Post by Maerin on Apr 3, 2008 11:34:00 GMT -5
The questionnaire asks me to write a book, and one should always be careful about asking a sage to do that without also setting a page-count limit. In all of your best interests (and mine), I will just provide a summary response.
My right name is Frank D. Reinart (yes, I am aware of my initials). I am a 34-year-old geotechnical engineer who lives and works in the Seattle, Washington (USA) area. Married, no kids, two cats named Eve and Rhys (Rhys being our spoiled teenager).
Favorite films and books would require a fairly lengthy response. I don't watch TV and don't plan on changing that anytime soon.
My introduction to Lone Wolf came in 1985, when I received Flight From the Dark and Fire On the Water for my 11th birthday. At this point, I own all the books and have certainly read them all more than once. I don't have a single favorite in the series, though the ones that do the best setting develop tend to number among my favorites. By the same token, my least favorite tend to be books that do not. My favorite character is probably Cadak. He was a great villain with a surprising amount of depth considering his limited "screen time". If I did not like something about him, it was that he was seriously underused (I would have liked to have seen him be the recurring villain throughout the Grandmaster series). The character I love to hate is Zakhan Kimah. The series did its level best to make him out to be a Darklord without actually doing so. Frankly, I think the final fight with Kimah should have been the final fight with Archlord Haakon. That brings me to the character I just plain hated: Archlord Haakon. We are supposed to believe Haakon was the Archlord of the Darklords? Give me a break... As I alluded to already, I think it would have been better for the integrity of the threat the Darklords were supposed to represent if the final fight, pretty much as written in Shadow On the Sand, had been with Kimah; and the final battle, again pretty much as written in Cauldron of Fear, had been against Haakon (though that, obviously, would have required a somewhat different approach to the overall plot).
As many people probably already no, I am an avid RPG gamer, and the Lone Wolf RPG is no exception. Though I find myself GMing a lot more than I ever get to play, I have played both Kai Lord and Sage of Lyris characters in the past. I cannot really say too much to which classes I like more or less, because I think the class system in the RPG is one of the worst-designed parts of the RPG (and not just because the Kai Lords and Shianti Sorcerers are significantly over-balanced). If anything at all is fixed in the forthcoming new RPG from Mongoose, it will be discarding the severe limitation placed on players starting at character creation.
I have been playing, GMing, and occasionally even writing for, RPGs for the past 25 years or so. The list of games is a pretty long one, because I was not introduced to RPGs with D&D/AD&D, and therefore had a long time to built up a very multi-faceted interest in RPGs long before I was exposed to AD&D.
Anything else one wants to know, I am around to be asked.
My right name is Frank D. Reinart (yes, I am aware of my initials). I am a 34-year-old geotechnical engineer who lives and works in the Seattle, Washington (USA) area. Married, no kids, two cats named Eve and Rhys (Rhys being our spoiled teenager).
Favorite films and books would require a fairly lengthy response. I don't watch TV and don't plan on changing that anytime soon.
My introduction to Lone Wolf came in 1985, when I received Flight From the Dark and Fire On the Water for my 11th birthday. At this point, I own all the books and have certainly read them all more than once. I don't have a single favorite in the series, though the ones that do the best setting develop tend to number among my favorites. By the same token, my least favorite tend to be books that do not. My favorite character is probably Cadak. He was a great villain with a surprising amount of depth considering his limited "screen time". If I did not like something about him, it was that he was seriously underused (I would have liked to have seen him be the recurring villain throughout the Grandmaster series). The character I love to hate is Zakhan Kimah. The series did its level best to make him out to be a Darklord without actually doing so. Frankly, I think the final fight with Kimah should have been the final fight with Archlord Haakon. That brings me to the character I just plain hated: Archlord Haakon. We are supposed to believe Haakon was the Archlord of the Darklords? Give me a break... As I alluded to already, I think it would have been better for the integrity of the threat the Darklords were supposed to represent if the final fight, pretty much as written in Shadow On the Sand, had been with Kimah; and the final battle, again pretty much as written in Cauldron of Fear, had been against Haakon (though that, obviously, would have required a somewhat different approach to the overall plot).
As many people probably already no, I am an avid RPG gamer, and the Lone Wolf RPG is no exception. Though I find myself GMing a lot more than I ever get to play, I have played both Kai Lord and Sage of Lyris characters in the past. I cannot really say too much to which classes I like more or less, because I think the class system in the RPG is one of the worst-designed parts of the RPG (and not just because the Kai Lords and Shianti Sorcerers are significantly over-balanced). If anything at all is fixed in the forthcoming new RPG from Mongoose, it will be discarding the severe limitation placed on players starting at character creation.
I have been playing, GMing, and occasionally even writing for, RPGs for the past 25 years or so. The list of games is a pretty long one, because I was not introduced to RPGs with D&D/AD&D, and therefore had a long time to built up a very multi-faceted interest in RPGs long before I was exposed to AD&D.
Anything else one wants to know, I am around to be asked.