Gen Con started in 1968 as a small gathering of tabletop gamers. Like Dragon*Con in Atlanta, and the comic book conventions of San Diego and New York, Gen Con eventually presented a wide variety of media, including general fantasy and science fiction as well as television and video games. But primarily, the convention is associated with non-electronic wargaming and role-playing games, since the show was started by the late Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s estimated that over 40,000 people visited Gen Con 2013.

Thousands of players gathered in Indianapolis, Indiana for Gen Con 2013 the weekend of August 17. This room is one of fifteen exhibition halls filled with tables for face-to-face gaming.

You can guess right away the question that we would raise at a show like Gen Con. Authors have always been independent, with an identity quite separate from their publishers. Likewise, every musician is considered independent until signed by a label. And with video games in particular, software development kits (SDKs) and Internet distribution make it possible for a solo programmer to reach a wide audience of gamers. How can this also be true of non-electronic games? Can a solo designer or a small team make a board game, or a card game, or an RPG that’s worthwhile?

Mark Diaz Truman, of Magpie Games and the Indie Game Developer Network, answers questions and represents game products at the IGDN booth at Gen Con 2013 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Mark Diaz Truman, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, thinks that the answer is a resounding yes. Truman and his merry band of independent game designers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with big, established game publishers at Gen Con. From their booth, the IGDN offered product demonstrations and sales in the same environment as Wizards of the Coast, Chaosium and Steve Jackson Games.

The IGDN was created by Truman, 31, and a number of like-minded designers who couldn’t bear reinventing the wheel over and over again. While it’s possible to do business outside of mainstream channels, these designers found it difficult to communicate productively, even with technology to connect people. In an effort to pool their knowledge and experience, they created a private e-mail distribution list to have honest exchanges away from the noise of the general Internet. Eventually the IGDN became more like a traditional trade and labor organization, with yearly dues and bylaws.

Truman’s organization is sensitive to the challenges that face independent game designers, which are also common to all indie media creators. “It’s hard to get people to try a new game,” said Truman. “Freelance and indie game design has never paid much, and folks have to work a long time to build a reputation. It’s easy to get in over your head with a print run that’s too large or a project that runs over budget while falling behind.”

In that light, the purpose of the IGDN is not just to share information, but to pool resources as well. Truman said their industry booth “was made possible by the joint efforts of our membership. Alone we would only be able to purchase small advertisements, but together we can actually put our books out in front of fans at Gen Con in a really exciting way.”

When pressed to explain how an indie game designer is different from a mainstream game company employee, Truman cited the example of his own recent work on a major RPG based on a television property. In Truman’s eyes, there is no conflict in accepting freelance or contract work from major companies while still producing your own material. “My independent impulse will always allow that I work on the projects that I am excited about,” said Truman. “The gaming industry doesn’t work like it used to. There’s no such thing as selling out in this business.”

Truman went on to describe the conflict between commerce and art that exists in independent games, and for all independent media. “It’s really a spectrum, not a chasm,” he said of the division between the two. “If a game is good on its own, then people will buy it. But some creators care less about sales than they do about making a point. An independent game creator has passion.”

So what is Mark Diaz Truman passionate about? As a graduate of the Harvard-Kennedy School of Government, with a Master’s degree in public policy, Truman cares a great deal about social inequality as it relates to issues of race and gender. This passion is reflected in his ambitious flagship game, the short-form RPG “Our Last Best Hope”. Truman said that he wanted to improve on the tropes of the disaster movie by making a game where many nations had to gather a diverse group of experts to avert some world-ending crisis.

“I think the most exciting part of the indie movement is the innovation, both in terms of setting and mechanics,” said Truman. He pointed out several tabletop games which addressed controversial or uncomfortable subjects meant to challenge players, and which wouldn’t necessarily be sold by any mainstream game company. Among them were Kagematsu, an RPG that encourages male gamers to think about medieval gender disparity, and Fiasco, about amateur crimes gone horribly wrong.

Have we answered the question of what makes a media creator independent?  Truman thinks it’s a question we’ll continue to debate for a while. “It’s really hard to define what makes someone ‘indie’ and it’s a topic that a lot of smarter folks than me have fought over for years before I even got into publishing,” he said. “For the IGDN, we really focus on looking for members who are maintaining as much creative ownership and control as possible. We care a lot less about where you work or if this is your full time job than we do if you are acting as a creative agent. ”

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Danmaku? I barely know you.

