Now, on to the mini campaign, Into the Dust. I will break this down into the sessions that covered each of the three stops, so 2.1 equals Stop One.
We played these eight sessions between February to July 2025, a fortnightly two-hour game with a few life breaks.
I’d already run the first stop, The Angel in the Machine, and it had gone down better than expected, so I felt confident that a mini campaign of three stops and up to six encounters would be enjoyable, even if I had misgivings about the Tension Mechanics and long-term play.
The book begins on Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. as we enter the life of Toshiko Sasaki, a twenty-year-old clerk in the employment of the East Asia Tin Works.
THERE ARE SOME GRAPHIC AND UNSETTLING PASSAGES BELOW.
Hiroshima by John Hersey
This matter-of-fact prose is repeated for five more citizens of Hiroshima;
Back in February, I called on four travellers - Martin, Jon, Alex and Gareth to join me on a road trip into an alternate 90s dystopian landscape. The Electric State. It is now July, our Journey is at an end.
Into the Dust
I was excited by this Kickstarter as it felt Free League were becoming the IP RPG provider of choice, with such fantastic games, who can complain? But I loved their original stuff like Coriolis and Tales from the Loop. The Electric State seemed to call back to that, sourcing the amazing artistic inspiration of Simon Stålenhag.
This was all before a Netflix movie was even on the horizon, of which I’ll avoid too much comment, only that for me, it didn’t inspire me the way the original art book and the RPG had.
On Monday, the 30th June 2025, our group finished Emissary Lost. We’ve been playing for 336 days, comprising 18 sessions, each lasting two hours, 36 hours in total. We ran alternate Mondays and ran for at least a minimum of 4 players.
This is part one of the Mercy of the Icons campaign for Coriolis: The Third Horizon. Something that had been on my bucket list of RPG experiences for many years.
Out is a 1997 Japanese modern, feminist, crime novel written by Natsuo Kirino and translated by Stephen Snyder. It concerns four work colleagues on the night shift of a factory line producing Bento lunches.
Out by Natsuo Kirino
The colleagues are Masako (cold, scary, commanding), Yayoi (attractive, lost, passive), Yoshie (exhausted, experienced, burdened) & Kuniko (plump, vain, chaotic).
Before I go further, this novel is hardcore and at times a difficult read; death, dismemberment, violence, sexual assault and torture.
It has been a long time since I read any Terry Pratchett. I used to read his books religiously as and when they came out in paperback. I loved the Corgi releases with the Josh Kirby covers, so from 1985 until around the mid-90s, I’d be picking these up on the day of release. But after this time, I sort of fell out of love with the books, finding them repetitive, wanting more serious novels, keen to read about certain Discworld characters and less of others, but I’ve come back to them over the years, and I’ve learnt to appreciate just how well written they are, less a knockabout fantasy comedy series.
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
I’d read Hogfather, and I had a distant memory of the plot and characters. To summarise, when the Discworld’s version of Father Christmas goes AWOL, Death takes his place to keep belief alive, while his granddaughter races within time to save reality from unravelling.
The book started well and introduced a cast with favourites of mine being Arthur and Susan Sto Helit (DEATH’s granddaughter) and their ascerbic interactions. For me, it loses the plot somewhat through the middle sections, the pace of the novel becoming bogged down in side quests and a slightly overly educational treatise on belief.
I grew up listening to music and going to gigs in the 90s, when that much criticised genre of music, shoegaze, was in full swing. I probably loved as much as I loathed in terms of bands, but Lush and their music, in my opinion have stood the test of time and it is great that guitarist and singer Miki Berenyi is now back and releasing, again in my opinion, the best music of her career with Miki Berenyi Trio aka MB3. So I was keen to give her autobiography a read and see how she experienced things from the other side of the stage.
