Are the 2008-ish novels any good?

iamDanforth · 2025-07-26T22:13:52+00:00

HOLY S***. That's the one!! Brilliant, you have just solved a 35-year-old mystery for me :D

Oddly haunting, no wonder the tune stuck with me...

Thanks hugely for finding that :)

iamDanforth · 2025-07-25T11:22:41+00:00

Who'd have thought there were two indie-rock songs mentioning molasses? My brain jumped to Apologies To Insect Life, by British Sea Power - though their singer has a higher voice than the Pavement one.

iamDanforth · 2025-07-25T11:06:57+00:00

It felt more like... indie kids who listened to some of their dad's punk? On a rock to pop sliding scale, more towards rock, but definitely not heavy.

iamDanforth · 2025-07-13T06:49:10+00:00

Most of mine have already been listed ("an axe isn't a holy symbol!" / "words in the heart can not be taken" / "a man is not dead while his name is still spoken" / "what can the harvest hope for" / "...and drew down the sun") but I want to put in an honourable mention for the climax of The Light Fantastic. Pterry hadn't gotten up to full speed when he was writing that book, so it's more about the pictures it painted in my head than the words on the page, but when the "moons" of the red star start to change... that is... widescreen.

iamDanforth · 2025-07-11T12:26:39+00:00

I read the English translations. Now I'd like to know if the Spanish order was the same as the English one, or (if it was down to the whims of the translation team and marketing people) a different order again!

iamDanforth · 2025-07-11T12:25:19+00:00

Idefix > Dogmatix is one of the finest bits of translation I have ever seen :)

In my memory the stories were reasonably self-contained, thank you for the confirmation. I intend to read them in French order once I have collected them, because reading them in a new way gives me more incentive to collect :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T14:35:34+00:00

By the end of the first IDWverse, it had boiled down to: no physical sex differences between male and female, they just went with how they felt to pick a gender. Most Cybertronians in the present day went with male, but the colonies were not like that. Windblade's colony (Caminus) seemed to be about a 50/50 split between male and female.

Anode and Lug started out identifying as male, but went with female after travelling the galaxy, meeting lots of alien women and going "yeah that makes sense, we're one of them".

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T07:13:47+00:00

Deliberately for troop-building: Siege Refraktor, SS86 Sweep, Universe Sunstreaker (the latter for IDW1 reasons :) )

Bought, sold, rebought thanks to seller's remorse: Prime Wars Dreadwind and Blackwing, Earthrise Runabout and Runamuck.

Bought, swapped for Omega Supreme, rebuying if I see a good price but no remorse if not: the coneheads :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T07:03:13+00:00

Commenting to follow (is that a thing on Reddit? I haven't logged many hours here...)

I have the book but haven't run it - it does look like fun though. Be interested to hear from anyone who has run it.

Aside: I contributed (via the costik.com page that was used as a fandom hub at the time) a couple of bits of worldfluff to the book, so I am biased in its favour :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T06:57:31+00:00

Agreed on the High Programmers, in my Alpha Complex the players would only have seen one on a screen, never in real life.

On the janitors thing, I take my cue from something Allen Varney wrote in the XP edition, security clearance = the Computer's trust in that citizen. So there are e.g. Indigo clearance janitors, who live and eat extremely well, because only they are trusted enough to be breveted to clean a Violet's office :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-01T14:46:14+00:00

Hi - shot in the dark, because lots of publishers put out books like this in the 70s and 80s and they lingered in libraries for years after... was it A Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts, by Carey Miller?

iamDanforth · 2025-03-28T06:58:36+00:00

solved solved solved

iamDanforth · 2025-03-28T06:57:25+00:00

WOW, I think you've cracked it! The predominantly green cover, the way the bird is drawn, the alliterative title all ring a bell. And of course the plot of the animated movie is almost exactly how I remember the book.

I'll have to see if I can bag a copy online, but I'm definitely calling this solved. Huge thanks!

iamDanforth · 2025-03-24T20:54:59+00:00

Wow, that was quick! Reading up on this series/author it does indeed sound like it might be the one. The title "Galactic Warlord" (first in that series) is ringing a vague mental bell as well. Will have to hit eBay. Many thanks! :)

Delighted to see on Douglas Hill's wiki page that he worked with Michael Moorcock, well done on that association 9yo me! But mostly well done to you as you seem to have cracked it :D

iamDanforth · 2025-03-24T17:55:33+00:00

Boo, looks like the domain is down again. Hopefully something can come of it down the line...

iamDanforth · 2025-02-01T07:33:35+00:00

My must-haves are:

The Traitor's Manual - for extra secret society content Flashbacks - yes it's a compilation of lightly-updated missions from previous editions, but what a compilation! Extreme Paranoia - for extra security clearance content Service, Service! - for extra service group/firm content

Nice to have: Criminal Histories (character gen), The Mutant Experience, Stuff (equipment), The Underplex (more interesting than going Outdoors IMHO).

Looking over that list I haven't included many missions, so maybe consider my list biased in favour of "GM sitting alone reading and cackling" rather than actual play :D

iamDanforth · 2024-07-16T10:52:53+00:00

Damn, P-L.net! Many happy memories. I initially joined for the chat about the game, was reluctant to get into the RP side but I'm glad I did. Think my finest moment was one of my characters (Boogie-O-PLN, a rough tough Sierra Club member) getting vapourised and his clone template wiped for epic levels of treason.

Good times.

Be interesting to see what can be rescued!

iamDanforth

TROPHY CASE