But how does one review? I had never been certain. Of course, I’ve read at least a handful, but I’ve never really thought about the elements of one. I’ve never had to. I’m hardly interested in my own vaguely bland opinions, and never conjured others would be interested enough in reading them. Surely you just looked at the thing and then put words down on paper. How hard could that be? A question that has led to the ruin of many a man. “Come on, sweet meat.” I told myself, “I’m taking you somewhere nice.”
Twenty minutes later I arrived at the local library.
“I need absolute silence,” I informed the elderly Mennonite lady working the reference desk. “I must have complete peace and quiet to reach a Zen-like state and I need one of your tiny rooms to do it.”
She looked up from her monitor at me, her languid gaze slowly following my gesturings towards the cramped study rooms towards the back. Her expression was the mask of the constantly harassed: seething hatred boiling underneath the placid, unweighted visage. No doubt she had heard this story a hundred times before.
“I’m sorry,” She gave in a boldfaced lie. “But all the rooms have been reserved through closing.” Troubling. Who would be out reserving study rooms in such a small town library, at this time of year, at this time of day? It certainly wouldn’t have been the community college students. The meth labs were on the other side of town.
“That won’t DO! There is important work that MUST be attended to. I need silence and I need security. I don’t need RPGnet’s employees sneaking in here. Their grease covered hands touching my things. Stealing my work.”
“Sir, I’ve already asked you to keep your voice down once.” Had she? Had there been a portion of this conversation that I had not been privy to? Or had I, in my ambition, simply filled in her parts of the conversation in my head. She continued, “The best I can offer you at this time is a seat at the long table, but you must keep your voice down. This is a library and others are trying to work.”
I surveyed the other inhabitants of the reference section. Three long tables stretching nearly end to end in the room, occupied by only a man and a woman. Early twenties. Students, possibly. Had they falsely reserved the rooms, just to sit and watch in sick pleasure as patron after patron was denied access? Were they currently laughing to themselves at the old man, unable to sit and write? What were they doing? It appeared to be chemistry. I turned back to the reference desk lady.
“That would be lovely, thank you. Wide open room. Clearly visible escape routes. If those villain nerd assassins do come for me, I’ll be out in the open, but so will they. Get a good look at them. The onus will be on you to avenge me.” I hefted my book bag and started for the desk before the weight of the geas she had been assigned truly settled on her.
A moment set up, stretching, mental preparation, and I was ready to begin muddling my way through this experiment. I withdrew the book from my backpack, still wrapped in its polypropylene bag it had shipped in. I had bought and received it weeks before, but time in this day and age comes at a premium.
Gone were the days of working a minimum wage, part-time job and still being able to afford basic necessities. It was nothing glamorous, but you had food, rent, and time. Time for art, creation, drugs and alcohol were a given, but hell, even rest. There was time to actually rest. I hadn’t rested in months. Slept sure, but not rest. Gone were those days of frugal living in exchange for recreation. Nowadays everything was working one and a half jobs, and still continuing to sink. Getting nothing in return. Neither basic necessities nor time. Gone are the days of the dirtbag lifestyle - gone before I even knew a name for it - and with it an irreplaceable art scene, soon too to be stamped out completely and replaced with corporate backed AI.
I felt my mind drifting at this twinge of nostalgiac regret and redoubled my efforts. Focus you dumb bastard. There’ll be plenty of time to review how you wasted your life later.
I glanced blankly at the book in my hand before tipping it out onto the desk. It looked to be roughly A5 in size; a good choice all around. Easy to stuff in a jacket pocket, or a bag of most sort, carry it around with you and gesture threateningly with it. Came at the cost of possibly getting lost on a shelf, though. I acknowledge that most people’s shelves are probably better organized than mine.
A singer sewn binding ran down the spine of the digest, another good call: It would allow the book to open flat when at the table. There was nothing more annoying than having to repeatedly flip back to a page because the paper refused to lay flat, choosing to, instead, flop to the side like a dog laying in the hot Virginia sun. I had seen some folks who took to breaking the spine of the book inorder to get it to lay flat. These people are war criminals and should be treated as such, including an extended vacation in the Hague.
