tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:245178athorntonathorntonathornton2015-03-13T20:32:28Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:245178:13177Three Dreamlands2015-03-13T20:32:28Z2015-03-13T20:32:28Zpublic0Three Dreamlands: <i>The Sense of the Sleight-Of-Hand Man</i> by Dennis<br />Detwiler, <i>Dreamhounds of Paris</i> and <i>The Book of Ants</i> by Robin D. Laws<br />with Ken Hite and Steve Dempsey, and <i>A Red & Pleasant Land</i> by Zak S.<br /><br />I recently read these three-or-four books, which are all RPG books<br />about, in some sense, Dreamlands; two (or three; whether you choose to<br />consider <i>The Book of Ants</i> as separate from <i>Dreamhounds of Paris</i> is<br />to some degree a matter of personal choice; I choose to see the pair as<br />a single work) of them quite explicitly so, and the third one by<br />implication. In looking at them, I'm also going to drag in some of the<br />other RPG books riffing on Lewis Carroll's work.<br /><br /><i>The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man</i> is far and away the most<br />traditional of these three works. This was a Kickstarter-funded project<br />that was initially published in 2013; somehow it had evaded my notice<br />until recently. It is intended for use with <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> 6th<br />Edition, but it would be easy to make it work with any other <i>CoC</i><br />version, or indeed any Lovecraftian RPG. It would be a little harder to<br />do outside of a straight-up Lovecraftian game, since it assumes a pretty<br />standard <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> cosmology and a Dreamlands not very different<br />from what you get in <i>The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath</i>.<br /><br />Its frame story, quickly dispensed with, is presented as 1920s Call of<br />Cthulhu but could trivially be moved to another environment. All the<br />characters are addicts who have fallen far behind on their payments to<br />their dealer; in the standard frame it is opium he deals, but one could<br />easily set it in 1970s Detroit with heroin, or really, almost any place<br />or time where someone sells addictive intoxicants to someone else, which<br />should leave plenty of latitude. The kingpin dealer has the PCs all<br />brought to his lair by his goons, and insists that they share a pipe.<br />Unbeknownst to them, they are not merely to be murdered as an example to<br />his other customers regarding the advisability of paying ones'<br />debts--they are given a drug which is supposed to gradually erase them<br />from everyday reality and shift them into the Dreamlands. Unbeknownst<br />to Mr. Lao, the drug dealer, the drug he is providing is tainted, and<br />disintegrates their bodies while propelling their souls into the nearest<br />empty vessels in the Dreamlands. The conceit behind <b>this</b> is that<br />there is an analog of Mr. Lao and the opium trade in the Dreamlands.<br />The Men of Leng supply dreamers to the moonbeasts, who in turn supply<br />them with the fabulously valuable Blood Gems.<br /><br />All this is well and good, but if your players don't like railroads--and<br />who does?--they are likely to get their characters killed in the real<br />world before they ever get transported to the Dreamlands, and even if<br />they go along with the train, they're likely to already be sullen and<br />resentful even before the next part. And if they make it there, they're<br />in for a further shock: the bodies they wake up in are radically<br />different.<br /><br />The adventure assumes you will be starting the game with brand-new<br />characters. To be sure, it'd be an extremely heavy-handed narrative<br />intervention if continuing characters within a larger CoC campaign were<br />all to become addicted to opium and then have their forms disintegrated<br />halfway through the first session of this new arc. However, since the<br />characters will spend their whole lives, effectively, in the Dreamlands,<br />you will likely get players who spent their time and character points<br />creating a backstory and set of skills for someone like Frank, the<br />down-on-his-luck auto mechanic with a lucky tattoo and tertiary syphilis<br />acquired in Montmartre, with piloting skills, familiarity with an M1<br />Carbine, and PTSD from the Great War, who now finds that he's a small<br />Asian woman, and there's nothing more technologically advanced than a<br />sword in the whole world.