lessofthat

I basically spent my entire childhood scrunched up in a corner with a pile of books, trying to hide from PE teachers, and I didn't change much when I hit adulthood, and I'm 46 now. so the number of books adds up over time.

I read mostly genre stuff for a long time but then I lived in Poland for a year and there just weren't many genre books available in English there in 1995. So I read all the British Council library's two shelves of SFF and then moved on to the general section, starting with A. I like Julian Barnes a lot, because he showed up early in the alphabet. If he'd been called Julian Zarnes I might never have read him. That sent me in a lot of different directions.

'The Athenian Murders' was the recommendation of an extremely clever and tall Brazilian physicist by the name of Pedro Machado. Hi, Pedro, if you're reading this.

when you start playing, not at all. Five minutes in, slightly. Half an hour in, moderately. Seventeen hours in, deeply.

I like settings that have a lot of areas on the map still blank, both literally and conceptually - no geolocation, no instant communication - but places that can support cities and where people do more talking than punching. And I'm long burnt out on mediaeval fantasy. Nothing wrong with it! I've just played a *lot*of those games.

Things I've thought about more than briefly: gritty space SF (Expanse-y, maybe), 30s/40s noir, Imperial Roman intrigue.

There are things behind the world. Your character is probably a villain, but s/he's the kind of villain that might get cheered over the hero.

> Do you expect to receive any messages from people feeling insulted due to the game's nature? O

We've had a few pings, but they've been very much 'you do know this is sensitive territory', not 'HOW DARE YOU'. And when it becomes clear how little overlap there is between this and cults like the Branch Dravidians or Heaven's Gate, people relax. I think we would have called it something different if we'd been from the US, though. Cults aren't really a thing in the UK in the way they are in America.

We got quite a nice review from a Christian site that did warn our subject matter wouldn't be to everyone's taste, and very gently lamented our references to opium and our use of the word 'damning'.