[books for gamers] All the Gold of Ophir
All the Gold of Ophir, written by David Drury, is half pulp detective, part hard-sci fiction story. Private investigator Michael Flynn has been hired to look into the “accidental” death of a young man on a Jupiter space station. The victim worked for the mega-corporation that not only owns the station and employs three-quarters of its thousands of inhabitants, but also has its own lethally-armed security force. Flynn is assisted by corporate attorney Wendy Chadwick and opposed by Silvanus Drake, so improbably named that J.K. Rowling would even blanche.
Drury is a professor of engineering and uses his knowledge to tell the story, one laden with stereotypical characters: the Irish hard-drinking PI, the incompetent and belligerent head of the police force, even the psycho ex-girlfriend (whom I kept calling “Ira” after Spade’s ex in The Maltese Falcon). The mystery was interesting and the action moved along well (although I had a pretty good idea of what happened fairly early on).
My only complaint, because I can let hackneyed, two-dimensional characters slide in a story like this one, is that in science fiction you have to give the reader certain boundaries of genre. Faster-than-light travel? Aliens? Artificial intelligence? You have to let the reader know what exists and what doesn’t, especially when you’re doing a mystery. It isn’t fair to say, allow teleportation to exist in the last chapter if it is instrumental to the plot. And Drury succumbs to this–after establishing the boundaries throughout the book he breaks one (as the underwhelming “shocker”) to tie up one of the loose ends. Or in other words, you can get most of the mystery on your own, but you’ll never get the last ten percent because Drury breaks his own rules. It is a frustrating end note to an otherwise fun weekend read.
From a gaming perspective, All the Gold of Ophir reminds RPG fans of how depending the gaming industry is on pulp-ish stories. The Jupiter space station would make a fine sci-fi environs, big enough to introduce new elements but contained enough to keep players from running far off the beaten track (my biggest gripe with sci-fi RPG’s).
Skaven Nightrunners 1
Burned-out peasant cottage finished
8th Edition Warhammer Fantasy?
So, GW hasn’t released all the army books yet, but realize that they have done some bad army books. Ergo, we get new rules, apparently with Empire and Orcs again. Seventh edition was released in September 2006, although it seems like it was just yesterday. That’s probably because I’m still sitting on piles of unpainted dwarfs. It also explains my immediate reaction of “WHAA!!! Those greedy SOB’s!” but then going, “oh well, it actually has been a while…” Four years ago is actually a lot longer than I think some times.
Fieldstone 6: the burned hovel
It’s been a long time since I posted something substantive. I don’t like to burden my hobbyist audience with real life quasi-drama, but suffice to say that my plate has gotten just a bit more full over the past few weeks, and yes it has impacted my hobby time. I’m still running my RPG on a regular basis, but the evening hobby time is a little pinched.
Anyways, onto other news. As it turns out, I won the grand prize for the Andaville raffle, a good sized gift card for the Home Depot. Since it isn’t a gaming-related prize, the field is wide open. But for now, I’m doing Andadas a favor by throwing together one or two of the pieces for his town that either weren’t taken or were taken but not made. Ergo, here’s a WIP shot of what I’m doing now, a burned-down peasant farmhouse.
I’ll probably have it done next week. Stay tuned.








