slimepsychic
The one thing that confused me about this module: the map on the inside of the cover is not labeled. The first time I read through it I assumed the map was for The Keep as the Keep is outlined first. It wasn't until I came to the page with a map of the Keep - confusingly placed in the Caves of Chaos section - that I realized I had been using the wrong map as reference.
I could have missed it but asterisks are always left unresolved. I would come across one and look for the note it referred to but there never was one.
I've owned this book since... 1988? Something like that. I was 9 or 10 at the time. I wanted to love origami but found it impossible to get my head around. A week or so I picked this book back up, curious if it was me or the book. It's the book. I downloaded an app for the iPhone which isn't terribly good, but contained some simple designs. The app easily did what this book never did in over 20 years.
Thanks to prior editions of Dungeons & Dragons being released under an Open Gaming License and the work of Proctor there is a resurgence of popularity in the roots of Role-playing Games and a lot of new material is being released. Labyrinth Lord is essentially a clone of the Basic/Expert D&D rules that were immensely popular in the 1980's - if you see something about D&D's popularity in the 80's it's related to the Basic/Expert rules.
What started out as a nostalgic reopening of my old school D&D materials quickly morphed into a full-blown Labyrinth Lord game - not using the D&D materials at all. Labyrinth Lord is well written and well organized and I found myself picking it up exclusively and not bothering to look up rules in my D&D books.
It's an interesting prospect - a do-over of an immensely popular game that grabs at the nostalgic heartstrings all while offering a game that became so popular because it was relatively easy to play. For example: Stonehell Dungeon - a third-party book compatible with Labyrinth Lord (and thus D&D). While it harkens back to the old-school roots of D&D it's fully new and has the chance to take all the lessons about adventure and dungeon design from the past 30+ years and create something wholly new. It's old and new at the same time.
I will save my review of it for another time but I must also mention the Advanced Edition Companion which essentially revives the rules from the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. If you are not familiar - the publishers of D&D had two different games released at the same time - Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. They had similarities but were intended to be separate projects and incompatible. Over the course of the years they became more and more different and even at the beginning quite a few tweaks were necessary to bring AD&D elements into D&D. What Proctor does with the AED is truly remarkable. He decided to make the Advanced Edition Companion fully compatible with Labyrinth Lord. This means if you like you can pick and choose elements of AED and plug them into the rule system of LL. One thing that you might do - in Labyrinth Lord a player can choose to be an elf, dwarf, or halfling but cannot choose their class, e.g. - you cannot be an elven thief. AD&D changed this so that a player could pick a race and a class. So the AED is terrific because it allows one to simply bring that idea back into Labyrinth Lord (and thus D&D) without committing to the entire Advanced rule system. I mention AED because when I discovered this it dawned on me that Proctor approached Labyrinth Lord with passion and intelligence - this isn't merely knockoff product but a masterwork in itself.
There are a few versions out there - the PDF version (which I am reviewing here) which is free and contains no artwork, the PDF version with artwork (which is currently $6), as well as paperback and hardcover editions available from Lulu.
My Great Uncle and Great Aunt wrote this book. They gave me the teacher's edition along with the regular one. My 4th grade teacher slyly asked me to bring it in, and I never saw it again.
It didn't even occur to me to cheat with it, I was actually fascinated with the materials teachers have to teach with.
I have been writing HTML for a long while and I'm familiar with the glacial pace of the W3C. For that reason I simply ignored the ongoing progress toward version 5 of HTML.
I should have waited longer. This book was well written and easy to understand for those with a basic understanding of HTML as it is now. Unfortunately a lot of the whiz-bang features working their way into HTML5 aren't supported well enough to implement. A lot. Reading this was kind of like propping your friend up on your shoulders so he can see over the construction fence and describe the unfinished work to you.
I didn't read this per se, but perused it quite a bit. There's a lot of information that could be considered, “Old School” but that was part of the appeal for me.