<br /><br />I know that if I were on the outside of the screen that I'd be pretty<br />peeved at having just put in a bunch of effort for character creation<br />only to have all pretense of narrative agency wrested away, and then to<br />have my character given a new, probably race-and-or-gender-swapped body,<br />with a bunch of skills completely inapplicable to the new setting.<br /><br />I don't know how you'd fix this without telling the players what you're<br />going to do to them, which would destroy a lot of the impact. It<br />strikes me that this is the sort of game you can only play within groups<br />that have evolved a lot of at-the-table trust--and if you don't do this<br />well, you may erode a lot of that earned trust. Caveat emptor.<br /><br />But anyway, assuming that you eventually do get the characters to the<br />Dreamlands, then the game widens out a lot. It's pretty much assumed<br />that the characters' motive is to get back to the real world New York,<br />although it's not clear to me that going back to a grim, hardscrabble<br />existence of mounting debt and ever-deepening addiction is such a great<br />idea.<br /><br />Once they awaken in the Dreamlands, they meet the wretched Collector,<br />who seems like a minor Peter Lorre role. He can provide some impetus by<br />telling them that if they do not find a way back home, their<br />dream-selves will sicken and die.<br /><br />For a book that wants to be a sandbox, <i>The Sense of the Sleight-Of-Hand<br />Man</i> reads much more like a choose-your-own adventure book. For<br />instance, in the city of Sarkomand, where the characters awaken, they<br />have three choices:<br /> * Try to find the exit to the waking world the Collector told them<br /> about by taking the greased chute to the Underworld. Turn to<br /> Chapter 7, p. 72.<br /> * Try to steal a moon-beast ship from the harbor. Turn to Chapter 5,<br /> p. 47.<br /> * Try to march overland to Inquanok. Turn to Chapter 6, p. 58.<br /> * If you just hang out in Sarkomand, you are eaten by a wamp or a<br /> voomith or something. The End.<br /><br />The book's title is the title of a Wallace Stevens poem. Each chapter<br />is introduced with a little quotation from Stevens. Stevens, of course,<br />is not part of the Weird Fiction tradition. It is very refreshing to<br />get little snippets of usually-quite-good poems rather than the same old<br />same old Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard and To Show That We're<br />Hip, Thomas Ligotti, or To Show That We're Ironically Hip, Clive<br />Barker.<br /><br />Fortunately things get somewhat better from here. The trip through the<br />Underworld (should the party take it), under the supervision of their<br />ghoul guide Madaeker is extremely railroady, but the other two options<br />less so. Eventually, perhaps, the characters will find themselves in<br />Ilek-Vlad trying to determine what's wrong with Randolph Carter (itself<br />a rather-nicely-done parallel to the addiction that landed themselves in<br />this predicament in the first place) and to defeat his nemesis (or at<br />least, rouse him or some other major Dreamlands power to defeat same).<br /><br />There are some delightful side-quests, such as the Oracle of the Western<br />Machine accessible from Inquanok, or indeed the whole Lhosk political<br />plot, as well as some fun smaller ones (including a nice Sarnath bit).<br />The midgame, with the characters wandering across the Dreamlands, is<br />where this book is at its best. It presents itself as, basically, a<br />bunch of location-centric adventure hooks with a few fleshed out<br />set-pieces, and they're generally well done, and quite varied. The<br />Oracle of the Western Machine comes across as almost Numeneraesque,<br />while The Nameless Rock comes across as ... well, it's not quite Robert<br />E. Howard, but imagine the better sort of Lin Carter and you've got the<br />idea. <br /><br />Alas, after having saved Randolph Carter and Ilek-Vlad, the dreamers'<br />putative quest--to return home to the waking world--may seem a little<br />lackluster. Should they manage it and return to New York to defeat the<br />villanous Mr. Lao, their triumph offers little catharsis. The fruition<br />of the bargain Madaeker may have extracted from them in the Underworld<br />is much more interesting. This is, of course, the natural consequence<br />of the dream narrative being much more compelling than the frame story. <br /><br />Still, as Dreamlands published adventures go, this is a damn good one.<br />It doesn't really break the mold of classic <i>Call of Cthulhu</i>, but if<br />you were looking for a solid large campaign, the size of <i>Horror on the<br />Orient Express</i> (I originally wrote this before the new <i>Horror</i> showed<br />up, borne to my doorstep on the backs of six sweating Venetians, pallid<br />of skin and wild of eye; let's amend that to the size of the <i>first</i><br />edition of <i>Horror on the Orient Express</i>) or <i>Beyond the Mountains of<br />Madness</i> but with the Dreamlands as the focus, you really couldn't do<br />better.