>> Arthuriana: I'm on a big King Arthur kick right now so I'd love Arthuriana-related recs. Novels, documentaries, podcasts, non-fiction scholarship...I'm open to it all. <<
>>Books: I will never say no to a recommendation for a good book.<<
The River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey (alternate history with some murder and revenge thrown in) In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan.
Hunter Series by Mercedes Lackey (sort of postapocalyptic steampunk fantasy with extraplanar creatures? definitely a genre-blender) They came after the Diseray. Some were terrors ripped from our collective imaginations, remnants of every mythology across the world. And some were like nothing anyone had ever dreamed up, even in their worst nightmares.
A Terrible Fall of Angels by Laurell K. Hamilton (fantasy) Meet Detective Zaniel Havelock, a man with the special ability to communicate directly with angels. A former trained Angel speaker, he devoted his life to serving both the celestial beings and his fellow humans with his gift, but a terrible betrayal compelled him to leave that life behind. Now he’s a cop who is still working on the side of angels. But where there are angels, there are also demons.
The Penric and Desdemona series (now available in omnibus volumes) by Lois McMaster Bujold On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is The Bastard, "master of all disasters out of season", and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric. From that moment on, Penric's life is irreversibly changed, and his life is in danger from those who envy or fear him.
The Incredible Story of Cooking From Prehistory to Today: 500,000 Years of Adventure For the first time, a graphic novel tells the story of humanity through the evolution of cuisine. From the discovery of fire to organic cooking, this book is aimed at all curious people and foodies. Hilarious but also informative, a great read for anyone who likes food and/or history.
>>Tabletop Games: I'm particularly fond of fantasy or horror tabletop games (think Gloomhaven or Stifling Dark) but welcome hearing about anything with beautiful art or design, good storytelling, or interesting mechanics.<<
Call to Adventure This is a fantasy board game for 1-4 players in which each player builds a heroic (or antiheroic) character. Epic storytelling, gorgeous art, interesting mechanics.
Chrononauts What would YOU do with a Time Machine? Would you stop the sinking of the Titanic? Prevent the assassination of JFK? Kill Hitler before WWII? These are just a few of the possibilities in Chrononauts, the award-winning card game of time travel. To win, you must change history at key points called Linchpins, so that history transforms into the Alternate Reality your character calls home. You can also win by collecting a specific set of Artifacts, such as a live dinosaur, the Mona Lisa, and an unpublished Shakespearean play. But be careful - if you create too many paradoxes, you could destroy the entire universe! Simple art, hilarious storytelling, multiple ways to win.
Planetarium Matter swirls around a new born star, coalescing on the planetoids that orbit it. Planets evolve, grow and migrate in their orbits, forming a unique solar system by the end of every game. Planetarium is a game of creation, chaos and terraforming on the grandest scale. Players are competing to crash combinations of elements onto planets that then allow them to play cards to evolve the planets in a variety of ways, with each player looking to evolve planets in the system to suit their own secret endgame goals. Pretty art, fascinating storytelling, mechanics influenced by science. We like to play this quasi-cooperatively as it usually happens at least one planet leans habitable and another turns into some sort of hellscape, so we go with that instead of messing it up.
I Was A Teenage Creature I Was A Teenage Creature is a narrative-focused RPG that emulates young-adult urban fantasy TV shows like Buffy, Supernatural, and Teen Wolf. In this game, it doesn't matter how strong the werewolf is, or fast the vampire is, or how beautiful the fae is... what matters is how these characters feel, why they're doing something, and not just how capable they are of doing it. IWATC uses a d10 system where the target numbers fluctuate with the narrative, making the Player Characters' emotions a mechanical part of the game and not solely what the Players and GM bring to the table. Although the game is focused on the Story, there is mechanical crunch, and less-narrative gamers can convert the PCs' Traits into reliable mechanical modifiers if a group prefers crunch over narrative. Play a teenage werewolf, or vampire, or ghost, or even a human, hunter, or psychic. With nine Creature Types and dozens of Feeling Factors to turn your character into just who you want them to be, I Was A Teenage Creature lets you make your character's story as angsty and dramatic as you want! Trying to survive adolescence, high school drama, and things that go bump in the night, even when the paranormal starts hitting the fan... Nice art, excellent storytelling, memorable mechanics. The core of character development and roleplay is your character's emotions. An advantage given your spread of interests is its narrative flexibility: you can play it as fantasy, paranormal, horror, etc. depending what characters and plot you select, so it tunes easily to whatever friends you're playing with.
>>Tarot Decks: Not that I need any more decks, but if you have a favorite Tarot deck I'd love to hear about it and why you dig it.<<
My favorite for sheer amusement value is The Ferret Tarot. Simple black and white line drawings, but so funny. The Tower is a bag of ferret chow about to fall onto a fleeing ferret. One of them, I think the 4 of Pentacles, has a ferret hoarding socks. Death is holding a ferret skull. This is a deck that I bought from the artist at an event so it's likely short-run rather than mass-produced.
Wish Granted!
The Ursulan Cycle is genderbent King Arthur.
Among my favorites is the graphic novel Camelot 3000.
Arthurian Non Fiction Books
King Arthur Book Lists
Arthurian Films
Television series based on Arthurian legend
>>Books: I will never say no to a recommendation for a good book.<<
The River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey (alternate history with some murder and revenge thrown in)
In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true.
Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.
This was a terrible plan.
Hunter Series by Mercedes Lackey (sort of postapocalyptic steampunk fantasy with extraplanar creatures? definitely a genre-blender)
They came after the Diseray. Some were terrors ripped from our collective imaginations, remnants of every mythology across the world. And some were like nothing anyone had ever dreamed up, even in their worst nightmares.
A Terrible Fall of Angels by Laurell K. Hamilton (fantasy)
Meet Detective Zaniel Havelock, a man with the special ability to communicate directly with angels. A former trained Angel speaker, he devoted his life to serving both the celestial beings and his fellow humans with his gift, but a terrible betrayal compelled him to leave that life behind. Now he’s a cop who is still working on the side of angels. But where there are angels, there are also demons.
The Penric and Desdemona series (now available in omnibus volumes) by Lois McMaster Bujold
On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is The Bastard, "master of all disasters out of season", and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric. From that moment on, Penric's life is irreversibly changed, and his life is in danger from those who envy or fear him.
The Incredible Story of Cooking From Prehistory to Today: 500,000 Years of Adventure
For the first time, a graphic novel tells the story of humanity through the evolution of cuisine. From the discovery of fire to organic cooking, this book is aimed at all curious people and foodies.
Hilarious but also informative, a great read for anyone who likes food and/or history.
>>Tabletop Games: I'm particularly fond of fantasy or horror tabletop games (think Gloomhaven or Stifling Dark) but welcome hearing about anything with beautiful art or design, good storytelling, or interesting mechanics.<<
Call to Adventure
This is a fantasy board game for 1-4 players in which each player builds a heroic (or antiheroic) character. Epic storytelling, gorgeous art, interesting mechanics.
Chrononauts
What would YOU do with a Time Machine? Would you stop the sinking of the Titanic? Prevent the assassination of JFK? Kill Hitler before WWII? These are just a few of the possibilities in Chrononauts, the award-winning card game of time travel. To win, you must change history at key points called Linchpins, so that history transforms into the Alternate Reality your character calls home. You can also win by collecting a specific set of Artifacts, such as a live dinosaur, the Mona Lisa, and an unpublished Shakespearean play. But be careful - if you create too many paradoxes, you could destroy the entire universe!
Simple art, hilarious storytelling, multiple ways to win.
Planetarium
Matter swirls around a new born star, coalescing on the planetoids that orbit it. Planets evolve, grow and migrate in their orbits, forming a unique solar system by the end of every game. Planetarium is a game of creation, chaos and terraforming on the grandest scale.
Players are competing to crash combinations of elements onto planets that then allow them to play cards to evolve the planets in a variety of ways, with each player looking to evolve planets in the system to suit their own secret endgame goals.
Pretty art, fascinating storytelling, mechanics influenced by science. We like to play this quasi-cooperatively as it usually happens at least one planet leans habitable and another turns into some sort of hellscape, so we go with that instead of messing it up.
I Was A Teenage Creature
I Was A Teenage Creature is a narrative-focused RPG that emulates young-adult urban fantasy TV shows like Buffy, Supernatural, and Teen Wolf. In this game, it doesn't matter how strong the werewolf is, or fast the vampire is, or how beautiful the fae is... what matters is how these characters feel, why they're doing something, and not just how capable they are of doing it.
IWATC uses a d10 system where the target numbers fluctuate with the narrative, making the Player Characters' emotions a mechanical part of the game and not solely what the Players and GM bring to the table. Although the game is focused on the Story, there is mechanical crunch, and less-narrative gamers can convert the PCs' Traits into reliable mechanical modifiers if a group prefers crunch over narrative.
Play a teenage werewolf, or vampire, or ghost, or even a human, hunter, or psychic. With nine Creature Types and dozens of Feeling Factors to turn your character into just who you want them to be, I Was A Teenage Creature lets you make your character's story as angsty and dramatic as you want! Trying to survive adolescence, high school drama, and things that go bump in the night, even when the paranormal starts hitting the fan...
Nice art, excellent storytelling, memorable mechanics. The core of character development and roleplay is your character's emotions. An advantage given your spread of interests is its narrative flexibility: you can play it as fantasy, paranormal, horror, etc. depending what characters and plot you select, so it tunes easily to whatever friends you're playing with.
>>Tarot Decks: Not that I need any more decks, but if you have a favorite Tarot deck I'd love to hear about it and why you dig it.<<
My favorite for sheer amusement value is The Ferret Tarot. Simple black and white line drawings, but so funny. The Tower is a bag of ferret chow about to fall onto a fleeing ferret. One of them, I think the 4 of Pentacles, has a ferret hoarding socks. Death is holding a ferret skull. This is a deck that I bought from the artist at an event so it's likely short-run rather than mass-produced.