Recent content by Howard Andrew Jones

It's been years, and I can't recall details, but I remember being quite taken with Heretics and Chapterhouse.

I find the AI intrusion into creativity incredibly alarming. I could certainly see the attraction of its use as a guided tool by fellow creatives, but the specter of it as a replacement, and the problem of it learning by stealing skill... It has taken me a life time of trial and error and...

Thanks for trying it out! I'm delighted you enjoyed it! Baen just sent me the final version of the cover for 3 last week. Is it cool for me to show it here, or is that too much self promo? I'm making a final pass on book 3 right now, just a last light read before it goes to copyedit. I'd been...

Before Corwin even has his memory back he spares Julian. He feels badly that he has to keep leaving Bill in the dark about what's REALLY going on. By the end Corwin admits to himself that he and Eric were more alike than not and, if memory serves, speculates that they might even have become...

He has more depth than he's aware of, which is one of the great things I love about Zelazny's writing -- the plot and worldbuilding has layers within layers, and many of the characters are deeper than they present themselves.. Often Corwin tells you one thing but his actions reveal a *little*...

I loooove the original Chronicles of Amber. Blew the doors off of my imagination when I read it in junior high. The shepherd/husky mix behind me is named Corwin...

I spent a pleasant hour this morning reading through all of the posts here over the last few years. Gardner Fox's Kothar and Kyrik books are pretty dreadful, which is why I put off reading any other prose by him for years. But, lo and behold, he can be QUITE good. I finally broke down and read...

Any thoughts on this thing? Looks like the Kickstarter of volume 2 and a reprint of volume 1 are going to close up in the next day or so. I'm a sucker for giant hex crawls, but only if the hexes are really interesting...

I'm all good here. I enjoy what you both have to say on a variety of topics, and what with the forum being pretty quiet overall I momentarily feared I had returned to this place just in time to see it, too, fade into memory.

I realize I don't know you guys hardly at all -- not even real world human names -- but I hate to see any bad feelings developing in what's one of my favorite spots on the interwebs. If I may, I think there's a valid point to be made about the change in society being at the root of some of...

Hey, thanks, man. I hope you enjoy it. As far as that algorithm, Amazon remains confusing and frustrating to me and so many writers... Murderbot is excellent and is hard to stop reading. And as it happens, Martha Wells was kind enough to blurb the new series for me, before I had even landed the...

I was in junior high in the 1970s, and I got introduced to AD&D, not basic, although friends of friends sometimes had basic modules. In our little corner of the world it was hard to lay hands on modules, so we didn't have much to model off of. The first one I was unfortunate enough to pick up...

First, kudos for you for teaching them how to be more interactive and not just hack everything to death. Second, I hear you on getting bored watching the characters declare all the things they're doing until finally you let them find the secret door. If my wife's characters say they're...

Paul McCartney wins. The first time he got high (with Dylan and the other Beatles) he was desperate for a piece of paper. Mal Evans finally found him some paper and a pen and he jotted down the eternal truth he understood. When he came down and looked at the paper the next day it read: There are...

Over the last few days I've been combing through modules I splurge bought over the years -- many in the years before I was aware of this and a few other trusted review sites -- and My God but they're bad. So very very many of them are room after room of some kind of lethal trap or monster that...