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Pirates and Poison
Aug. 15th, 2019 12:14 pmLast night, we spent a fun evening with friends at Draughts, and played Treasure Island, a game that was entirely new to me. One player is Long John Silver, who has hidden his treasure somewhere on the island but can't go and get it because he's in prison. The other players are pirates, trying to figure out where the treasure is before John escapes and retrieves it for himself.
The pirate players move around the island map, picking up hints and searching for the treasure, with Long John doling out snippets of information as they go along. Some hints are provided to the whole group and some just to individual pirates, so it's up to the players how much information they share. Also, not all the hints are reliable, and players have to use up actions to determine whether or not they may be true.
It was quite a fun set-up, but the kind of game I'm usually really bad at. However, as the countdown to Long John's escape grew nearer and my fellow players revealed more and more of the information they had gathered, I used a clue I'd received quite early to work out that we had been fooled. We were all searching in one corner of the map, thinking we had narrowed the treasure location down, but I realised there was a whole other section that was still viable. So, I used my one-use-only fast gallop ability to teleport to the other area and found the treasure immediately!
On the way home, I finished reading my latest book, Poison Study by Maria V Snyder. I picked it up because it's one of the books reviewed on the Novel Predictions podcast, which I really enjoy, but which is obviously more fun if I'm familiar with the book. It tells the story of Yelena, a self-confessed murderer, who is given the opportunity to become the military dictator's food taster rather than be executed. She takes the job, gets trained in poison detection and has to navigate various threats to her life while trying to figure out secrets from her past.
I liked the world building - it's unusual in a high fantasy setting for the monarchy to have been overthrown by a military coup, and the rules of the society are interesting. I thought the writing was a bit clunky in places, with quite a bit of telling, but the story overall had lots of intrigue and action to keep it ticking along. Overall, I enjoyed it enough to carry on with the series, which is a good job because I bought a box set of all six.
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SPOILERS AHOY
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I liked Yelena's journey from totally lacking in agency, to getting herself trained in self-defence, figuring out how to use her burgeoning magic and eventually being able to take action to help resolve her predicament.
But the romance aspect was wildly unconvincing and felt very forced. The main male character is the Commander's spy master, Valek, who is the one who offers Yelena the job, subsequently trains her, and basically controls her whole existence, as she is still essentially his prisoner. So, it's a bit concerning from a power dynamics viewpoint that she falls in love with him. It also comes out of the blue with no development of the relationship in that direction. He does spend a lot of the book rescuing her from physical harm (which is also annoying) but it just didn't feel natural or satisfying to me. There are other male characters that would have been better suited as the love interest, and that I liked a lot more than Valek.
There is also a trans-gender character, which is good to see in this kind of book, though the treatment of this plot point felt a bit clumsy. At the end, one of the bad guys shouts out that the Commander is really a woman dressed as a man and all the soldiers laugh at the 'ravings of a madman'. There's then a whole paragraph explaining that they're not laughing because the idea of a woman in command is ridiculous, but because the Commander is so strait-laced they can't believe he would deceive them in this way. So, the author is certainly trying to avoid making the trans character a point of ridicule but it feels very clunky and over-done.
There's also some homophobic joking from one of the guard captains earlier on, which jars a bit.
The pirate players move around the island map, picking up hints and searching for the treasure, with Long John doling out snippets of information as they go along. Some hints are provided to the whole group and some just to individual pirates, so it's up to the players how much information they share. Also, not all the hints are reliable, and players have to use up actions to determine whether or not they may be true.
It was quite a fun set-up, but the kind of game I'm usually really bad at. However, as the countdown to Long John's escape grew nearer and my fellow players revealed more and more of the information they had gathered, I used a clue I'd received quite early to work out that we had been fooled. We were all searching in one corner of the map, thinking we had narrowed the treasure location down, but I realised there was a whole other section that was still viable. So, I used my one-use-only fast gallop ability to teleport to the other area and found the treasure immediately!
On the way home, I finished reading my latest book, Poison Study by Maria V Snyder. I picked it up because it's one of the books reviewed on the Novel Predictions podcast, which I really enjoy, but which is obviously more fun if I'm familiar with the book. It tells the story of Yelena, a self-confessed murderer, who is given the opportunity to become the military dictator's food taster rather than be executed. She takes the job, gets trained in poison detection and has to navigate various threats to her life while trying to figure out secrets from her past.
I liked the world building - it's unusual in a high fantasy setting for the monarchy to have been overthrown by a military coup, and the rules of the society are interesting. I thought the writing was a bit clunky in places, with quite a bit of telling, but the story overall had lots of intrigue and action to keep it ticking along. Overall, I enjoyed it enough to carry on with the series, which is a good job because I bought a box set of all six.
>
>
>
SPOILERS AHOY
>
>
>
I liked Yelena's journey from totally lacking in agency, to getting herself trained in self-defence, figuring out how to use her burgeoning magic and eventually being able to take action to help resolve her predicament.
But the romance aspect was wildly unconvincing and felt very forced. The main male character is the Commander's spy master, Valek, who is the one who offers Yelena the job, subsequently trains her, and basically controls her whole existence, as she is still essentially his prisoner. So, it's a bit concerning from a power dynamics viewpoint that she falls in love with him. It also comes out of the blue with no development of the relationship in that direction. He does spend a lot of the book rescuing her from physical harm (which is also annoying) but it just didn't feel natural or satisfying to me. There are other male characters that would have been better suited as the love interest, and that I liked a lot more than Valek.
There is also a trans-gender character, which is good to see in this kind of book, though the treatment of this plot point felt a bit clumsy. At the end, one of the bad guys shouts out that the Commander is really a woman dressed as a man and all the soldiers laugh at the 'ravings of a madman'. There's then a whole paragraph explaining that they're not laughing because the idea of a woman in command is ridiculous, but because the Commander is so strait-laced they can't believe he would deceive them in this way. So, the author is certainly trying to avoid making the trans character a point of ridicule but it feels very clunky and over-done.
There's also some homophobic joking from one of the guard captains earlier on, which jars a bit.
