We’re starting another new series here at The Flickcast. This time around it’s all about books with the first edition of What We’re Reading. So, what are we reading? Today, it’s some helpful D&D books from author Keith Ammann.

These helpful D&D books are The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters and Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Players. We know, those titles are kinda long, but they’re really good books, so we won’t hold it against him. In fact, the info in these books is so helpful and useful, we don’t mind if he uses twenty or thirty words for the title of his next one!

Moving on, you can probably guess these D&D books deal with various aspects of playing Dungeons & Dragons, especially combat. The first, targeted at Dungeon Masters . . .

“. . . lightens the DM’s burden by helping you understand your monsters’ abilities and develop battle plans before your fifth edition D&D game session begins. Just as soldiers don’t whip out their field manuals for the first time when they’re already under fire, a DM shouldn’t wait until the PCs have just encountered a dozen bullywugs to figure out how they advance, fight, and retreat.”

It really helps DM’s get inside the minds and motivations of NPC’s and creatures in the game. It also makes combat encounters more realistic and fun. Sounds great, right? We’ve used it during many of our games with great success. 

The second book is targeted at players and deals with their mindset and tactics during combat. It’s . . . 

“. . . an introduction to combat tactics for fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons players, Live to Tell the Tale evens the score. It examines the fundamentals of D&D battles: combat roles, party composition, attacking combos, advantage and disadvantage, Stealth and Perception, and more…including the ever-important consideration of how to run away!”

It also offers several combat scenarios featuring character and monsters of increasingly higher level. This helps to better illustrate the tactics of each character class, abilities available at various levels, what to do with them during combat and the roles each class can play to help ensure combat success. It’s pretty cool. 

If you’re a D&D player, Dungeon Master (or both) and you want to improve your games, especially during combat, give these books a try. You’ll definately learn something. We sure did. 

You can find these books at Amazon, or your local bookstore. We get a lot of our books at Book People, which is one of our favorite local shops here in Austin. Please support local bookstores when you can. 

Keith’s next book, featuring more combat tactics and monsters from Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, is available for pre-order now. And in addition to the books, you can get more insights and info over at his blog.

What are you reading and enjoying these days? Let us know in the comments or hit us up on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Happy reading!

Note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links.  
Artwork: Saga Press / Keith Ammann

Taking a cue from the designs of Pacific Rim, The Art of Titanfall shows the titans as less than beautiful pieces of hardware that feel like lumbering hulks meant to take a beating as well as delivering them. With only three basic units, there is a great balance in diversity and design of each titan. During the fast paced battles of the Titanfall game, it’s incredibly challenging to try and notice these details but the art book allows you to really appreciate it from the pulled back perspective.

The Art of Titanfall does an awesome exploration of the maps as well. Though not giving a full breakdown as if it was a strategy guide, The Art of Titanfall allows a player to again appreciate the care put into each map that they’d never get to during the heat of battle.

Have you ever played any of the Devil May Cry franchise? If so, then great – you might enjoy the backstory that you get out of this comic. If not, then both the plot and the structure of the comic itself will likely confuse the Devil Trigger out of you. Hang on with me here.

First, Some DmC Background:

Devil May Cry is a video game series that was initially intended to be a continuation of the Resident Evil plot line, but became its own franchise due to the focus on fast-paced, stylized combat. The game follows Dante, a “devil hunter” who is the son of the demon Sparda and the human Eva. Sparda was a powerful demon knight who served Mundus, the king of the underworld.

Mundus strove to reign over all of humankind, but Sparda chose the path of justice, defeating Mundus and sealing off the underworld. In an act of revenge, Mundus sent demons to kill Sparda’s family. Eva hid 8-year-old Dante and his twin brother, Vergil, and died at the hands of the demons. To protect his sons, Sparda wiped their memories and sent them into the human world to grow up and live “normal” lives (yeah..right).

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get to the pages of this comic, shall we? I’ll tell you the gist of the story, and then I’ll dish out the good and bad. DmC is Kinda Weird, and the Comic Continues the Weirdness.

In this modern world of instant videos, tweets, Tumblr, Vine, Instagram and more, reading the printed word in a book can sometimes get left behind. Fortunately, the folks at Lucasfilm/Disney haven’t forgotten just how important reading is. In fact, in conjunction with partners like Del Rey, Scholastic and Dark Horse Comics, they’re helping celebrate reading by dedicating an entire day to it.

What are we talking about? Well, read on from the official press release to find out:

New York, NY – Lucasfilm, Disney Publishing Worldwide, and its publishing partners announced today the second annual Star Wars Reads Day to be held this October 5, 2013. Last year, 30 authors and 1,500 costumed volunteers participated in over 1,200 Star Wars Reads Day events across North America. On October 5 of this year, Star Wars fans, authors, and artists will again come together in this multi-publisher initiative that celebrates reading and Star Wars. Participating publishing partners include Abrams, Chronicle Books, Dark Horse, Del Rey, DK, Quirk Books, Random House Audio, Scholastic, Titan Magazines, and Workman.

“Star Wars Reads Day is the kind of initiative that we at Lucasfilm love to support” says Carol Roeder, Director of Publishing at Lucasfilm. “Reading and Star Wars have gone hand-in-hand since 1976, when the novelization of the original Star Wars movie was released. Over the years, many fans have discovered the joy in reading through Star Wars books, and we hope to continue encouraging more people to read.”