Fingers Crossed by Miki Berenyi
The book begins at the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, tracing the meeting between Miki’s mother, a Japanese model and actress and her father, a Hungarian womanising journalist. The childhood is unconventional, and the marriage doesn’t last. Miki is born into an exciting world, with a lot of freedom, but also things a child should never have to go through, with emotional and physical child abuse from her grandmother and other “friends” of the family.
Yasuko Nagazumi, Miki’s mum, also appeared in Space 1999
I’ve been listening to the Gareth Hanrahan trilogy, Lands of the Firstborn, on audiobook, but I pre-ordered a print copy of the final part to complete this trilogy.
The Sword Triumphant
The trilogy tells of what happens to the legendary Nine after a world-ending threat has passed. The nine are a group of heroes with differing talents and weapons. For the first threat, Lord Bone, they were all young, overcoming incredible odds, becoming legends, but twenty years have passed when we catch up with one of them and the main character, Alf. He’s middle-aged, he aches, he moans - mainly to his black, demonic sword, Spellbreaker - he’s cynical, but book one introduces a new threat to the land, so off he sets.
It’s hard to detail the final book in this trilogy without spoilers, but the background is all about the peace, war and interactions between the Firstborn (Elves) and the Secondborn (Humans). The book casts lots of shades on familiar tropes, and over the trilogy, it is hard not to grow fond of certain characters, SPOILER, not all of them make it to the end!
This is game designer and writer (or is it writer and game designer?) Robin D. Laws second non-RPG foray into The Yellow King mythos, after a collection of short stories New Tales of the Yellow Sign. Picked from the Aftermath setting of his The Yellow King RPG, this book concerns post revolutionary America; alternate history, modern day, fifties styling and eighties tech. It's complicated. An alien backed dictatorship has fallen. Remnants of the Castaigne regime remain, causing paranoia and uncertainty. There is no government yet, elections are promised, different factions want different things, let's face it it's chaos.
The Missing and the Lost
Into this world comes The Technician, he services the Lethal Chambers, suicide booths, but he was also a key figure in the insurgency, leading his cell in the rebellion and gaining a level of notoriety that he could well do without. Now he wants these chambers dismantled, but is struggling to find someone in the Interregnum Administration to help him.
Not to give too much away the book concerns labyrinthine political manuevering, kidnapping, parageometry (Carcosan magic), Castaigne terrorist cells, Heat style gun battles and various protagonists who may or may not be on the side of The Technician including his own family.
This is as far away from tabletop roleplaying games as I can think. I’ve been wanting to read this novel for a while. It seems Sally Rooney is everywhere (Waterstones book of the year 2018!), and everyone has an opinion about her and her novels, so I dived in.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
This is not a book with a plot; it is about characters and specifically relationships between characters, and initially, I struggled with this. I focus a lot on the story in the things I read, and along the way, the story defines the characters in many of the novels I enjoy.
After a while, though, I picked up the beat of the novel and started to enjoy the snapshots through time of the characters Marianne and Connell. It’s extremely well written and reminds me of school, or probably more of university. It’s that uncertain time, when you don’t really know yourself but are charging ahead, beginning relationships with strangers, incredibly exciting but fraught with fear and uncertainty.
This was a last-minute swap in as I found I was going to be losing a weekend to an RPG con. Just seventy-odd pages, but he’s a writer I’ve loved since I first read The Trial back in my teens, and it was a real pleasure to reacquaint myself with him.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Okay, the story: a salesman wakes up and finds out he’s been transformed into an insect. His family and work colleagues are at turns shocked, sad, frustrated, angry and indifferent. He dies.
So why is this book so well regarded? Like Hemingway, it’s what’s not said that is important. As the bizarre but simple story unfolds, you find yourself questioning your own humanity and what makes society value you. Love seems to dissipate as soon as our form changes so drastically, it is incredibly disturbing.
Glorious sun and blue skies saw 40-odd nerds pay their £10 toll and enter through the imposing wooden gates, traverse the crumbling ruins and ascend into the impressive Earl's Chamber.