Any discussion of twin-stick shooters starts with Robotron and ends with Geometry Wars. The formula is very simple, in that you move with one joystick and shoot with the other. Being able to duck off to the side while you’re shooting enemies chasing behind you is one of the most powerful legacies left behind by the coin-operated arcade machine. Other unique controls included twisting paddle knobs on top of the joystick like you had in Ikari Warriors, or the complex thumb buttons and triggers of the original Tron game. But the twin sticks were most easily duplicated with home gaming equipment, and the advent of analog controllers meant more precision without sacrificing the simplicity (or the addictive nature) of the games. Twin stick shooters are easy to learn and remain reliably entertaining today.

These instructions also apply to high school and certain sections of Damascus.

Let’s get the few negative things out of the way first. It’s evident that the writing isn’t being done by a native English speaker, what with all the improper verb tenses and the odd sentence fragments, to say nothing of the story built entirely out of cliche. The music is one long boring Casio-synthesized string crescendo that wouldn’t be out of place at Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland. Also, some of the graphical features are uninformative or distracting. Why do enemies sometimes change color when I hit them? Do one of the six text boxes in my heads-up display tell me? I can’t read anything anyway through all of the unnecessary flak explosions that are flashing everywhere for hours after somebody dies. There are also a couple of extra game modes that give you side-scrolling and static enemy shooter modes that are fun for exactly as much time as it takes to say “Gradius!” or “Galaga!” before you turn them off and go back to the main campaign mode.

Any astronomy student would be happy to help out with the language and terminology for a case of beer.

But what a campaign mode it is. Defenders of the Last Colony borrows the best feature of Geometry Wars: Galaxies, by structuring play around different levels and different goals. The beta only provides two of these levels, but they successfully convey the variety of challenge that awaits you in the full game. The first level makes you collect resources to move on, which is strange because you’re spending very little time killing things. That worry goes away in the second level, where you have to split your attention between collecting that fuel and fighting off the enemies that threaten your mother ship. It’s a level of tactical thinking that’s not usually present in a twin-stick shooter, and at a certain point the option of having three other players on the same screen starts to make sense. Teamwork can make some of the challenges reasonable, if not any easier.

There’s a lot to like about the original design choices too. Each player’s ship is surrounded by a simple status indicator that shows shields remaining and resources collected. That feature neatly solves the problem of output display meant for multiple players, since everybody will naturally be looking at his or her own ship anyway. One type of ship can use materials to switch weapons, whereas the other can actually build stations and floating weapon platforms as you would in a real-time strategy game. There’s also a cleverly informative radar on top of your ship that indicates the position of the closest enemies, and with multiple players it’s possible to triangulate an off-screen target. That becomes important when the action is zoomed in close, and the camera points away from the mother ship that you’re spending so much time protecting.

If Namco hasn’t sued Gameloft yet, they probably won’t sue you for this either.

Defenders of the Last Colony is a promising first effort from the Knitted Pixels development group. It strikes a competent balance between the familiar and the innovative.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In the same way that every board game shares a number of default mechanisms, every SRPG has in common a number of gameplay features that make it familiar and welcoming. Servants of God puts you on a square grid map, and by turns your troops and your enemies jockey for position and attack one another. Not every battle is a fight to the death, as different victory goals are stated for each battle. You might be required to hold a particular position, or to escape from a superior force. In between battles there are more traditional RPG game elements, in a mechanism borrowed from Shining Force III that puts a town and a barracks in place of a boring statistical menu. A player can expect dialogue exchanges that impart narrative, or free exploration segments where you meet new characters and discover new quests to complete.

Servants of God has some interesting and unique qualities that set it apart. Rather than a modern military environment (like Nintendo’s Advance Wars) or a western medieval world, the game is set in a fictional middle eastern universe that bravely evokes images of ancient Ottoman and Moorish culture. The detailed dialogue exchanges also imply that there are consequences to the different choices, as it’s possible to be polite or rude to your allies or to the various people you meet. These are the sort of details that indicate a lot of love and effort went into creating the game world, and making a player care about more than just moving soldiers around on a map.

