Lois Tilton reviews Short Fiction, late May

Good to see more original fiction posted on this site again.

Alternate history in 13th century Ireland, where chiefs and petty kings wage war on each other and the English have commenced to divide and conquer. David ó Flynn knows that The ó Flaherty wants him to help overthrow the current king of Connaught, but David doesn’t believe he has the strength to succeed. The ó Flaherty, however, has an secret new ally – warriors from the west overseas, warriors with metal armor like the English. But something about the newcomers makes David suspicious.

This is what I like. Many inferior practitioners of AH concentrate excessively on the point of departure from our own timeline. Flynn tells us enough that we know the Icelandic settlements in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly some others, were conquered and absorbed by the tribes we see now in Ireland, but it is not his purpose to suggest that this may or may not have been how they began to work metal, build ships and ride horses. There is sly humor here, as well, with the Irishmen at first mistaking the name of the Foreigners’ tribe as ó Gonklin. Flynn has worked this history out thoroughly and throws out a lot of hints, but the real story here is not about how things have come to pass but about the canny chieftain ó Flynn deciding if he ought to throw in with their side.

–RECOMMENDED

An ambiguous fantasy. Ken Takumi either has an alter ego or a dissociative disorder in which he thinks he does. The alter ego is more fun than he is, and better at picking stocks, but he tends to paranoid fantasies about raccoons.

Sometimes the alter ego slips out and pretends to be Ken – or maybe not. In the meantime, Ken sees patients in his eye practice and has an affair with his nurse – unless that’s the other one.

Is this interesting? No. Do I care? I don’t.

Bobby is a time traveler, visiting the pre-catastrophe years to incinerate various causes of various future catastrophes. He gets arrested a lot. His mission is more or less futile, as one change leads to other catastrophes. Which is not, you know, an original insight.

Dread Necromancer Spell List - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine

Any help on this would also be nice as the ability to store ones soul indefinately and be able to move to it after you die and then on into another body no matter how far you are away from it (limited to world ofc) would be wicked and open up all sorts of interesting play styles as those who have read the books will know he has no choice over the body he first inhabits :P Luckily, I have significant experience with necromancers, so I have a few pointers that I feel I can offer. One is that clerics and dread necromancers make the best necromancers, bar none. Wizards can be ok at necromancy, but will never be at the same level as the other necromancer classes as far as animating undead goes. They lack many of the key necromantic spells like the inflict line(which heals your minions) and the ever important desecrate. Wizards however, can make great debuff necromancers who focus more on throwing around enervations and metamagiced rays of enfeeblement and less on actually animating undead. However, if you want to run around with a horde of minions, the best non-3rd party or homebrew way to do it is via the cleric or dread necromancer. However, if your DM is open to homebrew and 3rd party content you have a lot more options. Frank and K made a great thread called the "Tome of Necromancy" which had many nice feats and necromantic prestige classes that are actually playable and a few actually make a necro themed wizard into a real necromancer rather then a conjurer who memorizes a few more necromancy spells then usual.(The current necromancy themed PrCs while cool in concept are hardly optimal and sometimes even traps(True Necromancer I'm looking at you.)) Also, Pazio publishing, the masterminds behind the great Pathfinder RPG produced a book called "The Dragon compendium" which updated much of dragon magazine's old 1e content to 3.5e. This book contains the death master, who is most likely the best arcane necromancer there is if your DM dose not allow you to alter/fix the Dread Necromancer's spell list. Speaking of which, a if you plan on playing a Dread Necromancer, you should really ask your DM if you can fix it's horribly handled spell list. For a good fix, check out this thread from GITP forums.. As for frank and K material, PM me if your interested in it, I can send you a well-crafted pdf that is a collection of all of frank and K's homebrew which I had downloaded a while back.

Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells

Spells & Magic

The Spell of the Black Dagger

Encyclopedia of new age beliefs

Tome of the Lost Realms Player's Handbook