6s are a critical success. Where the game excels is in driving fiction first play. The core gameplay loop involves the player setting their goal and choosing an action. The GM sets the position (controlled, risky, desperate) and the effect (great, standard, limited), the player finds extra dice, you roll, and tick off clocks.

The system has enough bits to communicate difficulty, but is fast and light and gets out of your way, because what this game is really about is making the city of Duskoval and the dangerous lives of scoundrels come alive. Play is divided into three phases. In free play, players wander the city talking to contacts, getting into and out of trouble in a traditional linear RPG style. When they’ve gathered enough information to identify a likely target, the play switches to the Score. Pick one of six plans, fill in a detail, roll Engagement, and hit the ground running in media res to demonstrate that these are professional scoundrels. Rather than tediously planning a heist, players spend Stress to create flashbacks (“of course these are the guards I bribed”, “I memorized the canal schedule and a barge is passing underneath right now”, etc). Finally, in the third section, downtime, players indulge their Vice to recover Stress, work on long-term plans, upgrade their crew and territory, and watch the gangs around them respond. This pacing mechanism, with brief bursts of action interspersed with longer periods of slower work, is an RPG design innovation, and I’m interested to see how the moving parts, between Coin and Reputation and Heat and Stress, all work together.

The setting of Duskovol is mashed together from a bunch of sources, the Dishonored and Thief video games, the Vlad Taltos series, The Lies of Locke Lamora. The result is evocative without being specific. This is a city ruled by cruel and decadent aristocrats, inhabited by downtrodden workers, and infested with criminals and cultists, where the dead linger and forgotten gods lurk around every bend. There’s a district by district break down, but the setting mostly comes through in one sentence descriptions of NPCs and organizations. Lists and tables in fine Gygaxian style provide enough material for a GM to skeleton an adventure, but this is a game that demands that everybody improvise in visualizing and inhabiting the city, rather than specifying everything in advance.

This is a tightly focused game. Reading it, I’m confident that within its wheelhouse it’ll be perfect. The active Google+ community has tons of hacks (and I hacked a much earlier edition for Stross’s The Laundry series). That said, this may not be a game for the faint of heart, and with its mechanics so tied up in pacing and danger, it may not be as flexible as it appears. One-shots are doable, but a lot of the cooler features about crews and downtime won’t come into play.
Compared to earlier editions, the rules for teamwork and leadership are much reduced, probably for the better. On a minus point, there’s a lot of mechanical similarity. A desperate back alley skirmish, binding a hostile ghost, and making contact with a noble at a swanky party are all the same type of action: working down a clock. My personal point of confusion is the Coin stashed away for retirement-the goal of the game-when every bit of narrative around thieves says that your career ends in One Last Job that is too rich to resist, and too dangerous to survive. Still, these are minor gripes for a damn good looking game. Put BitD on the top of your list.

Goodwin examines the character and greatness of Abraham Lincoln through his relationship with a group of men who he beat out for the Republican nomination in 1860, and who eventually became his cabinet. It's fascinating to see how an unlettered backwoods lawyer became the defining political figure of the 20th century, and how Lincoln used empathy, honesty, and forgiveness to outmanuever his opponents. The "team of rivals" metaphor doesn't quite hold through, as the team only became effective once Lincoln established his moral century and dominance over the cabinet. They seemed to fight more with him than with each other. Compared to Battle Cry of Freedom this book is a little light on the history, focusing instead on these great men of the age and their ambitions. Still, a fascinating and important popular history.

Cordwainer Smith/Dr. Paul Linebarger was an undoubted genius of science fiction, a visionary writer who plotted out over 15,000 years of radical history under the rule of the Instrumentality, by turns technocratic elites, corrupt and decadent overlords, and deeply moral saviors. His stories touch on love, pain, and the almost-human lives of the underpeople, animals turned into slaves so that true humans may live of life of leisure and near immortality.

Some of the stories are breathtaking masterpieces: "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Game of Rat and Dragon", The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal", and "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" are all first-rank pieces of short fiction. The thing is that the rest of the stories, many of them longer, leave me rather cold, as they wander through Smith's meditations on morality and the human condition and experimentation with non-Western styles. But the four stories I mentioned are brilliant torches. Read them.

Before the Incal is everything I wanted The Incal to be, a delightful romp through the deranged and decadent Cityshaft with John Difool, and much less "it was spaaaaace Jesus the whole time". The young Difool bounces between acts of crime and charity, experiencing the banned emotion "love", falling in with an obsolete Bible-quoting robot cop, and foiling the machinations of the Technopope and repeatedly clone President. His investigation, into where the babies of prostitutes are disappearing, uncovers a scandal of galactic proportions that has him leading psycho-anarchists against the news media in a desperate battle for survival.

There's one quote which I think gets the essence of the story. "We know one thing: The babies have their brains injected with sperm and ova from two non-putrefied ancient saints... Then they're frozen and sent to the Aristo-Maternity Ward... So if we want to resolve this mystery, that's where we have to start!"

Yeah, that's the one thing I know. Strange story by Jodorowsky, great artwork by Janjetov, awesome book.

There's something powerful and elemental about portraiture; about meeting another person's gaze across time and space. Similarly, the process itself, the complex dance between the subject, the artist, their actual appearance, what they desire to appear, and the chance that the image captures something of their essence, is also fascinating and powerful. And when portraiture becomes systematized, as it does in the National Portrait Gallery, that adds all the complications of public notability.

