Ep06 - A River of Teeth

by Sarah Gailey

Here is a link to the episode: https://www.k-squareproductions.com/gmbc

Here is a link to Sarah Gailey’s Website: https://sarahgailey.com/

Here is the transcript:

Speaker A 00:00:15

Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club, where great fiction becomes your next great role playing experience. I'm your host, Eric Jackson, and I'm here with returning game masters Patriot Jackel, Colleen Noctrip and Roger Alex Goudreau. To journey into a United States that never was, but should have been. Sarah. Sarah Gailey's river of Teeth contains heists, hooligans and hippos. Yes, I said hippos. Join us as we explore the delightfully dynamic and diverse characters in this alt hippo history.

Speaker B 00:00:43

First, I'm going to have you guys introduce yourselves. Then I'll have you tell us about a favorite viral character, a character in your games that went viral. Roger, since you reminded me, why don't you go first?

Speaker C 00:00:57

All right. Hi everyone, I'm Roger. I have been playing D and D for 43 years and I've played bunch of other games and love playing fifth edition. But I'm really interested to try the cipher system, which is why I keep plugging it in podcasts. A character that was unexpectedly important in my game. So I was running an Eberron campaign. The party was in the jungles of Kabara. They were exploring the ancient city of Hakatorvac, where a corrupted ancient black dragon guards, you know, an ancient mystical treasure. And there are tribes of lizard folk living in the jungle. The poison dusk lizard folk is one group in Eberron, and these are smaller lizardfolk. They sneak around, they use poison blow darts and so on. But the party had all but defeated a group of these lizardfolk that had defeated them, or that had ambushed them, rather. And the smallest lizard folk in the bunch, seeing his friends die around him, threw himself on the mercy of the party. His name was Zazu and he was so wretched and pathetic, think yo Gollum, like, curling around on the ground, that the party spared him and they gave him a chance to live. And they were like, tell us about, you know, where are the other forces here? And so on and so forth. And so he became their guide. And then sort of once they let him live and then he was, you know, other lizard folk would show up. Zazu presented himself as the voice of the new gods. He being chaotic evil, he jumped on the opportunity to seize power. And he presented him as the voice of these mighty heroes, the PCs for the lizard Vulcan. Only through Zazu's wisdom would the lizard folk survive. And it was meant as a throwaway bit. And that was it. Zazu was with them the whole way through this adventure. And then again later, they. They wanted to bring him on things. But he was, you know, happy with his position of power, you know, among the lizardfolk of, of the Kabara jungles. But we talked about it about Zazu to this day.

Speaker B 00:02:57

Awesome. Colleen, do you want to tell us about a character who took over your campaign unexpectedly?

Speaker D 00:03:03

So I actually run a lot of one shots, but sometimes I get to run campaigns. And then I was getting well known for running Lady Blackbird, which is a one page RPG written by the same person who wrote Blaze in the Dark, John Harper. It's very good. I recommend it. You can just look it up. Lady Blackbird. Except for now there's a singer named Lady Blackbird. But if you look up Lady Blackbird rpg, you can find it. But I ran it a long term a couple times and I found as I ran this one shot, I came up with this character at one point that Ladyblood. The players had kind of avoided the first obstacle in a really weird way and ended up running into another ship. And I created Lady Blackbird's fabulous and sassy cousin named Ambrose. He was supposed to just be this fop that they could steal another ship from and get away and hide from the bad guys. But people loved him so much that they kidnapped him and took him with them and then eventually just started bringing him into more of the one shots. I just had this character, he was Ambrose. People loved playing with him, people liked having love interests with him. And he just kind of became a staple of my one shots that this character would show up. And it's never failed me to this day. He's, for some reason he was supposed to be just someone that they could use as a hostage or they could just steal his stuff or he was just supposed to F off at some point. But instead he just continues to crop up and people want to make him one of the gang or one of the crew of the Owl. So now I just incorporate him in because I found that the character works really, really well with the dynamic of the characters.

Speaker B 00:04:45

Awesome. Petra, who's a character that has haunted taken over your game unexpectedly.