I took up the book and turned it over in my hand – “Jesus Fucking Christ on the Cross!” I found myself shouting out loud, unable to stop myself in the slightest. The paper quality on this thing was outstanding. A good weight, durable. I didn’t intend to test it, but I imagine it could stand up to getting slightly wet. The ink might not, but the paper wouldn’t immediately rip should a glass spill on the gaming table. Wise. I would later come to learn, through the rumor mill, that the paper selection had ruined the chosen printer. Put the poor bastard right out of business.
I found myself, however, immediately accosted about the shoulders and head, by what I can only assume was an old Mennonite woman’s house slipper, for various incidental blasphemies. A few panicked moments later, I found myself back on the street, my pack being thrown at me by an over conservative librarian. I wouldn’t be back in that library this month. She had seen to it.
I stood there a moment, as I clawed out a half broken cigarette from the pack in my pocket, reflecting on the events. Something was off. Something had gone wrong.
“It was really good paper, though,” I told the man beside me as I lit the smoke. He took a few steps away. I shrugged off the post violence trauma through a cloud of inhaled nicotine and took account of the situation. Clearly there had been a misstep from the very start. A hidden factor I had overlooked. I needed a drink to clear my head.
…damn my eyes. The hell was I thinking? Not reviewing a book about barcrawling in its clearly natural and wanted setting. I was slipping in my old age. I announced this to the man I was sharing the sidewalk with and he, naturally, increased his pace before crossing the street.
This left me alone on a street corner I hadn’t been in sometime. Decades ago it contained a taqueria and a community mutual aid headquarters. I had lost them both in a bad breakup - she got our usual hangout spots and my good hoodie, I got her collection of Harry Potter in Latin, for some fucked reason. The town apparently saw fit to remove the building, almost entirely. They took the walls and roof, yet strangely left the floor. The ruble cleared away, yet the checkered tiles of the floor left exposed to the elements. I assumed the scar had been left there as a warning to the lower class: “Don’t forget your place, or we’ll take that from you too.” The liberals that ran the city would help the poor, certainly, in their means-tested hoop-jumping bureaucratic humiliate-yourself-so-you-don’t-forget-your-place sort of way, but would never allow for any attempt at collective action. In hindsight, asbestos was probably also involved.
Why the hell did she have Harry Potter in Latin?
I moved on, nostalgia threatening to drag me back into the hell I so rightly deserved, arriving minutes later to the one piece of paradise, perhaps, left on this earth: a bar simply named “Finnegan’s” or to the regulars “Finn’s.” It wasn’t an Irish bar, as the name would suggest, just a bar, owned by a woman who had once married an Irishman, and a disdain for customers. I let my notepad fall to the bar top and ordered a beer.
“You can’t smoke in here.” The bartender told me, strangely handsome in his weird way. “Not until 3.”
“It’s 2:50,” I said, checking my watch. A shrug. “How about I tip twenty five percent and we call it even?” This was amenable. Lighting another, I finally opened the book and began to scan. Seriously, nice paper. It appears I had a first printing, so quality may vary.
“Barkeep on the Borderlands,” by W.F. Smith. The title was a play on the old B2 module by Gygax, whom I had accidentally met, and left abandoned on the side of the road, decades before. And this W.F. Smith, it seemed, by all rumored accounts, was some sort of prismatic ostrich headed man. I was too on the fringe of this community to understand what the hell any of that ment.
Opening the book I was immediately confronted by a map of the Keep. I noted this would be extremely useful for a GM keeping track of the players’ wanderings and useful as a player to get a spatial sense of the city. Cheat sheets and often accessed information being printed on the endpapers had become a popular feature in rpg books as of late. I couldn’t pinpoint the origin of the habit, but I appreciate the innovation. Flipping to the back end revealed not another cheatsheet, but adventure information jammed all the way into the bleed margins.
“A pubcrawl pointcrawl adventure” the credits page announced, a statement backed up by the design of the map from the previous page. I found myself nodding in agreement, before grimacing as two drops of condensation fell from the glass onto the page. “First Printing.” Well, I fucked that up. The names behind this thing were some heavy hitters that even I, an aforementioned relative outsider, recognized.
