Bookpile - "The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki" and Boletus: City of Rot and Revenge"
I finished a couple books sitting in one of the half-dozen piles littered around my bed this week. I am not sure if I have enough thoughts about either to fill out a post for each of them, so here's a two-fer!
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki is a short Norse saga recommended to me by DeusExBrockina back before Cohost shuttered. It is a pretty breezy read - the Penguin Classics translation I picked-up clocks-in at 78 pages before you hit the end-notes - but I struggled with it. That's less to do with Jesse L. Byock's translation than me realizing I just don't click with sagas. And I can't place just why that is. I enjoy the Irish Ulster Cycle tales I've read, love half of the Welsh Mabinogion, and can even appreciate old Arthurian knight tales. But for whatever reason, learning about the family drama of Kraki and his heroic family interests me less than paragraph-after-paragraph of Irish place name origins.
To wrap-up Kraki on a positive note, I hooted the entire time I read about Bjorn, son of Hring, who got transformed into a cattle-consuming bear by his stepmom because he wouldn't sleep with her. Like the other tales in the saga, this ultimately is in service to familial revenge, but the intrusion of the supernatural into the saga was a breath of fresh air that had me add notes my RPG Inspiration Spreadsheet.
Speaking of RPGs, the other book I finished was Boletus: City of Rot and Revenge, by Prey Species. I grabbed this sizable tabletop 'zine when Andrew Kelley, a mutual, posted about it on Cohost. I really wanted to get a write-up about it done before Cohost shuttered, but like a lot of things, that wasn't in the cards. Regrets aside, Boletus is a pleasant read. It feels like a setting the Prey Species crew ran themselves, then expanded out to publish. It has some solid narrative threads referees can follow to build a campaign out of; The pseudo-industrial, explicitly colonial city-state of Boletus is sufficiently described; And it includes a depth-crawl that will take dedicated adventures deep under the city, to the heart of the myconid and metaphysical trauma that undergirds the entire book. It's neat, but has the problem all setting books have - do you want to actually run this?
This isn't a slight against Boletus. It's a 107 page zine that packs a lot into that comparatively brief span. And it is as effective a pitch for my attention as anything published by Wizards of the Coast - I'd have more fun running players through Boletus than I would trying to come-up with an adventure set in Baldur's Gate. But I'd also rather just make something myself. And that's fine! There's ideas in here - like a church for gamblers that gives out casino tokens as communion wafers, or a sword that turns a person's history into money at the expense of making them a literal or figurative newborn - but I'll probably drop them into something I spin-up instead of use the city-state of Boletus as a whole.
It feels good to get these off my night-stand! Unless something grabs my attention (I have a copy of His Majesty the Worm arriving next week) I plan to work through tabletop 'zines that have trickled in from this past year's ZIMO and Zine Quest initiatives. I'll post about those once I knock a few out.