Speaker E 00:04:53

My game, but someone else's game. So I had gone to. It was a homebrew game and I was just there kind of as a guest one day. I was watching and they're like, oh, you know, come, come play. You know, make a character. So real quick, I made a character which was a little, kind of a little dracatina type character. And really this was just a chaos generating character. It was really. She had telepathy, she could breathe fire magically, not very big Very little fire. And I played for that one game and the players love this character so much that I was forced to play the game with the character. And the, and the campaign ran for years. Actually. We're still, we're still playing it. And yes, I have not been allowed to, not to not play this little Dracatina character. She basically runs this little group of mercenaries that is the other player characters. And she's just, just a hoot to play because really all I do is cause chaos the entire game. It's. It's very beloved. And the GM uses this character's joy and their love of me shamelessly to move plots along. It's a lot of fun.

Speaker B 00:06:11

Yeah, that's fantastic. I mentioned previously that I have a demon possessed duck that has taken over one of my current campaigns and has worked itself into a bunch of different things. But I thought I'd also mention that in a. In my regular game, in my regular Tuesday game where I am not the dm. We did a couple of games in Ravenloft and we had a person come in who guest starred, much like you did Petra. And he played a character named Vlad. And it was determined that everybody loved Vlad except one person in our party. He just thought like, he was like, why does he think. Why does everybody think Vlad is so cool? And once that person said that Vlad was great at everything and he was the savior. And every time we told the story, even though that character's. That character had done like five things to save us, the player character, but we just attributed all of his actions to Vlad. You see how Vlad saved us. And Vlad is so cool. He's like. And. And then later on, even after this guest star left, we would sometimes be like, oh, I really wish Vlad would come back and save us. Or man, if we were drinking, Vlad would be here and he'd spot like and. And then the character would go. It was just. Was up front. Vlad is a great one shot character who just stuck around forever. We even mentioned him in other games. As Roger said, like, there we. He's. We still say maybe Vlad will show up, even if it's not even the same campaign world. We're just like, yep, Vlad.

Speaker A 00:07:47

All right, now that we've met our game masters, it's time to talk about our book.

Speaker B 00:07:51

We read river of Teeth by Sarah Gailey, which is a story about a heist with hippos that takes place in the 1890s and takes place in an alternate US history where someone said, hey, we're going to get rid of water Hyacinths, which are clogging the riverways by bringing hippos to the United States. And the kicker on all of this, of course, is that someone actually did propose this. Not in the 1890s, but in the 1910s. But this is one of those things where history and the writer and they said, yes. Hippos, heist, cowboys and rotom story. And that's. That's really all there is to this story, which is great.

Speaker E 00:08:37

So I have to say that was probably one of the oddest books I've ever read. I mean, entertaining and very, very Western. It was very Western. It was a complete caper, even though, you know, characters would not approve. Total caper.

Speaker C 00:08:54

It was an operation.

Speaker B 00:08:56

Yes. Not a caper operation.

Speaker E 00:08:59

Yes, it was an operation, not a caper. But the hippo thing I found distracting.

Speaker D 00:09:09

From.

Speaker E 00:09:10

From the storyline.

Speaker B 00:09:11

But there are animal companions. We know this is a weakness of yours.

Speaker E 00:09:16

It is absolutely a weakness. But I was just like, okay, it's a hippo. And. And they're very cute. You know, the way they described them and. And who they were and. And their personality traits was very clever. Thought, you know, the specialized hippos, you know, Ruby was great, and who wouldn't want one? But, yeah. And then I started going down the rabbit hole, right? I was like, well, if you're gonna have hippos in this capacity, then the world has to be more. More of a water world than what we currently have, because otherwise it wouldn't be practical.

Speaker D 00:09:47

Right?

Speaker E 00:09:47

So I just started in my brain, just started going down these routes about how that would work in today's world.