There's a great deal of potential in this work. It's a fascinating topic and Schama has the art historical background to pull it off. But only a few sections really gel as a cohesive whole; the first chapter on power, the last chapter on ordinary Britons, some of the asides on caricature and miniature paintings which were carried as a constant reminder of a beloved one. Basically, for an American, what this book needed was more structure and context on about 200 years of British history from 1750 to 1950. I consider myself reasonably well-read and an amateur historian, but I only know enough to sketch an outline of this period, and Schama is so caught up in breathy gossip that I lost track of what he was gossiping about. What could be insightful tends towards a ramble through the British Gallery.

This book probably also suffered because of my tendency to marathon through whatever I'm reading. At a chapter a day, the tone might grate less. Still, lots of beautiful plates and fun words, even if the choice of images in a chapter can be somewhat frustrating.

Nothing says airpower like the iconic silhouette of the B-52. Since it started operations in 1955, and going forward until at least 2040, the lean fuselage and huge wingspan of the BUFF has represented the ability of the United States to lay down destruction on call.

Bowman has written a bunch of these books, and this is exactly what you'd expect from the cover, a detailed history of the B-52. The book covers the tense alert posture of Strategic Air Command, with a third of the fleet on airborne alert with live nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, with Arc Light strikes and the deadly Linebacker II raids over Hanoi, and the modern use of the B-52 deliver cruise missiles and smart bombs with global reach. There's an exhaustive investigation of the many B-52 variants (A-H), lots of photos and diagrams, and lists of tail numbers and names.

Welcome to a world loosely based on the Silk Road, where every empire rules under a different sky. Two dispossessed heirs, Temur of the great horse clans, and Samarkar once-princess and now wizard-in-training, meet and journey across the endless miles gathering allies and fighting against a murderous cult of the Goddess of Knowledge. The setting is amazing: weird and fantastic and grounded all at once, with believable versions of real Earth cultures without a return to the oddly democratic and Christian kingdom so commonly found in generic fantasy. Bear also treats horses as living creatures, rather than legged motorcycles.

The thing is that aside from the setting, the characters are empty vessels into which the Quest can be poured. Despite their royal blood, cosmopolitan learning, and understated yet exceptional skills, Temur and Samarkar have little agency. They run for survival, pray to their gods, and seek revenge. al-Sepher, the head of an assassin-like cult, at least seems to have a plan, even if his machinations seem to come down to sending outmatched goon squads against our heroes.

Having read another Silk Road themed fantasy recently (book 1 of The Mongoliad) I can safely say that Range of Ghosts is much much better. But while it has some really cool nuggets of detail, the overall plot isn't enough for me to actively seek out the sequels. Maybe if there's a sale, otherwise, my stack of books to read is deep enough these are going on the back-burner.

Four Roads Cross takes us back to the (publishing order) beginning of The Craft series, taking up a year after Three Parts Dead with Tara Abernathy as in-house counsel to the Church of Tos Everburning, barely treading water on her student loans while trying to untangle the mess the of the first book. When the resurrected goddess Seril starts saving lives in the middle of the nights, the security of investments in Tos is threatened once again, and Tara and Cat and Raz have to stop a very hostile take-over by correcting the ancient sins of the God War.

It's a good Craft book, and I have to admit that I just like Tara more than the other protagonists. She's smart, strong, wicked, and totally overmatched by the forces against her. Gladstone really finds a rolling rhythm here, with his mediation on faith and what brings us together as humans. Tos and Seril are the only real gods left in his world, and from the perspective of this atheist, they aren't all that bad. The return to form is appreciated, especially after Last First Snow. I'm excited to see what follows.

What kind of person reads an Intro to Sociology textbook? The kind of person who is concerned that they might have to teach SOC 101 without ever having taken it. I strongly believe that textbooks should be as cheap as possible, and it's hard to beat Free and Open Source. So how does it perform?

This book has 21 chapters, covering three major theoretical approaches in sociology: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interaction; and dozens of topics from family to race and social change. The book is clear and minimizes jargon, choosing broad consensus statements over sharp or controversial points. The chapters do a decent job covering the material and linking back to the theories. Each chapter has useful references, rather mediocre multiple choice questions (are there any other kind?) and some decent short discussion prompts. On areas where I have some graduate training, the medical chapter does a decent job but leans too heavily on Conrad's medicalization hypothesis, and the technology and media chapter is a mess. The book relies heavily on recent American examples, which leaves it feeling oddly dated. 2014 feels like a whole 'nother universe.

That said, Free and Open Source is a moral good for intro textbooks, I didn't find any material errors, and a strong instructor could do a lot with this book. Just don't assign the chapters straight through.

A powerful work of magical realism, The Salt Roads follows four connected stories of black queer women across time and space. Metante Mer is a medicine woman and slave in what would become Haiti, trying to survive. Jeanne Duval is the (historical) mistress and muse of poet Charles Baudelaire in 19th century Paris. Thais is a 4th century Egyptian prostitute and slave who goes on a pilgrimage. Between them all, in fragmentary BEATS and BREAKS is the African goddess Lasirén or Ezili, of water and love, who possesses characters and influences events.

There's a lot of style here, and a lot of power in the characters, even if the Lasirén sections are a little overwrought. There's a keen urgency to the loves and lusts of her characters. Yet, I can't help but shake the sense that this is a premise without a conclusion. The deconstruction of Jeanne and Thais (historical personages, even if in some cases scantily documented), works at cross purposes to the construction of Mer-as wise, as powerful, as good. This book says "Wouldn't it be cool if these people existed?", and then having created their existence, ends.