Appendix Nova is me, reviewing stuff that isn’t games. I just thought it might be fun. But, I as with everything I do, I always use these things to give me game ideas, and so I’ll loop it back around to that eventually. So honestly, this is a little bit just me taking notes, so they’ll be brief. Oh, and there’ll be spoilers. I’ll talk about what I want, but I’ll try to be vague.

Master of Djinn is a fantasy novel by P Djeli Clarke. It’s a police procedural, about two women detectives in alternate history 1920’s Cairo, where djinn and other magical creatures have in recent memory assimilated into twentieth century society.

A Master of Djinn features a masc gay woman protagonist, who wears the most spectacular suits (very well described), and I vibe it very, very hard.

While I saw the “identity of the villain” twist three quarters of the book off, I really enjoyed the idea that the source of the villains powers were unclear and as much of the story was spent figuring out how the villain could be doing the things they were doing, as spent actually confounding the villain. I could see the translating into a grand campaign. A version of Dragonlance where the question wasn’t where are the good dragons but rather how are our foes controlling dragons seems far more compelling to me.

This is doubled down with the interesting minions: Firstly, the fact that the villain controls at times the main characters allies, leading to a neat mole situation, and secondly because the two main minions are nigh unstoppable. The fact that the minions are unstoppable makes for a really compelling villain.

I also, personally, really love villains that are petty with petty goals, because most people in real life are petty with petty goals. So the fact that the villain here — despite being driven and capable of world-shattering — is petty with petty goals makes me really happy. I can relate to a villain who is really just frustrated that they were overlooked for that promotion for a mediocre white man.

The big thought I came out of this with was “gosh, I could picture a fascinating roleplaying game setting out of this”. I listened to it on the back of talking about working with the AFD discord community on a setting zine with a bunch of little knock-offs of classic 2nd edition lines. Al-qadim obviously came up, and was also pretty clearly too racist to adapt. But it was still a childhood favourite of a lot of people. And A Master of Djinn is a book about queer women in the middle east, but a queer woman…wait no. P Djeli Clark is a Caribbean-American man who grew up in New York. Honestly, I was shocked, but also it doesn’t feel as western a fantasy to me as, say, City of Brass does. City of Brass, which I enjoyed, feels like fan fiction. This does not. Honestly I’d be really interested in an middle easterner’s perspective on this seeming current popularity in middle eastern fantasy written or created by western folk (that jinn movie by George Miller comes to mind as well). Anyway, I would be all on board an egyptian clockwork robots and Djinn with gunpowder setting as a replacement for the tired and orientalist 1001 nights lite that was Al Qadim.

Anyway, those’re my thoughts on A Master of Djinn. It’s a good book, especially if you enjoy queer romance, perplexing magic and historical settings.

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