Speaker D 00:09:55

It took me a while to get used to the hippos as well, until I realized that all equiline mammals were replaced with hippos, and that anything that was a cow or a deer or a horse was just a hippo. And then I was listening to the audiobook of this, and the person doing the voice act had an accent. So when he said feral, he said feral. And for a while, I was like, what is this new animal that's wild in these rivers? And it took me forever to go, oh, there are wild hippos, there are wild hippos, and there are trained hippos. And there's a great map at the end of the book that tells you about how the Mississippi is overrun with hippos. I actually really enjoyed it. I got really into it a little ways into it. I'm like, oh, this is a heist. This is a Western heist about. Especially about hippos.

Speaker E 00:10:46

Yep.

Speaker D 00:10:46

And I just thought that was fantastic. I actually started reading the second book because I loved it. Even in the introduction, Sarah Gailey says that she has no regrets making a story about hippos. She just leans full on.

Speaker B 00:11:01

Yes. No, I have no regrets.

Speaker E 00:11:06

I have no regrets. Yes, yes. It was very unabashedly exactly what it says it is. 100%.

Speaker B 00:11:16

100%. No question. It was. So, yeah, we had a five man band and a very diverse cast and a interesting setting and just enough weirdness that just to keep going on what you were saying. Petra. It was so odd that it tripped my fantasy switch in that it was such an odd thing. It's not being a historical and started being an alt world or a fantasy world. And I don't know where that line is, but this one clearly is over it.

Speaker E 00:11:49

Oh yes. But super entertaining, right? I mean, it was an entertaining book and it definitely had me thinking about what if this were in the real world? What would we. What would we do with this? How would this work? Which is not something I ever really thought that I would be thinking about. So kudos.

Speaker C 00:12:08

Yeah, I think, Eric. I think it didn't quite trip the fantasy line for me, but it definitely had that sort of adventure feel to it. I would put this more in the category for me personally of kind of like Indiana Jones. But as I say that, I realized there are some. There are a few magical elements in Indiana Jones. Right. The Ark of the Covenant and so on and so forth. So maybe not even quite there. But it had an adventurous feel to it. I'll agree with that. It didn't have any magic that I noticed.

Speaker B 00:12:38

It didn't. So, Roger, you think this is pulpit?

Speaker C 00:12:42

Yeah, I would call this pulp.

Speaker B 00:12:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Colleen, any thoughts on where you'd place this in the genre spectrum?

Speaker D 00:12:50

I would put it at action adventure. Pulp, definitely like a high stakes heist. I wouldn't quite put it as a western though. There is a lot of riding hippos because you're not really in the West. It's the west is now the Mississippi, which is a really interesting take. Yeah. There's no magic. It's sharpshooters. Right? Sharpshooters, gambling, drinking, lots of. There's even disguises in it. So it's definitely a heist. Spy action adventure.

Speaker B 00:13:20

Now that we've got our setting and we've talked about what's happening in the book, we've got a heist, we've got pulp action, we've got hippos. I just can't keep saying we Got hippos. So give it those things. Folks. We'll start with Colleen. Colleen, if you wanted to run this as a role playing session, what game system do you think would support this kind of story?

Speaker D 00:13:45

Yeah, well, the obvious go to for me was Blaze in the Dark because it's a heist, right? So if you wanted to stay with the grittiness, like these hippos are not vegetarians, I would stay with Blaze in the Dark. But as I kept reading it and I thought about different characters and the world, I actually turned to Kids on Bikes and I decided, what if you flipped Kids on Bikes instead of Kids on Bikes, It's Kids on Hippos because in Kids on Bikes, you can play a kid, you can play a teen, you can play an adult. And the awesome people over at Kids on Bikes, the developers made a whole bunch of different settings. So they have kids on brooms and they have dads on mowers. So I was like, okay, Kids on Hippos, this is the alternate America. What about Kids on ranches? Or you could do adults and instead of a supernatural character, because in Kids and Bikes you have a special character that everybody at the table plays that is your hippos. So your hippos are your special character. And everybody gets to control the hippos and what they do. And everyone else has their own baggage. So in case of Bikes, you have a backpack and all your baggage goes into your backpack. That can be emotional baggage. That can be tools and crafts like guns and cards. And you could do a really fun cross country adventure on hippos with kids solving like a one of the small town issues with maybe the hippos escape and get wild and you have to go corral them. Or you find out that there is a gambling mobster who has a horrific plan with the hippos and you as kids or teenagers get to go ride your hippos and save the hippos and stop the bad gambling man who only cares about capitalism. I think it would definitely fit, especially because the book really had a lot, a very modern cast. Women and men were treated very equally. They even had a non binary character who I loved. So Kids on Bikes also has a very modern feel to it as well that you could. You would not have a problem running the system with that kind of theming. I just thought it was just a really fun world building. So I always wanted to do like a Kiss on Bikes game where you could do the world building on any other thing, like women's space. But in this case, I've actually started writing a scenario for kids on hippos that I wouldn't mind trying to run. So just take like your classic 80s plot, but in this case, it's hippos.