<br /><br />It's published by Arc Dream press. It's clearly laid-out, and well<br />copy-edited. I found only a few typographical errors. There's not a<br />lot of reason to buy the print version: it's completely adequate, the<br />same quality you'd expect from a Lulu book, for instance, but nothing to<br />write home about. It's just a bit larger in every dimension than the<br />Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition paperback. An ungenerous reviewer might<br />point out that if the margins were less huge it would have fit into many<br />fewer pages and made a less weighty, and cheaper, tome. The art is also<br />by Detwiler and is unspectacular, but competent. My recommendation<br />would be to stick with the PDF.<br /><br />The second of the Dreamlands adventures under the microscope is Robin<br />Laws', Ken Hite's, and Steve Dempsey's <i>Dreamhounds of Paris</i> and its<br />companion volume <i>The Book Of Ants</i>. They are nominally for <i>Trail of<br />Cthulhu</i>, but as with most <i>ToC</i> works, it wouldn't be too hard to<br />translate it into another gaming system.<br /><br />This game is evidently the fruit of a whole lot of research Robin Laws<br />did into the Surrealists. The players are expected to take the roles of<br />Surrealists (historical or fictional) in 1920s Paris, and to care about<br />the machinations of Andre Breton and his ilk as they guide the movement<br />through the interwar period.<br /><br />But of course that's not really what's going on. Maybe. The basic<br />conceit of the work goes something like this: Giorgio de Chirico, having<br />looked at a lot of Bocklin, finds his way to the Dreamlands in 1909.<br />Cocteau follows in 1913, and his children's book <i>Le Potomak</i> is a<br />Mythos tome. Dada does its thing, Max Ernst starts Dreaming, all the<br />Surrealists figure out how to get to the Dreamlands. They start shaping<br />it. The Dreamlands get weirder and nastier and then start to bleed back<br />into the waking world. Dali shows up and steals the Surrealist<br />movement. World War II destroys Europe. The End.<br /><br />One of the things <i>Dreamhounds</i> tries to do is explain some of the<br />(historical) bizarre behavior of the Surrealists by reference to their<br />struggles within the <i>Domains du Reve</i>. Not to worry, an awful lot is<br />also still down to their politics and their just-plain-batshitness.<br /><br />This thing is engaging (especially if, like me, you didn't know much<br />about the specifics of Surrealism beforehand) and quite fun if, like me,<br />you keep doing Google searches on the various artists mentioned as you<br />read it. But that's the thing. It's fun to read, and it's a good<br />introduction to Surrealism, but I have a really difficult time imagining<br />how you'd play it.<br /><br />For starters, you'd need to have a group willing to devote months or<br />years to playing Surrealists in Paris. Maybe, maybe if I were in<br />college and all my friends were in the art department or at least taking<br />a bunch of art classes, I could see that happening. These days? Not<br />likely. Next, you and they will all need to be down with the idea that<br />the investigators are, most likely, going to be historical figures, and<br />that the game will therefore constrain their waking world actions at<br />certain points (there's also a pretty decent sidebar on how you can<br />arrange for the dream-Bataille, for instance, to escape to the real<br />world and take over should Georges Bataille the PC succumb to a terribly<br />addled egg). And you'd have to be willing to force not just the<br />real-world, but to some extent the whole Dreamlands narrative arc as<br />well, onto your players.<br /><br />I haven't even started to talk about <i>The Book Of Ants</i>, which is a view<br />of the history of Surrealism and its expression in the Dreamlands, from<br />the point of view of a minor and forgotten Surrealist, one Henri Salem.<br />This gives a much more visceral picture of the mutation the Dreamlands<br />undergo than <i>Dreamhounds</i> itself did. As a general rule, I hate game<br />fiction. So it's high praise, coming from me, that it's great fun to<br />read. Really, the best part of the combined work is the sudden horror<br />when Salem realizes that the cod-medievalism of the Dreamlands has been<br />irrevocably eroded: he discovers that the ninth month of the dream-year<br />is no longer "Basalt" but "Machinegun."