I always liked the Krondor series. It inspired several D&D characters of mine. Like The Witcher, it too has a video game based on it. Though it’s from way back in the day on DOS.
You might know this already, but the original series in that universe, The Riftwar Saga, Feist wrote about a DnD campaign he played with his friends. I picked up the first one, Magician, and it felt just like a DnD campaign, so I looked it up and sure enough it was exactly that.
I’m making my way through all of the books and haven’t gotten to the Krondor books, so I don’t know how different they are as I could clearly see his growth as a writer in just the first series. I’m currently reading through the Daughter of the Empire series that he co-wrote with another author and I’m really enjoying it.
the short is: alien race f's up a non trivial percent of the human population with a virus.. most die. what neat is the mish-mash of history with a new minority of deformed humans. i think it starts in ~1947 running through the 90s.
British writer Neil Gaiman met with Martin in 1987 and pitched a Wild Cards story about a character who lives in a world of dreams. Martin declined due to Gaiman's lack of prior credits at the time. Gaiman went on to publish his story as The Sandman.
I was aware of the Wild Cards collection as a sidenote in Martin’s publishing history, but this is the first time I’ve seen it recommended by a real person!
If you want more grimdark and it has to be fantasy, check out Warhammer horror especially the vampire Genevieve. If you’re okay with grimdark science military science fiction, a good chunk of the Warhammer 40k and Horus Heresy lines will fit your bill.
I feel like Hobb is much lighter. For whatever reason I always think of Tad Williams and the Dragonborn Chair as connected to Hobb. I suspect it’s from the Legends anthology but they were only together in Legends II with a different Hobb trilogy setting and Otherland for Williams. Both are great starting points to find authors that have huge bodies of work that could hook you. They were how I found George RR Martin back in the early aughties.
He added a midquel, Port of Shadows, in 2018, and there are some really good shorts you can find in his Best of collections that are also recent. I’ve found a lot of folks who read them back when have missed these!
I feel like this is a great rec because The Witcher is pretty grimdark and Cook is a grimdark progenitor. Good pick!
Pale Lights, an ongoing web serial set in the pistols-and-sabres era. The first book’s already out for you to read! The author previously wrote A Practical Guide to Evil, which is completely finished.
A very solid series, dense as fuck, with an intriguing way magic works. Just be aware that there can be a fair bit of talking in-between action scenes, there’s a lot of time spent in political/religious discourse between characters.
Also, birds with human heads! A prostitute finding out who she slept with by the fact he literally has black cum! Too many scenes of people cleaning themselves up after taking their morning shit!
First book is Jade City. I like that it’s set in a 1950’s tech world with the magic being only one part of the greater story. Crime, politics, family drama; it’s the Godfather with super powers.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go… by Philip Jose Farmer. Everyone who ever lived wakes up on the banks of The River.
Is there some sort of twist that makes it more fun further in? Got halfway through the first Gentleman Bastard and had to give up because I just couldn’t care less.
I didn’t loathe it like I did with the Kingslayer Chronicle (also DNF), but it’s one of a select trio of books that I just couldn’t finish, out of some 200 books I’ve read the post 4 years (Jo Nesbø’s “The Bat” being the third).
I don’t use Lemmy so much anymore, I settled on mastodon after everything (it just had a much more mature ecosystem imo) but I still come back to beehaw to lurk because of the community. I think that moving to another app is the way, anyone with an account here likely has another anyways if they like federation since the biggest instances are defederated from here (blahaj was for me). Best wishes for the mods, and I’ll probably still be here after whatever happens even if I’m not interacting a lot.
Is it possible to have some communities be exclusive to Beehaw users? I’m not advocating for cutting off the existing communities, rather adding in a few walled gardens? That would filter out anyone who doesn’t want to bother explaining why they value what Beehaw is and include anyone curious enough to create a Beehaw profile to see what the less active but more Beehaw communities are like. Something like “The safest space” which is going to respectively attract and deter the people you would want.
As for having to deal with what y’all deal with at all, which the above would do nothing to diminish, I have thought for a while that y’all need more help. You guys are doing a ton of work and in my opinion a little too much work each. I don’t want y’all to get burned out and not be able to continue at all. Maybe an appeal to the community that y’all can’t continue like this without more help would encourage those with the ability to lighten the load?
Running with your holiday meal analogy, it warrants adding that while we can’t stop people from coming to the table, we are able to make them leave.
Of course the onus to this would be on the hosts of the meal, or in this case the admins and mods of Beehaw. I’m sure that’s a difficult, unpleasant, and often thankless task.
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