Speaker B 00:16:07

Sounds awesome. We'll invite Sarah Gailey to come play. Did you want to take the next shot at this?

Speaker E 00:16:12

Well, I mean, this is a fiasco game for sure. Unabashedly. So the hilarity of the hippos, the caperness of the storyline all basically writes itself for a. For a fiasco game. It was that. Just the colorfulness of the characters. Right. You know, talking about the relationships that were involved were pretty well fleshed out. And I thought that, you know, they had the twist. Right. I don't want to give it away necessarily, but they had the twist in the middle of it, you know, and even some of the deaths were very apropos for. For a fiasco game, this would make a, I think, a fantastic fiasco game.

Speaker B 00:16:55

Awesome. Roger.

Speaker C 00:16:57

Right, so my first go to is D and D, but obviously that doesn't work here. There's no magic you could do it. But what's the point? Cipher system. I stand by my position that we can play anything in the cipher system. And though the cipher system does not currently have a western themed setting book, they have a Weird west setting book called High Noon at Midnight coming out in a couple of months, which adds a supernatural element that isn't strictly necessary for our hippo infused alternate America. But I think it'd be even cooler with a little bit of weird magic in it. But yeah. So cipher system, you basically summarize each character with an adjective, a noun and a verb that describes sort of who and what they are. And so like, off the top of my head, houndstooth. Right. He's clearly a charming adventurer who keeps the plan moving. Right. So that's sort of his role. Archie is a deceit full manipulator who revels in trickery. Right. She's the. She's the con artist, she's the disguise artist and so on. And maybe Hiro is like the quiet expert who makes things explode and so on. And I was going through the current list of all of the officially published posei in the cyber system. Didn't have enough time to like really find the ones that really fit. But the nice thing about the cyber system is you can make up your own. The other system I thought might be fun to try for this because of the whole caper aspect is Leverage. The leverage role playing game. You know, the TV show had the whole hacker Hacker, hitter, grifter, thief. Right. The Mastermind brings you to five. I was looking at the rules and the rules do de emphasize violence. Right. It's much more about the cleverness of the team in overcoming the challenges, getting what they need. If you use leverage to run this, you would have to have a team comfortable with the idea of violence and people dying. But yeah, we're role playing gamers, so in a game that's fine.

Speaker B 00:18:51

Violence is okay. Can I ask Roger? I went to go look for leverage. Did you already own it? Because I was having a hard time finding a copy of it.

Speaker C 00:19:00

I don't own it. I was aware of it and I ended up relying on some online summaries of the rule system and the content to sort of evaluate how well it would fit.

Speaker B 00:19:11

Okay. I went to go find it and take a look at it. I found that it was either no longer published or it's difficult to get a hold of. But I do think it's a great system.

Speaker C 00:19:20

So maybe not a great recommendation for new game masters who would struggle to.

Speaker B 00:19:24

Find it, but still we're going to stretch a little. It's certainly something worth going out and looking for. It's definitely got the structure that something like this needs.

Speaker C 00:19:33

Yep.