A couple of design choices are a little worrying. Both battles and exploration show all the characters from a literal overhead viewpoint, in that you’re looking straight at the top of everyone’s head. That sometimes makes it hard to distinguish among your troops during a fight, and the lack of detail is only accentuated by the elaborate character portraits you see outside of battle. There also doesn’t seem to be any way to resize the game window or run in full screen, which might be a limitation of the Adobe Air environment used for development. It’s evident from the meaty icons, large fonts and the lack of drop-down menus that the user interface was intended to be ported to touchscreen devices at some point in the future. That means a player has to click the mouse a little more than you might in any other game intended solely for PC. There’s also a small problem with the pathfinding during battle, in that your troop movement limitations are calculated literally rather than relatively. In other words, moving back and forth twice between two spaces on the grid  counts as five units of movement rather than just one, which forces you to reset and try to move your character again. That’s different from the way every other SRPG calculates movement.

But those are minor complaints that are mostly outweighed by the grin-inducing sense of fun you get from playing. Small strategic details like flank attacks and ranged weapon usage are exactly right. The conflict that drives the game is worldly and political, but the main character’s quest is a personal one about family. There’s even an in-game explanation for why you’re able to see the position of every fighter on the battlefield, which is a detail that isn’t usually addressed in an SRPG of any type or setting. What’s most inspiring about the game is the novelty of the setting, which never seems to wear itself out.  The good qualities of the game thoroughly overshadow the issues.

A demo of Telepath RPG: Servants of God is available on the Sinister Games website, and the full game is expected to be released in February with a retail price of $24.95.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Naomi and Mattie are sisters who want nothing more than to court worthy men and start families of their own. But Mattie’s budding romance with a new convert to the faith may be derailed by her father’s secret, sinful past. And when Naomi’s prodigal suitor whisks her away to a different life in New York, does she forget her obligations to God and to her family? There’s barely room for both story lines in 274 pages, and the two sisters scarcely cross paths outside of a laborious introduction full of long flashbacks and too many characters that come and go unexpectedly.

Dmitriev is an experienced and knowledgeable writer, and her grip on Amish culture is credible and authoritative. Over the course of forty chapters, what initially feels like fetishism eventually reads as respect and genuine affection for a foreign culture anchored in an America that is tolerant but not always accepting. Dmitriev gets all the little details right, from the hairstyles to the vocabulary, all the way through to the complicated reality that the Amish must rely on the kindness of outsiders and the benefits of their technology. But a major problem with the book as a whole is that Dmitriev communicates this information in a workmanlike and clinical manner. There’s no poetry when we learn that braids signify a girl is too young to marry, or that people opposed to electricity have no problem with mobile phones for emergencies. Some of these facts pop up randomly in the middle of long prose sections, as if they were meant to be footnotes or academic sidebars. This stilted presentation has the effect of making our omniscient narrator sound less than all-knowing, a lost outsider in an alien world.

Thankfully, the story comes alive when the action moves to New York. Naomi’s transformation from Amish wallflower to Fifth Avenue fashion maven is plausible, mostly because she doesn’t live on the runway. Her brief time as a model is believable precisely because it’s so brief, and her ultimate destination as a workaday corporate fashion buyer is anything but a fairytale ending. Sadly, Mattie’s forbidden romance back at home is the more interesting of the pair, and has the potential to be a real exploration of gender boundaries and faith-driven decision making as prescribed by the genre. But a complicated subplot involving paternity testing undermines the religious subtext that defines this type of fiction. Mendelian genetics bizarrely block God from being a meaningful character with any impact on the two young women.

It’s very difficult to recommend the book. Amish romance aficionados are not likely to put up with the way “Stolen Bride” deviates from the norm, even if those turns make for better fiction overall. Likewise, general readers aren’t likely to become fans of the genre after reading this particular work, because the dramatic components of the two stories would be considered derivative in any other format.

Stolen Bride, by Valentine Dmitriev. Published 2011 by CreateSpace, ISBN 978-1463665920. 278 pages, softcover.

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The setting is the most interesting part of the game, a cel-shaded island paradise that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Nintendo 64 or the Dreamcast. The laid-back cartoon physics of the puzzles are certainly reminiscent of Banjo-Kazooie, and the faux-Caribbean structures and music pleasantly recall Samba de Amigo. These qualities aren’t good enough to distract from the fiddly gameplay, which on the first level is repetitive and more than a little tedious.

