Shores of Night

Spinning out of the imagination of Iain Lowson, and incubating within his mind for many years, Dark Harvest is a Gothic roleplaying setting which takes a very simple idea, that far from being repulsed by what he creates Victor Frankenstein becomes enthralled by it and hatches a plan with some confederates that leads to him hijacking the creation of Romania for his own purposes; namely to create country in his image and runs with it. The resulting country, Promethea, is a country where science is revered, technology is pushed to the cutting edge of its time (the game is set in 1910) and Frankenstein's dream has been corrupted to the point where the poor are used as a resource for fresh body parts for some of the rich and powerful. In some respects this makes the game feel as if it's capturing the Zeitgeist, mirroring the track that the 21 st Century seems to be taking (to date anyway) but with enough distance to take the sting out of the situation and allow gaming gro...

A thick book of stories, this volume is packed with some of the best sword and sorcery I've read in a long time and really confirms that Leiber was one of the stars in the genre's firmament.  Written as short stories, which suits both the sword and sorcery genre and the characters, the narratives within have a different texture to those I've read to other writers of the genre, whilst losing nothing of the strangeness or wildness that make it one of the more interesting sections of the fantasy genre. The book starts surprisingly slowly and the first story is perhaps the weakest part of the book; it drags a little as the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are introduced and are set upon their paths.  The writing here is self indulgent and woolly, and it's a relief when the characters arrive in Lankhmar itself and meet, if only because the pace picks up and Leiber's use of language becomes much sharper. Despite this I must say it's a shame that two interesting chara...