Greg Rucka

While I remain committed to not making any resolutions in a new year, two of the things I’d like to try doing are having a neat bit of synchronicity at the moment with the current fan-funding campaign for The Fifth Season Roleplaying game, based on the novels by N.K. Jemisin.

One of those two things is reading more physical books. I know some people are into trying to read 52 books a year, or even 100. For me, reading in quantity is never a big challenge. I’ve read 80,000 pages of comic books in a single year!

What I’m not so great at doing is giving my eyes a rest from the screen and from digesting artwork to sit down with a book of prose. Plus, sometimes it can be hard to find a full range of diversity in American floppy comics comic authors and stories, but the work of literature is much, much larger.

At the #1 spot on my “books I’d read if I made time to read books” list is The Fifth Season from N.K. Jemisin, a book about a fractured family on a wounded planet. It has occupied that spot even since it won the Hugo Award for best novel back in 2016 – long before I read her absolutely brilliant DC Comics series The Far Sector, which debuted the new Green Lantern Sojourner “Jo” Mullein.

Not only that, but when I asked my beloved college D&D friends for sci-fi/fantasy novel recommendations that weren’t just straight white people writing about straight white worlds, The Fifth Season was their first recommendation!

As quick as I am to acquire a new comic I’m interested in reading, I’m snail-paced at snagging a book I might want to read. Even after having my interest confirmed in a recommendation from friends, it took me a full three months to remember to request the book from the Wellington library system – which had all of one copy – so then I had to wait another two months to receive it.

That weatherbeaten paperback novel has been sitting on my bedside table, waiting to be cracked open and read for all of my incredibly-busy past three weeks – including the day I received an ad for The Fifth Season’s table-top RPG rulebook.

(Somehow I have engineered it that Facebook will only serve me ads for nerdy Kickstarter campaigns. It’s the only website on the internet where I don’t have ads blocked, so it’s like I live in a world where the only things anyone ever advertises are RPGs and board games. It’s a paradise.)

As it happens, that advertisement piqued my interest not only because of the book on my bedside table recommended by D&D friends, but also another thing I’d love to do this year related to my gaming gang: I’d like to learn some RPG systems other than Dungeons and Dragons and 5th Edition! This goal was on my list even before the OGL drama of a few weeks ago, and even though that came to a happy resolution it doesn’t change the fact that I’d love to extend my game-running skills outside of D&D. [Read more…] about N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game campaign on Backerkit (TTRPG Tuesday)