Since your flying whales can’t actually interact with the environment, you’re dependent on the other characters to do your dirty work. This generally involves picking them up, and then using their unique gadget to drag something, push something, or flip something over. This is fine when you just need to put weight on a floor switch or move a large obstacle. But when multiple puzzles are nailed together in separate rooms, the game becomes a frustrating marriage of fetch quests and unavoidable backtracking. I have to go over the stream to push the little guy onto the switch using the magic animal flute, then I have to come back over the stream and switch to the grappling plunger so I can rotate the lever that moves the ski lift so I can get the second guy over to the second switch. But wait, the second guy isn’t on the lift yet, so I have to switch back to the flute to push him into the seat and then switch back to the grappler… And now I’m ready to download Daytona. There’s intriguing potential for two simultaneous players to cooperate for puzzle solving, but imprecise control and an annoying crosshair reticule don’t make me anxious to try that feature out.

Will kids warm to this game with no licensed characters and no marketing outside of PSN? That’s for parents to decide. Ten years ago this game would have merited a budget release on a disk for $30. Is it worth $14.99 to download the full game? Let your child try the demo first and see if she asks for more.

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Eufloria

A disembodied voice commands you to plant trees and spread seedlings around a white, featureless universe. ‘Go forth and multiply’ is the command, and you’re tasked with establishing a presence on big round asteroids found all throughout space. But you’re not the only plant life form in the world, and so you’re challenged to fill the emptiness and not to surrender to the other plants who are encroaching on your property.

It might not be fair to compare Eufloria to other RTS games. It’s not aimed at the market that plays Warcraft, Starcraft, or any other imitator. Abstraction is the order of the day, in that every mechanical component of an RTS is stripped down to the most basic presentation. Units are ‘seedlings’ that look like dots until you zoom in on them, and even then there’s very little customization to do. Bases are ‘trees’ whose function differs depending on where you build them, and again you can’t otherwise customize the type of base that gets built.

The main strength of Eufloria is also its most glaring weakness, in the way that information about your success or failure is communicated. By centering combat around bases only, it becomes very easy to evaluate how well you’re doing. Units are always associated with a base, and while they can travel from one base to another they don’t actively engage enemies except in the context of attacking or defending an asteroid. So moving your cursor to an asteroid immediately tells you how many of each unit are present and whether you’re winning or losing. While that makes for efficient play, it also robs the game of the nuance that’s unique to the genre. Without the complexity of customization, without the build-up and gathering of varied resources, the whole affair becomes a binary, black-or-white decision making process. That will divert but not hook new players, and will do nothing to retain veteran RTS gamers.

Other RTS experiments on consoles have produced deviations from the standard play format that might some day come together in a transcendent game. Tom Clancy’s Endwar has a method of geographic delineation similar to Eufloria. Robocalypse had a unique icon-based command system that hasn’t been imitated. And Sega’s Stormrise has a imperfect but inspired method of moving units around. Eufloria will be considered another one of those stepping stones in the long run. There’s a demo you can try first before you decide if it’s worth the full $9.99.

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Jackie, our redhead heroine, is faced with a dilemma. As zombies climb out of the ground to consume the living, does she travel south to save her best friend or east to make contact with the scientist who might save the country? There WIll Be Brains is a solid first effort from Xbox Live Indie Games developer David Parker. While the premise of a zombie apocalypse isn’t original at all, the execution of the gameplay concepts and the art presentation is well thought out. But a number of minor flaws keep the game from having any replay potential once you see both endings. Although the game doesn’t exceed its 80 Microsoft Point value in any way, there’s enough worthwhile content to make players look forward to the promised sequel.

While the game is structured like a side-scrolling brawler, it’s really another iteration of the Space Invaders concept turned horizontally. Zombies approach slowly (or surprisingly quickly) from the right with the intent of tearing down your ramshackle barricade of furniture and garbage. You can choose to take down your undead enemies at long range with the usual assortment of firearms, or you can engage them at the barricade with some gory melee weapons. Each level challenges you to survive five waves of zombies before you can scavenge enough fuel to make it to the next city. In between waves of zombies, a not-so-mysterious street merchant can sell you new weapons, or can sell you extra fuel so you can skip a wave. You can also upgrade existing weapons, but you can only have two at a time equipped. Fortunately, you can also have a special weapon held in reserve, a smart bomb attack that clears the screen of enemies when you’re overwhelmed.