<br /><br />That's where this piece shines. It's a weird allegorical<br />reinterpretation of RPGing itself, I think. Maybe capitalism in<br />general. Hear me out. My thesis goes something like this: Gygax and<br />Arneson gave us a world where, sure, the trade dress was Late Middle<br />Ages France Without The Cholera, but the stories? Westerns. Don't let<br />the longbows fool you: D&D is about How The West Was Won.<br /><br />Only the Indians were now orcs and hobgoblins and shit, and so we didn't<br />have to feel the least bit bad about killing them, because it's not like<br />they were people, right?<br /><br />Only then, later on--maybe <b>much</b> later on--we said, hey, what? Dude,<br />that's...a little creepy. And some people went on to do games where<br />Well Obviously It's The People Who Are The Real Monsters. The thing is,<br />it's not much fun to kill monsters and take their stuff if you have to<br />feel guilty about it. Self-aware murderhoboing is uncomfortably close<br />to straight-up psychopathy.<br /><br />So: the Dreamlands. HPL's cod-medievalism. Feudalism where you're sure<br />you're one of the landed gentry, and not a feces-besmeared peasant, and<br />where the feces and the cholera are discreetly offstage. And, of<br />course, this follows in a loooooooong tradition of romanticization of,<br />well, feudalism. Of the Ancien Regime.<br /><br />Then you've got the Surrealists. Who are, not to put too fine a point<br />on it, all like "Hey, this Established Social Order <b>sucks</b>. Seriously,<br />guys, can't you see that it <b>blows goats</b>? It's completely reinforcing<br />the status quo at the expense of, well, <b>almost everyone</b> except the<br />very richest motherfuckers."<br /><br />(Oh, by the way, if you've read this far, you can probably give<br />Piketty's <i>Capitalism In The Twenty-First Century</i> a miss, because it's<br />pretty much what I'm saying right now, only with more data and fewer<br />swears.)<br /><br />So, you know, it's hard not to sympathize with the Surrealists, or for<br />those who'd challenge the established social order, because they're<br />right, it <b>does</b> suck. But tearing down is the easy part. Trying to<br />build a New World Order? Turns out that not only does it usually suck<br />just as much, but it sucks in <b>most of the same ways</b>, only the New 1%<br />are a (maybe) different group of motherfuckers.<br /><br />So, yeah. That critique applies to Surrealist falling-out-of-love with<br />Stalinism, but of course it also applies to our wanting to play Not D&D<br />but always, somehow, coming back to it. And to Capitalism In The<br />Twenty-First Century (the thing not the book), for that matter. Maybe<br />Human Endeavor In General.<br /><br />Anyway, coming back from that tangent: <i>Dreamhounds</i> and <i>The Book Of<br />Ants</i> are fun to read. I don't know how the hell you'd ever use them at<br />your table. If you have some disposable cash and you feel like learning<br />more about the Surrealists while reading some social critique dressed up<br />as history dressed up as an RPG (and hey, I thought <i>Qelong</i> was one of<br />the best RPG books of the decade, so, you know, I'm not being dismissive<br />here), then you should totally buy this. Or buy it if you just like<br />Surrealism and want to inflict nightmare-scapes out of Dali or Bunuel or<br />Max Ernst or Magritte or ... on your players.<br /><br />I do have physical copies of these. They're...nice, in modern<br />high-end-but-not-Paizo-or-WotC ways. If you own any other Pelgrane<br />Press books, you know what <i>Dreamhounds</i> looks like. <i>The Book Of Ants</i><br />is smaller, and paperback, but both seem solidly bound. The quality of<br />the editing is good. The art is all right; the Hugenin cover on<br />Dreamhounds isn't his best work, but it's certainly serviceable.<br />Really, though, you're going to remember the art as the Surrealist<br />things you looked up while reading it, and <b>that</b>'s mighty fine. Or at<br />least, if you don't like Surrealism, there's no real reason for you to<br />buy this book, so you probably will remember the art as having been<br />mighty fine, if slightly creepily obsessed with rapey Pianotaurs.<br />Again, though, there's not a compelling reason to buy a physical copy<br />rather than the PDF of either of these.