Tuesday, January 15, 2019

STATUES adventure reviewed on Fear of a Black Dragon podcast



Fear of a Black Dragon, at The Gauntlet, devoted a 55-minute podcast to reviewing my STATUES adventure!  

Maybe I'll return to this with more detail in a future post, but it's gratifying how deeply they sunk their teeth into analyzing something into which I poured my heart's blood. 

Fear of a Black Dragon won a 2018 Silver Ennie award.  The podcast consists of Jason Cordova, who sounds like a fellow American, and Tom McCready, who sounds like an entertaining and erudite Britisher.  It's a very polished production.  There is fun interplay between the hosts, without the podcast becoming aimless or off-topic.

They cross media and genre lines, they get intertextual: There are comparisons and references in the podcast to Altman's classic 1975 film, Nashville, to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser's doings in Lankhmar, and 1979 cult film The Warriors.

Wandering through a city, meeting a vast range of people...

Each Fear of a Black Dragon podcast is cut into sections titled "The Basic Crawl", "The Expert Delve" - in which they dig deeper into a topic related to what they are reviewing, and "Companion Adventures"- in which they mention other artworks, TV, movies, games, which pair like wines with the roast beast they have just carved in front of you.  In the Expert Delve for STATUES, Tom McCready coins the term "Urban Picaresque" for the genre of this adventure.  Interesting analysis!

In summary, podcasts well worth listening to:  Fear of a Black Dragon