Went over to Nathan’s and played Pax Pamir with him and his friends Bryan and Dina.
Finished reading Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, one of those niche books I sometimes read about the history of role-playing games. This one focuses on TSR from before its inception to the ouster of Gary Gygax. It was mostly just sad: The two principal figures (Gygax and Dave Arneson) come across as bitter, insecure, and emotionally-stunted grudge-holders; the story is fascinating (with much more detail than I’d known before), but their animosity left me with a bad taste in my mouth long before the end of the book.
Finished rereading King of Sartar by Greg Stafford. It’s something of an anthropological study of Stafford’s RPG setting Glorantha, which inevitably reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. But while the vast majority of game designers aren’t Greg Stafford, it’s also true that Stafford wasn’t Le Guin. I enjoyed the book, but can only recommend it to a vanishingly-small slice of readers.
This makes me realize that some of the plot (including some characters’ actions), especially at the start of the book, felt like RPG sessions. The characters themselves are well-conceived and -drawn, but most of them seemed pretty blasé about the supernatural.
Really, Lovecraft Country just makes me want to run a Harlem Unbound game of Call of Cthulhu.