If you've been around the tabletop RPG block a time or two, you've probably run into the concept, if not name, of a Let's Read. It's basically a rambly, in-depth review of an RPG book of some type. I'm fond of talking about the art (if it stands out as good or bad) and rolling up a few characters in addition to the review.
A short, non-exhaustive, and probably incorrect history:
Let's Reads got their start on Something Awful by way of its regular
Fatal and Friends megathread (archive is linked), as so many gaming things do. Also of note is the
WTF, D&D series.
This continued on to
RPGnet (again, archive is linked).
Now it's continuing (I think; the only one that's in-progress and still posting is DragonQuest) on
RPG Geek.
I participated in (and finished) one on RPG Geek but it spawned little discussion. So little that there are probably only four posts out of 29 that are not mine (and two of them were the game's author trying to create a FAQ in the middle of my review...). Part of that was probably due to my choice of a mediocre generic system that only had 137 backers on Kickstarter. I had fun reviewing it, though that fun was derived from both the act of reading/writing and the thought of community interaction moreso than the book itself.
Now I'm looking to start a second review, which brings me to my question.
Check out the links above. If you want suggestions, I'll include some at the end of the post.
...
You back? Good.
Is this something the B12 community would be interested in? I imagine one lucky individual (possibly myself as I came up with it) would create a megathread with the intention of meta discussion and linking to your own Let's Read. People would then start up their own threads for an RPG (or supplement, I suppose) of choice and throw a link to it in the megathread. There would probably be a semi-standard Let's Read header for the intro post describing what it is and directing the reader back to the megathread for more neckbeardy goodness.
The geeklist format was pretty cool. The RPG Geek forums are also much more featureful than our own (easy un/subscribe, nice formatting including floats, on-site image hosting, and more). When your only tool is SMF, however, all problems look like mixed metaphors. Or something like that.
Reading ListIt's been so long since I've read many of the Fatal and Friends threads that I don't recall the good ones. hyphz' (sadly) abandoned
Eoris Essence reading is pretty good, though. I think I might have also enjoyed Halloween Jack's reading of
Immortal: The Invisible War.
Felix's
WFRP 1e read-through on RPG.net was pretty amazing and made me want to play it.
dysjunct's
Mouse Guard and Samathi's (in-progress)
DragonQuest 1e reviews are top-notch and spawned lots of discussion.
