Heroes Dark Continent

Perrin, Lester Smith, Margaret Weis Don. Sovereign Stone Game System. Sovereign Press,
Very Good; The original Sovereign Stone book, not the later D20 version.; 168 pages; "A World In Peril: A savage army marches out of the west. Its soldiers--the monstrous and terrifying Taan--have never before been seen on this continent. Dark rumors whisper that the army is being led by the evil Dagnarus, Lord of the Void, dead for two hundred years. His captains are Vrykyl, fearsome undead who long ago traded life for horrible immortality. The nations of Loerem--realms of the Humans, the Elves, the Dwarves and and the Orks--are too involved in warring with each other to pay much attention to this new threat. But throughout the world, heroes from every race have seen the dark clouds gather. They are arming themselves with sorcery and with steel to meet the coming challenge. Join them . . . if you dare. The Game at a Glance Skill based system, each skill and attribute is listed as a die type, ie: d8 in strength. Actions are rolled with an attribute die and a skill die. A character can exert for an extra die, but at the cost of stun points. Magic is rolled with an attribute die and a skill die, too. You need to achieve a number of points and the spell goes off. If you don't reach it in one turn, you add your next turn's roll. The world has Orks, Elves, Humans and Dwarves as player races, as well as a few new ones, and a really nasty set of villains! The Orks are a sea-faring race, advantaged in water magic. The Elves are a medieval Japanese-like race, advantaged in air magic. The Dwarves are a nomadic Mongol-like race, advantaged in fire magic. The Humans are mid-European medieval-like, advantaged in earth magic. The Taan, the void magic users, are just plain wicked!". 0965842231.

Paperback,

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Buel, J.W. Heroes of the Dark Continent & How Stanley Found Emin Pasha, Philadelphia: Manufacturers' Book Co. 1889

Hard Cover. First Edition. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall. Complete history of all the great explorations and Discoveries in Africa, from the earliest ages to the present timePoor-Good/No dust jacket. Red cloth boards w/heavy wear & damp staining on upper top quater, cracked front & rear hinges, front endpaper & frontispiece are unattached but still intact, fold-out map is missing. No ownership markings, text & illustrations are clean. Illustrated w/580 of the grandest most beautiful and wonderful engravings and Magnificent Colored plates & maps. F Hardcover

[SW: TRAVEL & EXPLORATION, HUNTERS, EXPLORATIONS, DISCOVERIES, EXPEDITIONS, AFRICAN HISTORY, SUPERSTITIONS, LIVINGSTONE, CAPTAIN SPEKE, BAKER'S EXPEDITION , NILE RIVER, SLAVE TRADE, MAKKARIKA CANNIBALS, LIVINGSTONE'S BURIAL, SOUDAN, CONGO VOYAGE, BOLOBO, YAMBU]

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Wilbur Smith. Blue Horizon (Courtney Family Adventures). St. Martin's Paperbacks,
0312991428 ISBN:0312991428 Mass Market Paperback, 812 pages. G. Light wear, spine creases, otherwise a solid unmarked copy. St. Martin's Paperback, 2004. Adventure, Action. More Fun from Wilbur Smith, December 9, 2004 Reviewer: mrliteral (Woodland Hills, CA United States) - In a certain sense, historical fiction is like science fiction, except one looks forward while the other looks back. Certainly both genres are wide-ranging in what they cover, not only in terms of topics, but in terms of style. Look at some of the big names in historical fiction: James Michener writes epics focusing on the evolution of a place rather than characters; James Clavell writes sagas of intrigue in eastern Asia; John Jakes focuses on U.S. history and writes what may be considered soap operas. Then there is Wilbur Smith, who uses history as a backdrop to adventure stories. The somewhat outdated and politically incorrect term for Africa is the Dark Continent, a reference to the fact that it was largely unexplored and mysterious. To a large extent, this remains true for popular fiction: Outside of some North African WWII tales, few novels take place on this continent. Wilbur Smith is the exceptional writer in this regard. Blue Horizon is a sequel to Smith's previous novels of Birds of Prey and Monsoon, focusing on several generations of the Courtney family, English expatriates who are trying to eke out a living around the South African Cape. Birds of Prey follows Hal Courtney; Monsoon follows Hal's sons, Tom, Guy and Dorian; Blue Horizon deals with the same characters plus Tom's son Jim and Dorian's son Mansur. Jim rescues a woman from a convict ship and they both wind up fugitives pursued by bounty hunters. Meanwhile, Dorian, adopted son of the Omani caliph, must contend with his vicious step-brother who has ascended to the throne. The focus in this story is on adventure as the heroes move from one perilous situation to another. "Heroes" is definitely the right word, as these are definitely good guys; similarly, their foes are unquestionably evil. It is obvious that Smith, despite his historical context, is not all that interested in realism, but that's okay; that's not what you look for in such a book. Similarly, the extremely progressive attitude of the protagonists - anti-slavery and completely tolerant of other races and religions - may be a little optimistic from a historical standpoint, but Smith makes it work. Actually, if there is a lesson to come out of this book, it is that these attitudes actually do pay off, as the heroes are able to achieve success as a result of their positive qualities; the villains, on the other hand, can only achieve victory through force, resulting in a less lasting success. But such lessons are secondary to what this book is all about: fun and adventure, and in this area, Smith is successful enough to rate five stars. .

PAPERBACK, Good

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Stephen King. Hearts In Atlantis. Scribner,
0684853515 ISBN: 0684853515 Hardcover with dustjacket, 523 pages. VG/VG. A Very Nice Copy! Scribner, First Edition, First Printing, 1999. Horror. Amazon.com Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is "Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mom is impoverished, and so bitter that she barely loves him. King is as good as Spielberg or Steven Millhauser at depicting an enchanted kid's-eye view of the world, and his Harwich is realistically luminous to the tiniest detail: kids bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock, a car grille "like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish," a Wild Mouse carnival ride that makes kids "simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately." Bobby's mom takes in a lodger, Ted Brautigan, who turns the boy on to great books like Lord of the Flies. Unfortunately, Ted is being hunted by yellow-jacketed men--monsters from King's Dark Tower novels who take over the shady part of town. They close in on Ted and Bobby, just as a gang of older kids menace Bobby and his girlfriend, Carol. This pointedly echoes the theme of Lord of the Flies (the one book King says he wishes he'd written): war is the human condition. Ted's mind-reading powers rub off a bit on Bobby, granting nightmare glimpses of his mom's assault by her rich, vile, jaunty boss. King packs plenty into 250 pages, using the same trick Bobby discerns in the film Village of the Damned: "The people seemed like real people, which made the make-believe parts scarier." Vietnam is the otherworldly horror that haunts the remaining four stories. In the title tale, set in 1966, University of Maine college kids play the card game Hearts so obsessively they risk flunking out and getting drafted. The kids discover sex, rock, and politics, become war heroes and victims, and spend the '80s and '90s shell-shocked by change. The characters and stories are crisscrossed with connections that sometimes click and sometimes clunk. The most intense Hearts player, Ronnie Malenfant ("evil infant"), perpetrates a My Lai-like atrocity; a nice Harwich girl becomes a radical bomber. King's metaphor for lost '60s innocence is inspired by Donovan's "sweet and stupid" song about the sunken continent, and his stories hail the vanished Atlantis of his youth with deep sweetness and melancholy intelligence. --Tim Appelo.

Hardcover, Very Good

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