Just a weird post. I've had out of my boxes my four books that make up the Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist. After "losing" three of the four, it took me quite a long time to reacquire them, because I wanted to have the original edited versions of them rather than the "author's cut" which have been in print for quite some time, and which honestly aren't as good (a few of the scenes that were cut were kind of cringy or weird, honestly. And all of them are unnecessary.) Also, not that long ago I reread the Belgariad novels by David Eddings, and was favorably disposed towards them. They were better than I remembered, in spite of their obvious flaws, which have been pointed out and honestly exaggerated online since the early days of Usenet. Most of those flaws are really more concerned with later works by Eddings, and don't make the Belgariad itself any worse.
This kind of prompted me to look at a bunch of older 80s-90s series that I have but haven't read in a long time. I reread the Halfling Jewel trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, for example. It was also better than I remembered, in many respects. I bought the Dark Elf Trilogy in omnibus format, although it's still in a box somewhere, so I probably won't read it this year. But I did find my Raymond Feist books, rebought all of the ones that were missing, and now I'm ready to read them shortly. I'm in the middle of reading a lot of game books right now, but that's not as exciting as novels in some ways, so I want to make sure to force time for novels.
I'm also rereading some Robert E. Howard and Simon R. Green Hawk & Fisher books. My biggest challenge to this is getting distracted by YouTube, and frittering away time on the internet. I hate doing that, but it seems to easy to do. That seems to be the biggest hurdle to reinvigorating my love of reading. It's also probably wreaked havoc with my attention span. I often find myself getting bored reading too long at a stretch now unless the book I'm reading is really fascinating... which, rereading old favorites or gamebooks isn't likely to be. Sigh. I know, a lot of this is my own fault, right? Why don't I read something else that's more likely to grab my attention?
Well, part of it is that I noticed that books were going downhill before I noticed that movies and TV was going downhill. Due to the nature of the market, they went woke and bad first; movies, given the huge budget and investment of all kinds of stakeholders involved, were slower to pick up woke and terrible trends that affected books earlier.
Which probably also contributed to my disillusionment with the hobby and my retreat to old favorites.
I'm finally going to read and evaluate some new systems for the first time in a long time, including Basic Fantasy, Savage Worlds and Shadow of the Demon Lord. I also bought, years and years ago, Decipher's Lord of the Rings game and never even read that, much less the more recent game first published by Cubicle 7 and later Free League. I'm also thinking of reading the Cubicle 7 Warhammer ruleset. About time; I've been reading the Enemy Within remixed off and on for over a year. I've been just breezing over the mechanics, because I haven't read the rulebook, although I'm kinda sorta familiar enough with the system to understand what I'm reading anyway.
I'm not sure that reading all of these game textbooks is the best way to handle my ongoing malaise with reading, but at least for now, reading adventures and campaigns and setting material has been entertaining enough for me.
Ah, well. If it's not good, I'll stop and do something else.
Just to not make this a completely useless post, I'll add some Corsair Coast names to a list here, so as I start developing them, I'll have material to work with. Much of these will come from either earlier versions of Dark•Heritage, or Western Hack.
Terrasa
Razina
Tolosa
Castellet
Enguerrand
Guiscard
Vaquelin
Alcassar
Sarabasca
Salvatez
Perestrello
Bara Gairo
Baix Pallars
Haltash
Untash (?)
Gandesa
Durenga
and, of course... Porto Liure! This is obviously the obvious place to put it.
I've already got name lists for characters to trawl through. This isn't urgent, but it gives me an excuse to create a Corsair Coast tag.
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