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.

The Blacktongue Thief is a fantasy novel by Christopher Buehlman. It’s randomly violent picaresque where a thief with magical gifts of an unknown origin, a witchling, and a knight who can summon massive war birds out of her skin, go on an adventure through a land that feels low fantasy but is indeed not at all.

First up, I listen to audiobooks mainly, and the voices the author puts on here are really impressive and very much drew me into the story. The story, being a tour around the world, benefits from the people in those places having a range of accents was significant and giving the main character a brogue made for a compelling listen, as did his breaking into song every now and then.

The Blacktongue Thief is honestly a masterpiece of interesting and largely exposition free world building. Where there is exposition, it’s usually in the form of a fallible story from an unreliable narrator, and so each time a story is told it’s a Rashomon-esque twist on a story told previously about the world. Mostly, though, you stumble upon things as they are encountered in the world: You don’t realise that there was a plague that killed all the horses until it became relevant, you don’t know that there was a decades long war against goblins until you meet someone who fought in it, you don’t know what a goblin or giant looks like (or whether or not they are as horrible as it is said they are) until you meet one. I absolutely adore this drip feeding of the world through when that history becomes relevant and no sooner — I genuinely don’t think giants are even mentioned until the two thirds point, even though they’re incredibly key to the resolution of the story.

Also of note is how this resolves in ways that could not be figured out at the outset, because of its reliance on the core narrator. That narrator is reliable in the sense that he usually tells you, the reader, the truth (he doesn’t once or twice but with a wink and a nod), but is unreliable in the sense that he’s being lied to by his companions and the world around him, and he only discovers the truth gradually over the course of the story. The core mystery here is unsolvable, because Kinch doesn’t have the necessary information, and hence, neither do you.

Also remarkable here is how it subverts so many Dungeons and Dragons tropes: Ubiquitous magic, beast masters, goblins, giants, thieves guilds, krakens, apocalypses are all subverted in interesting and surprising ways, and this book is surprising enough that I’m reluctant to spoil any further.

There are occasionally confounding missteps, however. It seems to me that many of the companions along the way simply exist to prove the danger of the journey, and I never feel as connected to them as I do the core three characters. The Kugel-inspired picaresque structure occasionally feels like the scene or location was imagined, but its bearing on the plot has not been adequately thought through. In this way it surely feels like a D&D campaign, to be honest.

Overall though, it inspires me to stop explaining everything. There are joy here, in discovering things as you go. And while I appreciate the desire to understand what you’re running, I feel like the urge for explanation can run counter to bringing that joy: The referee can have that joy, too. There is a lot of lore finding its way into my current project, and reading this feels salient, because I don’t want to read as much lore as I’ve written, but I think it’d be better drip fed and hidden throughout the module, like I did in Bridewell: I know the economy of the valley, but I never describe it anywhere.

Anyway, the Blacktongue Thief: Strong recommendation, for a precisely R-rated picaresque with a compellingly flawed and spiky protagonist.

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