Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is part of MIT Press' holiday reading and gifting guide. You can get 30% off US orders until November 30 with code MITHOLIDAY, only through the Penguin Random House site (Regular, Deluxe). There are some other good books included in the sale as well, including part one of Jon Peterson's Playing at the World and Chris French's The Science of Weird Shit.

Like a million or so other people, I dumped Twitter and moved to Bluesky (funny thing: the "moved to Bluesky" thing was zeitgeisty, but I've been working on deleting tweets before leaving Twitter for weeks, so my dumping Twitter when everyone else was dumping Twitter was really a strange-feeling coincidence). Anyway, no one cares about that - instead of thinking about social media, how about you forward this newsletter to a pal to get them to sign up? Way cooler.

Before we move on, I need to point out that I am annoyed with 2023 Stu, the guy responsible for writing this week's posts, for two reasons. One, I didn't credit or even mention Joe Bouza's fantastic art work for the Compleat books, particularly in The Compleat Spellcaster (possibly because there are no art credits in The Compleat Alchemist, and I just assumed the others would follow suit?). He's great and I wish he did more work.

Second, how could I not mention that these three books are called "Compleat" because they were initially (exclusively?) stocked at The Compleat Strategist in New York? Also, my copy of Adventurer has an ad page that proudly proclaims "Now available at Walden Books" which is noteworthy because Bard Games shuttered because of a big orders/big returns cash crunch thanks to Walden a few year later.

I haven't had a minute to slap any more paint onto the Goblin War Giant, alas, nor have I had much noteworthy mail, so let's do a music recommendation. I've had Mark of the Worm, by Landsraad, on my turntable nearly non-stop for a few weeks now, which is about as ringing an endorsement as I can make.

Landsraad is a side project from a dungeonsynth act named Orcus (who I am not really familiar with) that is essentially a soundtrack for each of Frank Herbert's Dune novels (Mark of the Worm is for Children of Dune and I really hope the others three that are out eventually get issued on vinyl as well). It isn't dungeonsynth, at least to my definition; it's more in line with kosmische mixed with clear touchstone from the Toto/Eno soundtrack to the 1984 Lynch film. It's quite spacey and nice, maybe it's exactly what you need right now.

Streaming on Bandcamp. Phantom Lure put out the vinyl. In the US you can get it from Out of Season (they just restocked).

The 24th (!!!) Geek Flea is just around the corner on November 23. In the North Jersey area? Come on down and hang out. I'm selling RPGs from my collection culling list, Hambone'll be there with 321RPG and our pal Zac will be hawking stuff culled from his own RPG collection, even though he's from Virginia. If Zac can drive all that way, so can you!

All the details are on the Facebook event page. The poster below alters some amazing art by pulpster Matt Fox, whose work you should check out!