tiggum's reviews
729 reviews

Serialised fiction that the author stopped writing (or at least posting). I was enjoying it, but it's been so long now I'm unlikely to ever go back to it even if he does start posting again.

I stopped reading these for a while and when I went back the website was gone. I remember the ones I read being largely ok though.

As far as D&D adventures go, it's fine. I just stopped running D&D.

The book is very well laid-out and contains such useful information about the game and setting that you can run a session with virtually no preparation (other than having read the book and, ideally, at least played before).

My only real criticism is that the setting seems to consist of all of the author's interests mashed together. I'd have preferred a more straight-forward crime-fiction setting rather than including the steampunk and ghosts and horrors outside the cities and so forth. When running the game myself I tend to de-emphasise the supernatural elements, but I'd have preferred they not be part of it at all. It's an issue I have with a lot of RPG settings, where I love the core concept but find myself less and less interested the more elements are added on top of it.

Mostly fine, but nothing particularly memorable. A book that you finish but then wonder why you bothered.

I don't know what the fuck this is supposed to be but I hate it.

Far too twee.

Mitchell comes across as extremely conservative: not reactionary or right-wing, just generally uncomfortable with change and incapable of imagining it being for the better. "The system is terrible, but unfortunately better things aren't possible" could be the tagline for this book. His view seems to be that things are bad and will remain bad, unless they get worse.

Depressingly plausible. My reaction to the future Amsterdam imagines is "yeah, probably." I don't need fiction to tell me what a world of ever-worsening natural disasters and plagues would be like, I can just wait and see first-hand.

The mystery is a bit lacklustre. It's never particularly intriguing, and the final reveal is neither the missing piece that makes it all make sense nor a twist, it's just some more of the story, I guess. But the biggest problem with the book is the excessive focus on the protagonist's dead fiancée and his resultant ennui. It's unnecessary and transparent; a textbook example of women in refrigerators.

Those points aside, the book is mostly fine. I'll probably read the second one, at some point, since I have it as well, but I'm not in any rush to get to it. For a first book, it shows promise, so if his later ones improve on it they'll be worth getting to. And the dead fiancée does seem to be basically dealt with as a motivating factor at this point so hopefully there won't be so much of that in the later ones.