Whilst I had the title The Spy Who Loved Me (cheesy 70s Roger Moore Bond flick) dancing around in my head, this is almost the antithesis of a Bond film. No glamour. No gadgets. No single villain. This is about paperwork, desperate figures, unclear objectives, impossible moral situations and where death is almost a blessed release from the constant stress and jeopardy of their position.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré
The book features Alec Leamas, a burnt-out spy chief who’s seen his Berlin cell systematically exterminated by his opposite number in the Stasi, Hans-Dieter Mundt. This culminates in the death of Karl Riemeck as he tries to make his way across the no-man’s land between the Wall, and Alec swears vengeance on Mundt. Alec is recalled to London and expects to be retired as he is “brought in from the Cold”, but Control has one last job for him.
The rest of the book sees Leamas fall from grace, reaching rock bottom in his work and personal life, with the only bright spot a brief liaison with a librarian communist(!) Liz Gold.
A switch to more modern horror. I knew nothing about this. Somehow, it made its way into social media adverts, but it seemed like a bit of a successor to James Herbert and that ilk. Note that Nick Cutter is a pseudonym of Craig Davidson, a Canadian author whose written some pretty diverse and challenging stuff under a range of different names and his own.
The Troop by Nick Cutter
The Troop follows a group of scouts and their scout master as they plan for a weekend of dib-dib-dob-dob adventures on a small deserted island. Some teen tensions develop amongst the smores and woggles, that is, until a very sick man arrives by boat.
There are some small-town musings on the relationships between the boys and the scout master, which is prime Stephen King. Settling you into a cosy, comfy story of good neighbours and a wholesome society, just before it all collapses into a pile of blood, offal and inhuman screams.
A penny in the honesty box, this was my emergency, get out of jail book. A mere eight pages, but I’ve also been dipping into other stories from Poe in this £1 bargain. So why the Emergency? Off on a walking holiday with space limited, I only wanted to take a single book, so the book that should have finished on Tuesday (my weekly reading challenge runs Wednesday-Tuesday) is finished early and I can pick up a chunky one to see me through the whole of next week. Don’t judge me. It still counts.
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was still in poverty, struggling to make it as a writer and a critic, when he was completing this book. In addition, his beloved wife (and cousin 😬) Virginia slowly succumbed to tuberculosis, a bloody and harrowing death. TB and cholera were rife in the 1830s-40s, more colouring of the short story he was writing, that colouring being assuredly red and black. As Poe quotes, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
The story describes Prospero and his retinue as they hide out in a monastery, enjoying food, dance and other entertainment, whilst his country suffers under the disease, the Red Death.
Picked up one of the big dogs, Ernest Hemmingway. It is one of my “cheat” books, a short hundred-page-or-less book that allows me to get through busy weeks.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
A simplistic tale of an old fisherman who tries to regain some respect by landing the big one. The tale begins with Santiago, the old man, talking with Manolin, a young boy whose mother has forbidden him to work with Santiago on account of Santiago’s unlucky streak, eighty-five days and counting without a catch.
The rest of the story focuses on Santiago’s attempt to haul in a “man in the blue suit”, a Marlin and return it to the village in triumph. Or at least with a little pride restored.
I picked this book because I knew I’d be running Cosmic Dark, the soon-to-be-released TTRPG from Graham Walmsley. Graham had mentioned that he’d been influenced in writing this scenario by reading a lot of J. G. Ballard. So I picked this off the shelf, a welcome Help the Aged purchase!
The Drought (aka The Burning World) by J. G. Ballard
The story follows Doctor Charles Ransom, who is an archetypical “cool observer”, and the eyes with which you view what is happening to this outcome of Earth. In summary, a vast chemical spill into the oceans prevents evaporation, and therefore, rain no longer falls. Water is fast disappearing.
You follow Ransom as he performs his daily tasks and interacts with various characters: a bible bashing leader, his ex-wife, a mad old woman and her deformed son. Ransom is much a static figure of inaction, thinking and observing, only rarely being forced into doing something.