<br /><br />Finally, we get to <i>Red and Pleasant Land</i>. This is Zak S.'s take on<br /><i>Alice</i>. I absolutely cannot review this in any way objectively. One<br />of the very few records I had when growing up was the boxed set of Cyril<br />Pritchard reading the two <i>Alice</i> books, and so for many years I knew,<br />basically, the entire text of the two Alice books word-for-word by<br />heart--and I bet if you quote me a bit I can recite along for a while,<br />even now. I may be the only person in the world who can recite<br />"Jabberwocky" in less than thirty seconds, and if you buy me a beer I<br />will do so for you. So: despite the fact that, by modern standards,<br />Carroll was a creepy, creepy man, and possibly a pedophile, and despite<br />the fact that, sure, he embodied a <b>lot</b> of What Was Wrong With The<br />Victorians, I <b>love</b> my Alice.<br /><br />And then there's the fact that Zak also did <i>Pictures Showing What<br />Happens On Each Page Of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow</i>, which,<br />well, if I were stuck on a desert island with one book, <i>Gravity's<br />Rainbow</i> would <b>obviously</b> be that book. You thought, based on the last<br />paragraph, I was a drooling Carroll fanboy? It's nothing to my<br />Pynchon-fanboy-ness. The only other person I'm close to that obsessive<br />about is Tom Waits. Who, yes, also did an interpretation of <i>Alice</i>.<br /><br />Zak's book made me realize that, at least at one point, he (meaning Zak,<br />not Tom Waits) must have been almost as scarily into <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i><br />as I am.<br /><br />So: there was no way I was going to not like this book.<br /><br />Of course I got a physical version as well. And, holy shit, Raggi<br />knocked it so far out of the fucking park you can't even see the stadium<br />anymore. Seriously. He nailed everything about this. You know those<br />late-Victorian-through-about-1920 fairy tale books your local library<br />had when you were a kid? This is those. It's the right size. It's the<br />right weight. The paper is not glossy, and it's medium-weight, and it's<br />cream-colored, not white. And the thing <b>smells</b> right. It smells like<br />a fairy-tale book. Seriously, if you don't want to take your pants off<br />and rub up against this book, you're probably a lot better adjusted than<br />I am.<br /><br />Jez Gordon, whom you may know from Secret Santicore or any of the other<br /><i>completely awesome stuff</i> he's done in the OSR, did some of the layout<br />and maps, but this is mostly a Zak piece.<br /><br />The closest I can come to a summary is:<br /><br />This is The Two Alice Books If You'd Taken A Bunch Of Acid And Also<br />Watched A Bunch Of Shitty Italian Horror Vampire Films.<br /><br />Nominally it's set somewhere in the Transylvania of Raggi's Thirty<br />Years' War Lamentations Of The Flame Princess setting, but...seriously,<br />it's pretty much the Dreamlands. It says it's for LotFP but, c'mon, you<br />can adapt it for anything D&Dish. Or CoCish. Or Risus. Or, y'know,<br />whatever.<br /><br />This one is very up-front about how you can use it: drop it into your<br />campaign whole, steal specific mechanical bits of it, use it as general<br />inspiration, or the seldom-stated #4, which is very endearing: "Some<br />animals will swallow almost anything whole and some are very small. You<br />can use this book to kill them— by choking them with it or dropping it<br />on them, respectively." <br /><br />The Alice character class (or, if you're going the whole <i>Gravity's<br />Rainbow</i> route, the Fool character class) is a charming touch; an<br />underpowered rogue backed by high-entropy serendipity. If your campaign<br />has one of these, you know it, and it's fun to be able to give that play<br />style (which usually meshes pretty well with player personality) some<br />mechanical support.<br /><br />The landscape of Voivodja is principally a war zone between the houses<br />of the Red King and the Heart Queen, who might as well be Dracula and<br />Elizabeth Bathory, if you'd been eating a lot of psilocybin. But add to<br />those the (nice tip of the ten-shilling-and-sixpence hat to David Foster<br />Wallace there) Pale King and the Colorless Queen, who are trying to take<br />advantage of the realms' weakened states to stake their own claims.<br />This can play out, if you want it to, as a high-as-fuck version of the<br />Thirty Year's War, much like the rest of the LotFP setting but with more<br />whimsy amid the arterial gouts and spilled viscera. Only, like Qelong,<br />it's a horrible war where everyone's been summoning all manner of<br />hideous nightmare creatures from the multifarious hells for years and<br />years and years, and it's all like the bridge scene in <i>Apocalypse Now</i>.<br />Oh, and every mirror takes you from The War Side to The Quiet Side,<br />which is so quiet that it drives you mad in a matter of a very few<br />minutes.