While this book is not structured in the best possible way to teach a newbie how to play Starfinder Second Edition, the fact of the matter is that this is a reference book. One might use it one time to learn how to play or, perhaps more likely, one will learn from YouTube videos, a Beginner’s Box product or being taught by friends around the table.

As a reference book, the Player Core is very well organized. It has the most likely stuff that the player would look up (character creation) up front. Based on how I’ve consulted the Player books for Tales of the Valiant and D&D, this is the most likely use for the book.

I was a Kickstarter backer on this (or it was a stretch goal for an Apex mag kickstarter - I can’t remember). Since these are micro-fiction I am not going to do my usual per-story review for the anthology as the stories are too short for that.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for an anthology themed around recipes for alcoholic drinks, the stories were overwhelmingly sad and/or angry. Since each story is only about a page long, this might be a good anthology to dip in and out of. Reading it straight through was a bit much. Also, some of the themes are repeated in a way that is made more obvious when reading it straight through.

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:

I recently got the Pathfinder 2e Beginner Box: Secrets of the Unlit Star. I did an unboxing and first impressions video. I will come back and do a proper review after I play it.

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.

As you know, I’ve been running a Cosmere TTRPG playthrough of Stonewalkers, the published Stormlight Archives adventure. I plan on writing a blog post (and maybe making a video) retrospective once we finish the game, but, partially prompted by my players, I wanted to write about some of the ways my players have surprised me over the last 2 sessions.

My favorite thing, both as a game master and as a consumer of actual plays, is when the players throw off the GM with their creativity. I don’t mean in the way that people talk about on Reddit (sometimes positively and sometimes negatively) in which the players go completely off the rails or in a direction that negates the prep work of the GM. My players are on board to tell the story we’re telling together, they just have some really unique ways of solving the problems they are confronted with. (Some amazing examples of the type of player creativity that bolsters the story can be found in the first 6 episodes of Mage Hand High Five’s The Badlands) A couple players have had to drop out, but everyone who remains has chosen a radiant path. As they have tried to make use of their powers we’ve definitely had our share of “yes and” and “no, but” moments. The last two battles have had some of my favorite examples.

For a show that often loudly professed to hate continuity, canon, and backstory Rick and Morty caps off the first season with an episode that both references characters from earlier in the season and sets up a bunch of characters for future multi-season arcs. Jerry and Beth go off to a Titanic re-enactment experience while Rick and Summer decide to enact the classic Wild Teen Party with much of the humor coming from Morty being the straight man trying in vain to keep the house from being trashed. References to earlier in the season include some stair goblins, the flu hating rapper, and some Ricks from the Citadel of Ricks (a parody of John Hickman’s Council of Reeds). Seemingly throwaway characters that become important characters throughout future seasons include Birdman, Tammy, Squanchy, Gearhead, and Slow Mobius.

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).