The positive aspects of the game reflect a high level of creativity. The 3D character models are well-rendered and fit well into the hand-drawn backgrounds, which evoke the Sega Saturn game Three Dirty Dwarves. The zombie death animations are also fun to see, as a sniper bullet causes a different sort of death than a kayak paddle. There are also some measured trade-offs in the selection and purchasing of weapons. For example, the shotgun has a powerful spread bullet but takes a very long time to reload, wheras the sniper rifle kills in one shot but only holds one bullet at a time. The money you earn from killing zombies can be spent on anything, so you always have to decide if your limited funds should be spent rebuilding your barricade or making your glock shoot straighter. As an aside, it’s nice to see that switching weapons also alters your costume subtly, like the Chicago newsboy cap you get with the rapid-firing tommy gun, or the elaborate buckler you wear when you equip the Greek gladius sword.

While the flaws in the game are excusable at the price, they can be distracting at the wrong moments. There’s really no advantage to engaging the zombies at melee distance, since they tear down the barrier so quickly. A min/max type of player will immediately observe that powering up firearms is the best option available, and will never spend money on a sword or a chainsaw. There’s also a distracting use of RPG numbers in the user interface. The displayed money stat reflects only what’s been earned in the current wave of zombies, and not the total amount you’ll have available to spend at the end. There’s also a slot for the amount of fuel you’ve accumulated, which is always in increments of twenty. Why not have a five-segment bar graph indicator instead? The same sort of graphical substitution would suit the strength of the barricade, which is a misleading number that counts down from 100. Although the barricade does visually break down as the zombies tear it away, it’s never clear how quickly it’s being depleted or whether or not you’re in danger of dying unexpectedly. Finally, there’s almost no advantage to buying fuel instead of weapons or barricade repair. Until you reach the final level, it doesn’t make sense to skip a wave of zombies if there’s money to be earned.

It’s usually out of line to criticize the music chosen for an independently-developed video game, given the complicated nature of licensing and producing a song. But the droning vibraphone vamp chord in There Will Be Brains would be better suited to a massage parlor waiting room.

One major bug in the game is already being addressed. At 720p and 480p resolutions, the font used for the stat display and dialogue scenes is too large and runs off the side of the screen. That means a player isn’t able to read instructions or see all of the text balloons in most circumstances. A patch to fix this problem is already under review for distribution as of this writing.

The conclusion of the game suggests that a possible sequel could resume telling the story from either the sad or happy ending. You may not spend a lot of time with Jackie, but it’s probably worth another 80 Microsoft points to see if she and her friends survive the next battle.

There Will Be Brains by David Parker, available on Xbox Live Indie Games as an 80 point download. Completed four times for review, twice for each ending.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

To his credit, editor David Lee Summers has assembled a very capable stable of authors who have an obvious love for the subject matter. Accomplished writers and editors like Patrick Thomas and Danielle Ackley-McPhail bring experience and brevity to work that would otherwise collapse under its own weight. Every work Summers chose to include is easy to read and to enjoy, and there’s no danger of being distracted by made-up terminology or faux military processes.

But this brevity only serves to accentuate how well-trodden these paths are. We’ve already seen the alien invasion, the hopeless last stand of an abandoned outpost, and the salvage mission gone wrong. Even more recent tropes are well represented, like the robot impersonating a human or the lone survivor trapped with no hope of escape. Just about every story in the book has been done as a 1950s cliffhanger serial or a Star Trek episode. That doesn’t take away from the quality of the writing in any way, but it’s hard to recommend the book as a whole when it’s all so familiar.

A notable exception would be Dana Bell’s “Chosen One”, a story of an alien encounter told from an unusual non-human perspective. Bell’s story is truly original and has the added benefit of being well-suited to the medium. Some science fiction concepts simply can’t be filmed or animated, and Bell uses her eight pages of dense prose to maximum effect. If only the story weren’t so short, it might be worth the full price of the book for that one work alone.

Full Throttle Space Tales 4: Space Horrors, edited by David Lee Summers. Published 2010 by Flying Pen Press, ISBN 978-0-9818957-6-5. 284 pages, softcover.