The basic setup was simple enough: History of the Keep, Current situation of the Keep, and Soon-to-be future of the Keep. All of which took up just a page. It resisted the urge of mental masturbation other modules typically fall into: going on and on, page after page, presenting histories and setting in textbook layout that no one will read. The factions at play also were presented in a succinct fashion and took its place as the largest section, weighing in at two full pages. The information was presented in such a brief manner because that was all it needed to. The book and adventure itself leaned into the GM’s expected ability to improvise and go with the flow of generated chaos. Something the current fashionable 5e game seemed to lack. Flipping through the rest of the book proved that. Each individual bar was nothing more than a set of tables, each entry a vague description of a situation.
“What are you reading?” The bartender asked, bringing me another beer. I offered a grunt of confusion as my train of thought was derailed, spilling coal and screaming cattle onto an otherwise pristine landscape.
“Oh, it’s an adventure module. A bar crawl in the shape of a point crawl, set to the background of a monarch dying. Looks to be setting neutral, so it could be used in just about any RPG,” I offered as way of an explanation. I was met with an uncertain expression on that stupidly cute face. I knew what I had to do to clear up the confusion. I knew it would hurt, but I swallowed my pride, “...like D&D.”
“Oh!” His face lit up, “Where you fight monsters and magic and stuff like that?”
“That’s just it…” I gave a performative flip of the pages, “Besides any correct opinion about Monarchy, there are no monsters in it. There’s no actual fighting to be had, or intended. The entire point is to get drunk during a Mardi Gras-like celebration week, moving from bar to bar. You might stumble across the plot, but you might not. I’m not…I’m not sure it matters in the end. Do any of those slice of life games have a point to them? Legitimate question.”
“Huh.” He gave. I was enjoying his attention, but I felt it was starting to slip. “Is it any good?”
I took a drink and a drag, ruminating on the question in my head. Flipping through the book and chewing on my lip as I slowly put words to the bare feral thoughts slowly lining up, “Well, besides the plot thing, it’s already led to me getting assaulted once today. Uh, long story, completely justified.” I dismissed the inevitable follow up question with a wave, “The Drinking rules look a little clunky - they’re usage die paired with additional rolls. Not…the worst move, honestly. I feel like some of it could have been combined, but I’ve not a better suggestion on hand at the moment. It’s certainly better than anything my…bitching..ass…has put out…” I trailed off as I looked up, just to notice the bartender had moved on to another customer. Probably drifted off during the extended silence of my thinking.
I grunted noncommittal, slightly embarrassed, dropping the cash on the bar before drifting wordlessly back out into the street. Was it good? Yes, certainly. Well worth whatever I had paid for it. Twenty Five, maybe? Fine. Whatever problems I had dredged out in the brief experience could be fixed on the fly.
A later playing experience would prove this to be true. For now though, I drifted down the train tracks I had spent so much time wandering in my young adulthood, avoiding traffic and prying eyes upon my coming and goings. Both then and now. Those moments too, forever lost. But then, what was this scene, this “OSR,” if not a bitter chase after forgotten, lost moments. Of better days before free actions and touch AC. A self proclaimed renaissance? Some sort of reformation? Truly it didn’t matter; some things just don’t. The scene had lasted longer than the multiple versions it sought to emulate. Forever chasing lost days just out of grasp, re-envisioning them through hindsighted glasses. Some, properly used this as a basis to build upon, generating weird, inclusive, purple prosed nonsense. Others spat and cursed at this, demanding purity and exclusion in their ill fated revival. These people did not matter.
I lit a final cigarette, still drifting on the tracks, plotting on ways to bring back the community mutual aid, and reflecting on forgotten practices of yesteryear. Still, one question nagged at me through all this: Why the damn hell did she have Harry Potter in Latin? Seriously. She couldn’t read the damn thing.
In the end, 4.75 out of 5. Points off for leading to my assault, however justified, and the feeling that the plot itself could be completely glossed over. Redeeming points for treating the GM like an adult, giving just enough information and staying the hell out of the way, rather than hand holding through the entire process.
You’ll be able to find it at https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/ or for free from the New York Reading Club twitter account.
