JCGilbasaurus

I used to play from 3rd through to 5th edition, and I recently unearthed my old collection of orks in preparation for 11th. It's a bit battered and there are lots of broken pieces, and the less said about the paint job my teenage self gave them the better—but it wouldn't be too involved of a project to bring them up to scratch. Just a long one.

But before I do that, it would be nice to know if there's any point to doing so. I strongly suspect that I'll have to rebase all of them, but that's why Gork and Mork gave us 3d printers.

My collection consists of:

• 58 plastic boys with choppas on 25mm bases
• 10 plastic boys with shootas on 25mm bases
• 5 plastic lootas on 25mm bases
• 5 plastic

16 years ago I was a teenager slapchoping 60 Ork Boyz because I wanted to game on Saturday but had two homework assignments due on Friday. I took a "break" from the hobby when I moved away to uni, because I didn't really have the time to commit to it any more, and I haven't touched paintbrush to mini since.

The new Helsmiths caught my eye however, and now being a mostly grown adult with an actual job I decided to make a financial mistake and bought myself a box of them.

I think I've been doing okay—I've been going off mostly instinct and hazy old memories of how to paint (what are these newfangled "contrast paints" I keep hearing about?), but I've been staring at both these minis for so l

Hi there, I'm a bookseller working for a small branch of a well known British book retailer. Recently our branch has had a new manager take over it, and next Tuesday we will be visited by the book purchaser for our region to discuss what direction the manager wants to take the store.

As an SFF fan, this is an opportunity for myself to put a thumb on the scales and refresh our Science Fiction and Fantasy section.

I was hoping you could advise me on some titles that may be popular or interesting to put on our shelves. I have a pretty good rapport with both my new manager and the purchaser, so I'm confident that I can most requests approved.

A few ground rules—
A) we only have three boo

I haven't seen many people talk about this yet (although it's possible I've overlooked something), but the item description on the butterflies strongly implies that Melina is Marika's daughter.

Note: I pulled all the quotes from the Fextralife wiki. If there's anything wrong, it's because I copy pasted from there.

First, there are three types of butterflies in the game, all of which are crafting items—Aeonian, Nascent, and Smoldering. And all three link to Marika and Radagon's children: Malenia, Miquella, and Melina.

First, the Aeonian butterfly:

A butterfly with withered, scarlet wings found in the swamp of Aeonia.
Material used for crafting items.
According to myth, these butte

I recently realised that in most of the books I read, if they have multiple female characters, those characters are either:

a) rivals (usually for the same love interest, but not always for that reason)
b) never interact/only interact with the main character, but rarely each other
c) family members (sisters, mother/daughter, cousins etc)
and/or
d) lovers

But I can't think of many books where they are just close friends. I did read A Deadly Education/The Last Graduate recently, which does count, but the main character of that spends most of the book believing she doesn't deserve to be loved, so it's not quite the right feel.

I also read Rick Riordan's Daughter of the Deep, which

The Starless Sea is a fantastic, literary, magical realism love letter to stories and storytelling. Not only has Morgenstern managed to improve on the dreamy, lyrical prose I fell in love with in Night Circus, but her characters, plotting and sense of mystery completely blows Night Circus out of the water.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins, son of a fortune teller, player of games, is a university student that stumbles across an eclectic collection of fictional short stories—except one recounts a hazy memory from his own childhood, a memory of the time he almost, but didn’t, open an imposible door and discover unknown lands beyond.

Haunted by what could have been, as well as the story’s taunt of “not y

A common piece of writing advice is to avoid “info dumping”—that is, to avoid disgorging vast quantities of expositional text onto the reader. Kim Stanley Robinson has clearly discarded this advice, not only embracing the info dump, but elevating it into an art form. Aurora is easily the platonic ideal for this kind of writing, and whilst at times it proved a challenging read, it was never a dull or unenjoyable one.

At its heart, Aurora is a story about a ship on a long, perilous journey, and the people who live within that ship. But, like all stories, what makes it special is the way it’s told. The narrator of the story is Ship, an Artificial Intelligence that grows from complicated softw

Hello, and welcome to the full discussion for The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon!

Since it's the end of the month, there will be untagged spoilers for the full book in the comments. Reader beware.

The Midway Discussion can be found here.

A few questions to start off with:

• Which character had the best arc? The worst?

• Who or what would you like to see in a hypothetical sequel?

Feel free to leave your own thoughts, comments and questions below.

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard, is, on the surface, a mystery wrapped up in elegant court intrigue. Set in the Vietnamese inspired Dai Viet Empire, it follows a cast of colourful characters who attempt to find the titular Citadel, a massive space station who’s firepower could save—or doom—the empire.

But on a deeper level, this is a book about family. Or rather, wanting family. The Empress, tired and weary from her long years on the throne, wants to apologise to the daughter she exiled thirty years prior. Engineer Diem Huong wants answers from a mother she barely remembers. The Mindship The Turtle’s Golden Claw wants to be loved by her family, especially her mother, Pr

Hello, and welcome to the midway discussion for The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon!

If you haven't heard of it, or are on the fence about it, check out my review of it here.

We'll be discussing everything that happens up to the end of Part 2/Chapter 37. Anything after that should be hidden with spoiler tags.

A few questions to start the discussion:

• Who's your favourite character so far? Least favourite?

• Any cool locations you'd like to visit?

• Has the book matched your expectations from your

The Luckless by A. M. Sohma is a Litrpg with an almost classic setup. Kit logs in to the full-body submersion fantasy game Second Age of Retha. Shortly afterwards a computer error breaks the game, disabling the log out button. Kit—and thousands of other gamers—are now trapped in the simulation. The only way to get out is to beat the end game boss and trigger an automatic logout.

There is just one problem with this plan—Kit is stuck in the body of a joke character. Due to prank gone wrong, she is now a Lv 5 Elf Dancer, widely regarded as the worst class in the game. She must find a way to overcome her near useless character, collect a ragtag bunch of misfits, and take on an end game boss n

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon is, at over 800 pages, a colossal tome. It's an amazing tale of politics, faith, love and dragons, carried by its great cast of complex and nuanced characters. There is a broad diversity of characters in age, race and sexuality, and each one feels like they fit into the world—that they belong. I honestly could not tell you who my favourite character was.

Surrounding these characters is a great romantic subplot that is deftly woven into a tale of dragons and world ending threats, and stood out to me as the highlight of an already fantastic narrative.

The story remains upbeat and optimistic, even in the face of tragedy, striking a perfect bal

The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera is an East Asian inspired epic fantasy with a queer leading couple, and it is in this couple that the story truly shines.

The book features two female characters; Shefali, a tribal Qoorin nomad, and Shizuka, the crown princess of the Hokkaran Empire. Born to two different cultures on auspicious days, their fates are entwined not only with each other, but with the land itself. Both women are warriors and leaders in their societies, with the strength, confidence and downright badassery to match.

The story is told in quite an odd format. It begins when Shizuka, now the young Empress of Hokkaran, receives a letter from Shefali. This letter is a recou

My sister recently visited, and I showed her some of my work. She loved it, and said she wanted more—specifically, more detail in what I had already written. She said each paragraph was too short, and merely narrated the main characters actions. "She did this. She did that. Then she did this." is what the story felt like, and my sister felt that you could put a bullet point next to each paragraph and not change the feel of the story.

She wanted more detail, more fluff and padding in the story, so she could feel like she was there, had a better sense of the history and feel of the world, and how each thing I did mention related to the world. She told me to 'Go Ham' on the story.

Any ideas,