<br /><br />There are a bunch of political alliances here, none of which are going<br />to make any sense to the players--I'm not sure they make sense<br />period--and then the two main castles are described. So, imagine Tegel<br />Manor. Now take some DMT, and add, obviously, Alice In Wonderland and<br />vampires. What comes out the other end is a pair of crazy, crazy,<br />super-lethal funhouse bizzaro dungeons. Then there are three<br />mini-locations, one of which, "Your Worst Halves," seems to have crawled<br />straight out of Crystal Castles, although I can't find Bentley Bear<br />anywhere.<br /><br />After that there are a few non-R&PL-specific bits: there's a mass combat<br />system which looks like it's not a bad way to simulate the PCs' part in<br />a big battle, and a delightfully quick-and-dirty mounted combat system.<br />There are the usual selection of entertaining random-roll and die-drop<br />tables you'd expect from a Zak S. work.<br /><br />I can't even guess about the utility of this book. I've already stolen<br />the Alice class for the Julian Jaynes-Cthulhu-Alice-JAGS Wonderland-The<br />Madness Dossiers mashup I'm doing, and I think I'm going to drop a<br />(perhaps somewhat nerfed) version of at least one of the castles into<br />the appropriate place in that mashup.<br /><br />There have been at least two prior attempts to make the Alice stories<br />into tabletop RPGs. Likely there have been more, but these are the two<br />I know: Gygax did the pair as Castle Greyhawk sub-levels, published as<br />EX1 and 2. They're pretty leaden, frankly, in the mold of "let's make<br />all the animals and people in the stories angry things with a whole lot<br />of hit points!"<br /><br />Much better than the EX series is Marco Chacon's <i>JAGS: Wonderland</i>, which<br />manages to go from author-slightly-creepily-working-through-some-of-his-<br />issues-with-mental-illness-and-its-treatment-in-21st-century-America to<br />something really cosmically weird in not many pages at all. It's<br />nowhere near as beautiful as R&PL, and it's clearly a lot more directed<br />(indeed, railroady), but it's well worth reading as a<br />compare-and-contrast. It's also horror, but of a very different stripe.<br />It's available free online, and it's definitely worth the price (its<br />companion, <i>The Book of Knots</i>, is less striking, but it's also free and<br />worth reading if you liked the first one).<br /><br />In my opinion, you should buy at least one physical copy of <i>Red and<br />Pleasant Land</i>. This is, as far as I'm concerned, now the high-water<br />mark of RPG publishing. Not just small-press RPG publishing, but RPG<br />publishing, period. The production values on this little book are<br />ridiculously high. As with Vornheim, I'm pretty sure that if you don't<br />want to keep the book, there will be plenty of opportunities for later<br />resale.<br /><br />Zak S.'s <i>Alice</i> art can stand beside Ralph Steadman and Mervyn Peake's<br />interpretations, and that's no small praise. Sure, it's not Tenniel,<br />but nothing is or ever will be. In fact, Steadman and Peake also tried<br />their hands at <i>Treasure Island</i>. Might I suggest ...?<br /><br />As to whether you'll use this: if you like Zak's work, or LotFP<br />generally, then, yeah, you should get a copy; you will certainly find<br />something worth stealing. If you like playing on the edge between<br />whimsical and horrific, this is probably in your sweet spot too. If<br />you're into the splattery bits of LotFP, well, there's some pretty<br />gruesome description in here, but the art is not a Cannibal Corpse album<br />cover. I keep finding little bits in the book that make me go "oh,<br />that's neat"--for instance, the Colorless Rooks. I'm not going to<br />plug this Wonderland whole into any of my games, but bits and pieces of<br />it will certainly show up for years and years to come.<br /><br />To summarize: get <i>Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man</i> if you want a big<br />straight-up Lovecraftian Dreamlands game. Get <i>The Book Of<br />Ants/Dreamhounds of Paris</i> if you like Surrealism and want to play with<br />some political and sociological themes in the Paris of the 1920s and<br />1930s. You won't be missing much if you get either of these in digital<br />form only. Get <i>Red and Pleasant Land</i> if you like either Lewis Carroll<br />or LotFP, and aren't completely dead inside. Get it in hardcopy as well<br />as digital.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=athornton&ditemid=13177" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments