This is a fun book that takes place on Golarian, the world of Pathfinder. The author does a good job presenting the TTRPG elements - like Zae needing to prepare her spells each morning - without bogging the story down in these things. But for a few things like that, I think it could be handed to any fantasy fan and they would enjoy it without realizing it’s based on a TTRPG.

Years after learning about the genre of dark academia and backing this anthology on kickstarter, the time has arrived to read this book. For my particular tastes the stories were a bit uneven. I loved some of them and others I hated. Also, compared to what I thought the definitely of Dark Academia was, this seemed to simply be an anthology of horror stories that took place in and around schools. Still, there are some gems here and I recommend giving it a read. Reviews of individual stories follow:

A short story that moves extremely quickly but is a fun romp. You don’t need to know anything about Pathfinder other than what the creature accompanying the protagonist is. I had to look it up because I’m pretty new to the Pathfinder universe.

Since it’s a short story it’s not too complicated. It’s a character being heroic and bringing us along for the ride. If you want a fast-paced sword and sorcery story, this one is pretty good.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. It’s based on a TTRPG. Would it be like the novelization of a movie or some of the books from the Star Trek or Star Wars universes? Would it be cheesy or great? Well, it turned out to be way better than I expected. There were a few things that came through a little bit game-y, but they were few and far between. The two examples that stood out to me were a character who created a psychic bond with her companions allowing them to speak to each other a “battle mind”

There isn’t much to say about an old, outdated technical manual. There’s at least one newer edition of this book released. However, whether you’re using vim or neovim, the basics remain the same. If you only have access to this edition of the book, I would focus on the chapters that teach you how to use vi and vim. In that respect, this book is very well written. Ignore the chapter on plugins and scripts as those have evolved quite a bit (especially in neovim with their use of lua).

As I normally do for anthologies, here is a series of mini reviews for each of the short stories:

Lean In: The Lord of Hell is Coming (Ericka Kahler): I don’t want to give anything away about this delightful story. I will say that it does an amazing job of flipping many tropes on their head and, in a funny way, actually made me rethink the premises behind many of those tropes.

I was a kickstarter backer for this book.

Back when Goldeneye first came out, the only first person shooter I’d played was a few short sessions of Wolfenstein 3D that my dad had introduced me to a few years before. I found it hard and boring and didn’t try to play all that much. When we rented Goldeneye, it was the first time I found myself enjoying the genre. A great deal of that came from the great mix of humor and seriousness in the game. We had a ton of fun playing “slappers only”.