This book has some fine mech illustrations and the ideas are there but it's part of the 1 ... 2 ... Poof! School of drawing instruction. Start with blobs, draw them straighter, done! A fully detailed robot has been realized from start to finish.
This book contains some sort of mind-altering chemical in it's pages. In the following days I've wondered what wabi-sabi web design would look like, if Lady Gaga is a wabi-sabi pop star, and wandering around my home admiring the cracks and inconsistencies in my old apartment. I loved the comparisons to modernism, as well as the bullet-point list of what wabi-sabi is about. This work stands in stark contrast to the vague descriptions I've read elsewhere, without invalidating the built-in vagueness of wabi-sabi itself.
I don't buy books until I've already read them and know I'll love them, and I'll be buying this one.
This book is a bunch of terrific watercolor and ink illustrations. Trying to read this as a book was a mistake. It's more of a reference book to come back to when perplexed how to illustrate rust, waves, flora, fauna, etc. I feel the actual instruction in this is a bit lacking but that is because it takes practice to learn these techniques and incorporate them into your work, not smaller steps.
Doing the right thing used to suck. In 2004 I left my aspirations of being a full time web designer behind. At the time techniques like the ones described in Responsive Web Design were possible but IE6 had no support for this stuff and held too much sway.
Responsive Web Design puts these methods together and because of the browser landscape of today it can put them to good use too. More than that he steps back from the technical side and ponders how this understanding can affect out design patterns. A great book for someone fluent in CSS.
I read this as part of the Illustrating Children's Books class I'm taking. If I had read this alone I'd probably give it five stars but I was introduced to this at the same time as [book:Flotsam], another of his books, and preferred Flotsam. It's a terrific story about an average Tuesday when strange events involving bullfrogs start happening. It's told without words and is quite similar to comics in layout and storytelling.
An excellent overview on the current state of CSS3. The book focuses on the CSS3 features that are supported by most up-to-date browsers today and how to use them in a inessential way – ensuring not to break anything for older browsers.I'd consider myself of intermediate to advanced understanding of CSS and had no problem understanding everything in the book though I had never used CSS3 prior to reading this. Those who are beginners might try [b:Zen of CSS Design 565 The Zen of CSS Design Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) Dave Shea http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157058871s/565.jpg 4821] followed by [b:CSS Mastery 563 CSS Mastery Advanced Web Standards Solutions Andy Budd http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157058871s/563.jpg 4819].
The watercolor/gouache/collage illustrations were terrific. I also liked the dip pen writing style employed throughout the book. The story was interesting though I felt it could have been more exciting.
Looks to be a great reference manual for canning. I'm a little bummed that they mention how dire it is to make your own recipes and to stick to these. I haven't tried them (as I do not own a canner yet) but ingredient–wise I would prefer my recipes for sauce to theirs. The book is adamant that it is fatal to deviate.
Prior to reading:I would recommend reading a book about Tarot (such as [b:The Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot 680918 Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot Rachel Pollack http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177099374s/680918.jpg 667311] and then [b:The Book of Thoth 243001 The Book of Thoth A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians (Equinox III 5) Aleister Crowley http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173059843s/243001.jpg 836251] (companion to the Thoth Tarot). Also watch the Alan Moore documentary. I cannot help but think that he was in the middle of writing Promethea while being interviewed. The story (particularly in later volumes) will make a lot more sense and there will be a lot to pick up on, both in the writing and the illustrations.
I read this in my Illustrating Children's Books class. I really loved the artwork and that the surreal plot which bleeds into reality (it's a red book and the story involves a red book). The book as a whole feels like a keepsake - the book is canvas covered while there's a small graphic plate stuck to the front... very unlike most Children's books.
I read this in my Illustrating Children's Books class. I liked the idea but the “space between pages” was too much and it was difficult to understand what was happening.
I really enjoyed this compilation of audio lectures. I'm not a huge fan of books on tape, etc, but this was good to listen to in the car. It's entirely possible that I'd listen to it again in the future.