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

One part Planet of the Apes and one part X-men, Laura Anne Gilman’s Dragon Virus is exciting but bleak, a provocative view of a future built on genetic engineering. In a world where evolution can be controlled, are human beings worthy of moving around their own building blocks? It’s not an original concept, but Gilman tells a compelling and concise story by relating brief vignettes over a century of speculative history.

The premise of Dragon Virus is an interesting synthesis of existing science fiction concepts, where anxieties about genetic modification color everyday concerns about religion, adolescence and community. A series of mutations results in still-born babies with physical qualities that seem to be drawn from old mythology. Wings, gills, and extra arms inspire equal parts religious fervor and scientific curiosity among ordinary people. Over time, advances in medicine allow these children to survive and to thrive, and the world must adapt as its people resist change.

The strongest content appears in chapters 2 and 3, which follow the experiences of one of the first doctors to research the phenomenon, and a circle of friends who are  mutated schoolchildren that must rise up against prejudice. While these figures have little opportunity to grow beyond their brief and sketchy appearances, Gilman’s strength as a writer is her ability to draw sympathetic characters quickly. Their reactions to conflict are extraordinary in that they are so ordinary, and not predictably dramatic or heroic.

Gilman borrows a trick from horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, in that she allows the writing to be seamlessly smarter than her characters. As they narrate, even casual readers end up knowing things that the people of that changing world never learn. It’s an efficient way to impart a story that few other writers do well. On the downside, Gilman makes up futuristic slang that is appropriate for the setting, but difficult to read. Thankfully, the language doesn’t distract from the powerful ideas.

Dragon Virus, by Laura Anne Gilman. Published 2011 by Fairwood Press, ISBN 978-1-933846-25-5. 102 pages, softcover and limited-edition hardcover.

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Maritime piracy during the age of exploration inspires a great deal of romantic, idealized fiction. But like the American wild west, the actual historical era can’t possibly contain all of the stories that have been written about the period. Veteran fantasy authors Stephen J. Sullivan and Jean Rabe decided to solve that problem by creating a whole universe of sailing heroes called the Blue Kingdoms, and ended up submitting their creation for the Wizards of the Coast “Fantasy Setting Search” competition. They weren’t discouraged when Eberron was chosen as the new Dungeons and Dragons game world, so now Blue Kingdoms lives and breathes in the form of four short story anthologies. Blue Kingdoms: Buxom Buccaneers leaps off the shelf fully formed as a pleasant, diverting page-turner. The book is intended for a general adult audience, and while there’s fantasy violence and an amount of innuendo it’s not inappropriate for young adult readers.

One of the advantages of a fantasy setting is that historical accuracy can take a back seat to modern sensibilities regarding race and gender. So while the titular buccaneers of the anthology certainly don’t lack for prose sex appeal, the book is never juvenile or exploitative. In “Magic’s Price” by Kathleen Watness, the spell-casting skipper has lost a hand, but not in the way we imagine would usually happen to a pirate. Likewise in Jason Mical’s “Keva’s Six,” elves and dwarves stand in for whatever foreign peoples might be unwelcome at a frontier port. Every Blue Kingdoms book effectively takes the tropes of the pirate story and turns them on their bandanna-wrapped heads, and Buxom Buccaneers continues that tradition satisfyingly.

Easily the best story of the bunch of Sullivan’s own “Sisters in Arms,” a story of filial loyalty and female empowerment. Sullivan draws the reader into his sailing world subtly but insistently, and along the way the unusual gender of his fighting sailors ceases to be either a burden or a novelty. In a century where the word ‘feminist’ is no longer relevant, the best kind of fantasy fiction assigns roles without regard to sex, and Sullivan does that skillfully and convincingly.

The way that “Sisters in Arms” ends the book illustrates an ongoing problem with the whole series in that many of the short stories don’t spend enough time establishing the world for new readers. Even established fans of the series might have trouble following along with all the specialized dialogue and place names of the Blue Kingdoms, and without an existing tie-in or some other reference material, it’s easy to be distracted or lost. That’s only a minor complaint for what’s otherwise a satisfying read.

Blue Kingdoms: Buxom Buccaneers edited by Stephen J. Sullivan and Jean Rabe. Published 2008 by Walkabout Publishing, ISBN 978-0-9802086-5-8. 182 pages, softcover.

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.