A friend of mine just lent me a book called "Tour of the Universe" by Robert Holdstock and Malcolm Edwards. It is presented as the scrapbook of a lucky human couple in the future who win a lottery and receive tickets to a tour of the universe. The book is lavishly illustrated and includes ticket stubs, hotel brochures, starliner publications and all the ephemera collected on your average tour of the universe.
I intend to scan in several of the illustrations, but let me start off with a cross-sectional map of one small part of Tombworld, a tourist destination planet that was used for millions of years in the past by spacefaring species from many different planets to inter the remains of powerful individuals. The surface of the planet is hidden beneath kilometers of ruins, but recent award winning work by a corporation holding tourism rights showed that sunshafts designed to bring sunlight down onto the masks of the sleeping kings from the earliest levels were incorporated into the designs of later tomb builders and provide uninterrupted vertical access; hundreds of sunshafts have been identified granting access to all layers of the mausoleums.
I am totally stealing this map:
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
Books vs. RPG Products
I won a Barnes & Nobles gift card at the white elephant gift exchange last Christmas at my grandparents-in-law's. Rediscovering it recently, I have been poking around on B&N trying to figure out how to best spend my $20.
I long since discovered the wonders of buying books for $.01 + S/H from Amazon, using this amazing resource to fill in many a hole in my sci-fi / fantasy library. When my friend lent me Halbritter's Armory recently and proudly told me I "wouldn't find another copy" of this "rare" and out-of-print book I didn't say anything, but sure enough, I found it for one penny on Amazon.
My current working list of B&N titles that I am trying to choose from (after a very brief session of poking around in the B&N search engine):
"Weapons - an International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to 2000 A.D." for $.09 + S/H;
"Encyclopedia of the World's Special Forces" for $.21 + S/H;
"The Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders and Birth Defects" for $.12 + S/H;
"Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects" for $.01 + S/H;
"A Dictionary of the Martial Arts" for $.01 + S/H
"The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom: A Celtic Shamans Sourcebook" for $.01 + S/H
"The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft" for $.85 + S/H
"The Ultimate Dinosaur Book" $.34 + S/H
"A Bestiary" $.01 +S/H
The question begging to be asked is why in the world anyone would spend money on buying products created for RPGs when products created for other markets with much higher production values are available for pennies and are infinitely more useful than all the RPG crap ever put up for sale.
I have a large collection of RPG books that I never use. I compulsively buy cool RPG books when I encounter them in the wild, sometimes irrespective of the fact that I own the exact same edition of that particular book. The desire that I have to buy cool looking RPG books when I encounter them in used bookstores and comic shops has nothing to do with their utility in my games. I will not use them. Most of the material sprung upon my players in any campaign I run is original Carl madness. I do use some published resources, however, and they are hardly ever "RPG Products".
I do use my ethnographies from my days as a cultural anthropology major at the University of Oregon quite often in my campaigns, and academic texts on subjects as disparate as the city states and orthography of ancient Sumeria and quantum mechanics.
Imagine a subject that is of paramount importance in the RPG you are currently playing in. Google that subject with possible book titles in mind and figure out what kind of books are out there on that subject. Search for those books on Amazon or B&N or just freakin' Google it again or something. If you do a rational analysis of the bang for the buck it makes no sense to buy an RPG product in physical form for $10-15 + S/H when you can get multiple books of source material on the same subject for less money.
I'm not sayin' I'm just saying.
:)
I long since discovered the wonders of buying books for $.01 + S/H from Amazon, using this amazing resource to fill in many a hole in my sci-fi / fantasy library. When my friend lent me Halbritter's Armory recently and proudly told me I "wouldn't find another copy" of this "rare" and out-of-print book I didn't say anything, but sure enough, I found it for one penny on Amazon.
My current working list of B&N titles that I am trying to choose from (after a very brief session of poking around in the B&N search engine):
"Weapons - an International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to 2000 A.D." for $.09 + S/H;
"Encyclopedia of the World's Special Forces" for $.21 + S/H;
"The Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders and Birth Defects" for $.12 + S/H;
"Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects" for $.01 + S/H;
"A Dictionary of the Martial Arts" for $.01 + S/H
"The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom: A Celtic Shamans Sourcebook" for $.01 + S/H
"The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft" for $.85 + S/H
"The Ultimate Dinosaur Book" $.34 + S/H
"A Bestiary" $.01 +S/H
The question begging to be asked is why in the world anyone would spend money on buying products created for RPGs when products created for other markets with much higher production values are available for pennies and are infinitely more useful than all the RPG crap ever put up for sale.
I have a large collection of RPG books that I never use. I compulsively buy cool RPG books when I encounter them in the wild, sometimes irrespective of the fact that I own the exact same edition of that particular book. The desire that I have to buy cool looking RPG books when I encounter them in used bookstores and comic shops has nothing to do with their utility in my games. I will not use them. Most of the material sprung upon my players in any campaign I run is original Carl madness. I do use some published resources, however, and they are hardly ever "RPG Products".
I do use my ethnographies from my days as a cultural anthropology major at the University of Oregon quite often in my campaigns, and academic texts on subjects as disparate as the city states and orthography of ancient Sumeria and quantum mechanics.
Imagine a subject that is of paramount importance in the RPG you are currently playing in. Google that subject with possible book titles in mind and figure out what kind of books are out there on that subject. Search for those books on Amazon or B&N or just freakin' Google it again or something. If you do a rational analysis of the bang for the buck it makes no sense to buy an RPG product in physical form for $10-15 + S/H when you can get multiple books of source material on the same subject for less money.
I'm not sayin' I'm just saying.
:)
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