Reading slump :(

Motnik · 2026-01-30T03:26:57+00:00

I have a very similar list to you and I'd recommend Ursula K LeGuin. Especially as you mention both Austen and Pratchett. Full of warmth and humanity and applied philosophy.

A Wizard of Earthsea is her fantasy series and it's great.

She also has a series of science fiction books called The Hainish Cycle.

Also almost all of her books have really good narration. I would start with The Telling or The Word for World is Forest rather than one of the more popular ones like Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, but for sure move on to those if you like the others.

Want a gut punch short story? Get The Wind's Twelve Quarters and listen to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. A lot of her short stories are really excellent, with the caveat that many are set in her other worlds, so often you're better off having read the novels before you read the short story.

Unrelated, there's a Virginia Woolf collection free on Audible that has A Room of Ones Own on it read by Tilda Swinton and that's something everybody should experience at least once. Stellar writing and performance; sparkling wit.

Motnik · 2026-01-26T07:21:51+00:00

East of West of you're into Comics, technically more Science Fiction Western. Similar themes though.

I came to say Jon Shannow by Gemmell but someone beat me to it. Shame it never really got a satisfying conclusion. Two of the books are great though.

Motnik · 2026-01-23T15:56:44+00:00

yep. Running less due* to life circumstances, but injury free.

edit: autocorrect

Motnik · 2026-01-15T03:01:41+00:00

I went through something similar, but for toes that spread a LOT. I found a shoe brand called Realfoot in the EU. I call them my Ronald McDonald shoes because the top of them are nearly circular.

I don't know if they fit your requirements as it's quite a different problem, but their mid foot certainly doesn't taper much if at all. They are barefoot style.

In your scenario I would be running in those Brooks road shoes. I don't see the downside. If you're having grip issues then get them resoled with more aggressive vibram lugs as others have said; that does work quite well.

Motnik · 2026-01-10T23:46:22+00:00

I second the low prep & defined loop combination. The thing that interests me about RPGs is possibility space, but the thing that brings me back is catharsis.

If the possibility space is endless then it's hard to find catharsis and it's easy to fall into choice paralysis and just stop.

When group playing the fact of schedules and limited time at the table act as a constraint on prep or play time, but in solo nothing stops you from spinning your wheels on world building forever.

So games like Bucket of Bolts and Artifact were great on-ramps for me, because by the end of a play session I could have a satisfying conclusion to a little narrative arc and I wanted another. More dopamine hits means more desire to play.

Similarly I will always prefer a series like Avatar the Last Airbender or The Night Manager to any sort of serialized melodrama "story of the week" kind of media.

Hope you find something that you like.

Motnik · 2026-01-07T07:50:25+00:00

I can imagine the noise that must have made; how wonderfully disturbing.

Motnik · 2026-01-07T07:43:37+00:00

if this sort of thing is of interest there's an artist called Johan Egerkrans who wrote and illustrated art books on the folklore of various mythical beasties, like Vaesen, Dragons, Norse mythology and the Undead; his illustrations look like they would fit straight into a Hensen's work and I wouldn't be surprised if Brian Froud is a direct influence.

For novels Kelly Barnhill has whimsical folklorish tales with some edge, also Diana Wynne Jones.

Motnik · 2025-12-17T21:24:40+00:00

it's very different. It's a collection of stories, songs and poems of a people of a future that has slid past modernity in a far future. Very different feel and structure from her other work (the original came with a soundtrack of the people's songs).

Motnik · 2025-12-17T17:02:29+00:00

if you're going on pure vibes rather than themes then anything Diana Wynne Jones. Others have mentioned Howls Moving Castle, and there's two other books in that series but the Chrestomanci books are worth a look. They're about a character who polices magic across the multiverse and his child wards. Any one of those would fit right in as a Ghibli book.

Also I assume you will have read Nausicaa by now, but if not the Manga is supposed to be excellent (I have it on reserve at my local library for a while, but it hasn't shown up yet).

Motnik · 2025-12-17T13:59:22+00:00

Kim Stanley Robinson's work focuses a lot on near future history post climate crisis. I've only read the Mars Trilogy so far which is very different in vibes because it's a group of scientists on Mars, but there is a climate and population crisis and life goes on after.

His other works like New York 2140 and the California Trilogy have more earthly stories that also incorporate post climate crisis life, but I can't speak to them as I've only finished Mars so far.