How do you follow a debut novel that was named one of Time magazine’s best books of the year? For Charles Yu the answer is Sorry Please Thank You, a breezy but fascinating collection of short stories.

In an interview during San Diego Comic-Con 2012, Yu revealed that the transition from writing his popular and widely praised book, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, to the short story format of Sorry Please Thank You was challenging. The author also admitted that not all of the stories turned out the way he had planned.

“Sometimes you write something and it’s just not what you thought it was going to be,” he said. Even so, Yu is pleased with the final product and readers will be too.

The collection of stories transports readers from futuristic earth to virtual reality and even into space. In every time and location the characters are searching for the same things: happiness and love. The fundamental nature of these desires helps keep Yu’s stories grounded even as some of them veer off into the more obscure and strange (an alien’s guide to Earth families, for example).

Almost a week has passed since The Walking Dead season 3 reached its midseason finale. On that night, Twitter and Facebook were filled with posts of people asking what to do with their Sunday nights now that they are forced to wait until February for the show to return. Well, there’s no reason for fans of The Walking Dead to be stuck watching the previous seasons (or doing something really crazy like going outside) as Robert Kirkman and the rest of the team behind The Walking Dead have put out tons of other materials that both set up the story and characters of the show and/or went off in their own directions.

The Walking Dead Vol. 1 – 17

It’s where it all started. Over the course of 102 issues, The Walking Dead has taken readers through a rollercoaster of emotions. They have seen Rick and his ever changing band of survivors try to deal with a world that can never go back to what it once was.

While viewers of the show may witness some similar instances, they will also see how two different stories have been able to be told about the same essential concept. One of the things that keeps drawing readers back is the idea that really no one is safe and characters that they fall in love with end up becoming the biggest tragedies.

It’s always interesting to see how people react to art books. Some people can’t wait to get their hands on them as they anxiously await a game’s release while others like to look at them after the fact so the vistas and characters aren’t spoiled for them. I received The Art of Assassin’s Creed III almost on the same day that the review copy of the game came to me and I opted for the latter and saved the artwork until after I had experienced Assassin’s Creed III’s gameplay. After going through almost 30 hours in this lush world, it made me appreciate the concept work that went into making it come to life even more.

The Art of Assassin’s Creed III starts off with what one wouldn’t expect, the modern world. Since the interludes of Assassin’s Creed III take place in the modern era with Desmond at the helm, there is a quick exploration of the temple of the First Civilization that Desmond and his team make their base as well as the areas they must venture to recover the keys to power the temple. After that, everything heads back to the American Revolution.

You may be wondering why we would publish a story about a bookstore opening in New York. Well, that’s a fair question. The reasons are varied, but the most important ones are that this bookstore is selling Sci-Fi books exclusively, which we love, and, more importantly, is trying to save older, out of print books from disappearing forever.

We think that’s worth a mention.

According to an excellent article over at The Verge, the bookstore in question, located in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood and called Singularity & Co., opened its doors recently with the intention of bringing new and classic sci-fi novels to anyone who wants to read them.

What started as a Kickstarter campaign to find forgotten, out of print sci-fi books, digitize them, and sell them as e-books has grown into a full brick and mortar store. They still offer the eBooks, which you can subscribe to here, but now seek out rare and classic sci-fi books still in print to sell at the store.

In addition, founder Ash Kalb is also hoping to reprint some of the older, out of print books and pay actual royalties to the original writers. He’s working on the details right now and negotiating with publishers to get this going. We think that’s pretty cool too.

So, if you love Sci-Fi and love books, you should be clicking on the link and supporting this good cause. For more, check out the Singulairy & Co. video after the break.

Jaws (1975) is the first summer blockbuster and is considered by critics and fans alike as one of the greatest films ever made. After success with the TV thriller Duel (1972) and his first theatrical release of The Sugarland Express (1974), director Steven Spielberg set out to adapt Peter Benchley’s novel about a Great White shark which terrorizes a small New England beach community. The screenplay was co-written by Benchley, actor-writer Carl Gottlieb (M*A*S*H*), and an un-credited John Milius who helped with some of the film’s most memorable dialogue like “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” and the legendary U.S.S. Indianapolis speech.

The film opens with one of the greatest sequences ever shot. A young woman leaves a bonfire beach gathering to go skinny-dipping in the ocean while being chased by an inebriated young man. The young man ends up passing out in the surf while the woman swims out to the middle of the channel. An underwater low angle shot represents the point of view of the shark as it begins to stalk its prey. John William’s haunting score builds as the young woman is thrashed around and is pulled under by the shark. This scene did to ocean night swimming, what Psycho (1960) did for women’s showering.

Director Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) is a contemporary urban drama with all the traits of a western. Hill adapted the screenplay from the novel written by Sol Yurick in 1965. The film follows a group of nine gang members from Coney Island who trek up to the Bronx where thousands of other rival gang members have gathered for a summit held by a man known as Cyrus, the head of the most powerful gang in the city who plans to unite all the New York City gangs together as a crime syndicate.

The opening of the film is a series of montages that follow the Warriors as they take numerous subways from Coney Island to the Bronx. Other gangs are also shown as they too make their way to the meeting. Once the Warriors arrive at Van Cortlandt Park, the Warriors make their way to the front where Cyrus delivers a speech where he plans to unite all the gangs in an attempt to control New York. Cyrus demands that all the gangs put aside their differences and secure each city borough, and then create a collective organization that can battle not only the police, but the mafia as well.