2025 read #4: Kids on Bikes: 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski.

Kids on Bikes: Strange Adventures in Small Towns, 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski

Includes “The Horror in the House on Hook Hill,” written and designed by Sen Foong-Lim and Alara Cameron

180 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 25, 2024 to January 7

Rating: n/a

The only game system books I’d read in their entirety before this were the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook from the 5th edition of D&D. With Wizards of the Coast doing everything in their power to alienate their audience and burn years of goodwill to the ground, it’s time to learn some new systems!

Thanks to my partner R for gifting me this one. <3

What I like about this book: The wealth of thought that went into its discussions of how to play a mutually respectful game with others. I feel like the DMG and years of being the forever-DM taught me less than this book offered about the topics of table safety, collaborative storytelling, prompting players, backpedaling when the story goes places it shouldn’t, and ways to make failing a roll both interesting and an opportunity to move the game forward. Whatever system I use in the future, I appreciate having these role-play tools at hand.

What could have been better: Just like the Player’s Handbook, Kids on Bikes buried the rules of play within some sub-optimal formatting. I like the choice to foreground ethical gaming, but perhaps the core rules could be highlighted with an edge color for easy reference. More pertinently, the book explains what to do with a particular game condition before it defines the game condition, e.g. we get told we can spend Adversity Tokens several pages before we learn what they are or how we get them. It felt slightly disorganized.

I’m excited to (someday, hopefully) be able to play a Kids on Bikes game. This book also joins E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies, Now and Then, Super 8, and a general cultural awareness of IT (which I haven’t read, or watched in full) on my meager list of inspirations for the kids-on-bikes novel I began writing this week.

2020 read #4: Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, et al.

Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Sam Witwer
433 pages
Published 2018
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This is the first book I've managed to read in its entirety since January. First I got stuck in a book that I didn't feel like finishing, then I developed anxiety about COVID-19, then came lockdown and panic attacks and depression and having no time to myself, then came the massive protests and uprisings against white violence and police brutality. This has been a turbulent year, and it's led to my longest reading drought since 2012.

This volume was an easy avenue back into reading. It's an art book—well over half its length is filled with art, tracing the visual development of Dungeons & Dragons from its roots in wargaming to its popular current iteration. I first got into D&D back in 2016. During this age of quarantine, unable to attend even an online session, I've spent lots of time downloading and browsing through PDFs of volumes from older editions. The primitive artwork and DIY fanzine vibe of the earliest days of D&D in the 1970s is something I appreciate, and who doesn't love the bizarre perms sported by half-naked rangers all through the '80s and '90s? I loved lingering over the art collected here, and recommend it on that basis alone.

The text, by contrast, is mostly a fluff piece, reading at times like a glowing end-of-year report to shareholders. Deep-dive exposé this is not. Four white dudes collaborated on the text, which suggests why certain vital topics—such as how the artwork of the current edition has shifted markedly toward a more diverse cast of characters, and how this shift has occurred in tandem with growing diversity within the hobby itself, which might be illuminating material for a visual history—aren't mentioned even in passing. I love D&D, but I'm no shareholder, so the text failed to excite my interest.

2019 read #10: Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition).

Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast LLC
312 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 29 to May 18
Rating: n/a

I continue my glacially slow read-through of the core rulebooks of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This one consists of the nitty-gritty rules and counterrules and exceptions and specifics of play, which made for especially dull reading at times. (There's a reason I've never read these books cover to cover before, even though I've been playing the game since 2016.)

These rulebooks are in desperate need of a quick-reference guide. The Player's Handbook gestures toward this with an appendix detailing "conditions" that your character might be subject to during the game (such as blinded, paralyzed, or knocked prone), but fails at completing even this modest goal; the rules for how to get up from the prone condition aren't in the appendix, but in the section on movement during combat, a hundred pages earlier. When I started DMing my own campaign a couple years ago, I tried typing up my own cheat-sheet of important rules, but it wound up an unwieldy twenty pages or so, and I guessed wrong about what the most important rules and exceptions would be. (Most arguments and deliberate "misunderstandings" of the rules revolve around race and class features in the game. Kind of like in real life, I suppose.)

Fifth edition D&D was my first tabletop game, and I'll always be fond of it and eager to play. The rulebooks could benefit from better organization, though.

2019 read #9: Dungeon Master's Guide (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition).

Dungeon Master's Guide (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast LLC
320 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 19 to April 29
Rating: n/a

I've been in another reading lull. I began several books but haven't finished anything since March. I've also been craving D&D, which I haven't played since January. At some point it occurred to me that I'd never actually read the game's core rule books cover to cover, and once I started, I discovered that reading the DM Guide helped me feel like I was part of a game again, even as it left me hankering to play more strongly than before.

To review this as a book, I suppose I'd need to be more conversant with game rulebooks and their comparative merits. Fifth edition D&D certainly has its flaws and shortcomings (social interaction and exploration, supposedly two of the three central pillars of gameplay, aren't given much in the way of specific quantifiable rules; martial character classes peak early and are left to clean up in the shadow of magic-users quickly becoming as powerful as gods), but I enjoy it all the same. I've never played any other tabletop game to compare it to, but I enjoy the rich history and lore lurking within the experience of the game. It has charm and replayability that sleeker, less clunky rulesets seem to lack—though again, I don't have any experiences to compare and contrast with it.

During my read-through of the DMG, I was surprised by how few rules are actually in this book. The bulk of its pages are devoted to worldbuilding advice, tips on handling players and running the game smoothly, and random tables meant to inspire creativity. You could 100% play this edition of D&D without picking up the DMG. As long as you have the Player's Handbook and a nice assortment of monsters, you have all the rules you truly need. That said, I'm a worldbuilder at heart, and I enjoyed those sections of the DMG.