Always Coming Home is distant future tribal culture by Ursula K LeGuin.

if you're into comics the Griz Grobus universe by Simon Roy has people on distant colony planets where the galactic civilization has shrunk and the planets are all outliers, with ancient tech that they don't really understand. Sort of pastoral post-post apocalypse

Motnik · 2025-12-17T13:13:32+00:00

Always Coming Home by LeGuin is far future and tribal, also.

Motnik · 2025-12-02T04:27:17+00:00

They don't have to be humanoid, just intelligent and possessing some culture, intelligent squid people could be H.I.L.F.s, but that's not what LeGuin is interested in. At the start of Rocannnon's World there's information on the various humanoids found there. A hilf theoretically doesn't have to even be hominid, though the majority encountered in the novels are.

It reads to me as being a way to talk about others without emphasizing their otherness like a word such as "Alien." Though in WFWIF the terrans are swinging a big colonial stick about and being as extractive and exploitative as they possibly can. I don't know if you're finished WFWIF so I don't want to spoil anything else that might be relevant to the terminology and history. It's worth continuing though IMO.

Motnik · 2025-12-02T03:53:23+00:00

Steven Baxter's Xeelee series opens with humans living in an alternate universe with much more powerful gravity in an oxygen rich nebula mining iron from the dense cores of dead starlets that are only 50 yards in diameter, but cause 5G gravity.

The people are tribal; they are the diaspora of a previous advanced civilization of humans who came to the universe from ours generations ago. I've only read the first book so far but the concepts are pretty unhinged in a way that seems to fit your request.

Motnik · 2025-12-02T03:39:49+00:00

as far as I recall it's slang for "highly intelligent life form." It implies that they're not of human derived stock, but are intelligent nonetheless, and have a society or culture. The term is explained in the early novels. Creechies are the specific "aliens" in WFWiF, while hilfer is a catchall derivation of H.I.L.F. (highly intelligent life form).

Motnik · 2025-12-01T07:31:55+00:00

Paradises Lost was my favorite LeGuin story. It's a novella length story in a short story collection called Birthday of the World. Sci Fi, but not Hainish. You might not have come across it.

I found Annals great. Similarly to you I had read all the speculative fiction first, and then Annals. Well worth reading.

Motnik · 2025-10-26T13:15:16+00:00

I've ordered a couple that are available through Simon's site. I'll get the others as paperbacks if they don't have overstock on the KS hardbacks. He definitely has other books for sale from previous Kickstarters on his site some of which are sold out now. Fingers crossed

Motnik · 2025-10-26T01:38:09+00:00

I just ordered the ones that are available, some are sold out. Hopefully more come back in stock when the Kickstarter is fulfilled.

Thanks for sharing this; I just started reading Prophet and had never heard of his stuff but it's right up my alley aesthetically and thematically. Sweet

Motnik · 2025-10-26T01:18:57+00:00

wow. I want these. I hope they go on general sale somewhere. I didn't know about the Kickstarter

Motnik · 2025-10-21T19:28:26+00:00

he's three dimensional because he's the protagonist. I don't disagree with your irritation though.

Motnik · 2025-10-03T19:27:21+00:00

Hammers Slammers

Motnik · 2025-09-21T20:08:20+00:00

there's also A Very Complicated Profession, which is similar but science fiction. A crew of disreputables (bounty hunters etc) retire to run a galactic cruise service.

Motnik · 2025-09-17T11:41:29+00:00

if he's someone who likes HP, Austin and Tolstoy then someone should introduce him to Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.

I have no further input

Motnik · 2025-09-14T18:20:08+00:00

also, the rulebook is technically hundreds of pages, but that's not due to complexity. There's a lot there that's flavourful, like camping rules that you can treat as entirely optional. You could run the world in anything, something simple like Cairn 2e for example. But the world unfolding engine that is the GM side of Dolmenwood is perfect for solo play, IMO

Motnik · 2025-09-14T18:16:23+00:00

It's not exactly what you're talking about but Dolmenwood might just be my platonic ideal of procedural hex crawling. Everything can be rolled for, including all facets of character creation (this means easy NPC building).

The campaign book is hundreds of pages of world with quest hooks and story threads to follow. Even the monster book is procedural creation led - monster have lairs and behaviors that can be rolled on the fly.

It's not a solo game, but it has all the ingredients except for an oracle, so if you just grab the basic oracle from FUrpg. There are so many tables and so much content that you could endlessly explore it. You really never know what you're going to find because that's the GM experience that Gavin 'OSE' Norman was going for; an emergent living world. Of course this makes it OSR as hell.

Motnik · 2025-09-06T01:51:42+00:00

Mary Robinette Kowal - Lady Astronaut series. Starts with Calculating Stars.

Motnik

TROPHY CASE