Current reading

I've been in a swords & soecery mood lately and pulled my Elic books off the shelf. I was absolutely enthralled by Elric when I was younger and I think it probably was one of the few real swords and sorcery books that I read. Mind you, this wasn;t due to a lack of interest, When I was a kid, I'd read anything that was even tangentially related to fantasy or science fiction (and to a lesser extent horror). No, it had to do much more with a lack of availability and just plain lack of awareness on my part. Growing up in the days before the interwebs, I had to pretty much rely on the word of mouth distributuion network. Living in the midwest, this could be spotty as a few things were in play here: 1) there was a pretty sizable stigma placed on fantasy by the ultra conservative gestapo where I lived. 2) The was no way to reliably do any research as there was no Internet and the locali library did not really stock such things (other than books on mythology and fairy tales - Authurian legend is still very much interesting to me. 3) I could not drive and it would be many years yet before I could 4) I had a single mother who was absolutely clueless about such things (but she did try and even gave em my first AD&D Coloring Album and Monster Manual - they both still are among my most favored gaming books). Right before my freshman year of high school my mother remarried. This had several HUGE impacts on my life. Not the least of these impacts was picking up stakes and moving to West Germany (cold war era!). This served to 1) get me the heck out of the midwest and the puritanical belief system 2) dump me right into land of real life medieval castles 3) introduce me to a new set of friends that new more about fantsy and gaming. The Post Exchange had a limited book store, but being designed to cater to G.I.'s (whom had a large interest in gaming), I picked up all sorts of new reading. Elic and the Eternal Champion were perhaps my favorite of the lot. But soon other interests would take the center stage (girls, skateboarding, and punk rock). Fantasy would still be a passion but more of a guilty pleasure rather than something I was upfront about. So having said all of that, yeah, my reading has been a bit skewed. I'm thinking about appenix N of the DMG and reading some of the selections mentioned there. I'd also like to read some of the other classics of pug and sword and sorcery.

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