Speaker B 00:19:33

Okay. So Colleen mentioned Blades in the Dark, which would be my first go to. That's the one I would be the most comfortable running this in right now. My understanding is that there is a new game that has recently come out with the live action Cowboy Bebop. There is a Cowboy Bebop RPG which is a mix of Fate and Blades in the Dark. I think that would be perfect. It has the clocks from Blades and a lot of the Fate mechanics that are in there, which are just great for running heists and having episodic sort of things, which this really comes down to. And setting up heists. The Firefly game that is out there and this book had definitely made me think of Firefly. We'll talk about when we get to media. The Firefly RPG has flashbacks in it, which happens a couple of times to help inspire folks through various points. People flashback to other jobs or other things that have happened to them in their time. That was the primary one. There were a couple of other one shot ones. Probably most appropriately would be the one page rpg One last job that has a much more noir feeling to it. But it is definitely set up for the whole heist thing. And it's also set up for the heist to go wrong, which is also of a more a fiasco kind of.

Speaker D 00:20:56

A Thing I agree with you so much actually. Like Blades in the Dark. Like I said it was. It was originally. The choice that first originally popped in my head was like, oh, was. I realized it was a heist. I thought, oh, blaze in the Dark. Definitely. Just. Just because the whole game is based around how you build up a heist. I just wanted to plus one your comments.

Speaker B 00:21:15

Oh, and I was plus wanting yours as well. So if we were playing D and D rolling with advantage on that one, I guess or something like that.

Speaker D 00:21:22

You just want to write a hippo. You just want to write a hippo and stop people.

Speaker B 00:21:28

Well, I'm going to jump right in and talk about stuff we can steal. And I want to be 100% clear that I ran a game not long ago where my characters went to the Feywild in a D and D game. They were visiting a group of Mushroom Fae. The whole point was that they were these fungal feylords. And since I was thinking funguses, I decided we were going to go swamp and jungle. And my characters had hippos. That was how they got around in this very swampy world. They had hippos. Our ranger had a talisman of animal speaking. And the hippos were constantly. They loved cabbages. And so they would just sing cabbages, cabbages, cabbages, cabbages. They. It was great. Each of the hippos had a lot of personality. It made it feel much more interesting to travel when they knew they were traveling with hippos. So I'm going to take that easy one right off the top and say, add hippos to your game. You will have fun. And. And I'll let you guys fight over anything else you want. Roger, what would you want to steal from this besides, I mean. And you can say hippos too. Nothing wrong with hippos.

Speaker C 00:22:41

Hippos and hippos.

Speaker B 00:22:43

Yeah, it's all hippos. And we can just assume that hippos.

Speaker C 00:22:46

And so I think I would steal the riverboat set as a setting as like an adventure setting. Particularly the way it's surrounded by waters filled with murderous feral hippos. Right. So you're in this scenario and it's all nice and genteel, you know, and there's seduction and there's card playing and there's high class booze and comfortable rooms and so on and so forth. Kind of like in the movie Maverick where you know, they're on the riverboat for all the card playing at the end of the movie. But like having that be surrounded by an Inescapable cordon of death in order to constrain the party's movements. Obviously, this is before PCs get teleport. If you're doing this in D and D, if you're doing a different system, it's probably not an issue anyway. But something like that, that just like this. This totally bizarre but utterly deadly condition around the adventure that thus forces them to stay in the location until they can resolve the story that they are there to resolve.

Speaker B 00:23:50

Okay, Petra.

Speaker E 00:23:52

So Roger stole my thunder. Absolutely.

Speaker C 00:23:55

Well, Eric stole mine, so I.

Speaker B 00:23:58

Hiccups and riverboat.

Speaker E 00:24:03

I did truly enjoy the whole riverboat setting. I just thought it was a lot of fun. And the fact that, you know, as Roger had stated, you can restrict the players because it's surrounded by death, essentially. It was just so colorful. I truly enjoyed that piece of it. I enjoyed some of the quips of the characters. But really, honestly, if I was ever going to take something away from this, I would take the hippos and the riverboat setting. Those were my two favorite pieces of the book.

Speaker D 00:24:32

Colleen guys are just taking all the good things. Taking the hippos, you're taking the riverboat. I love alternate history settings, so that's amazing. And then Peter's like, I would steal some of the character clips. I would just steal Archie. I would steal that character. She's amazing.

Speaker C 00:24:50

I. Archie for the win.

Speaker D 00:24:53

Yeah, she was fantastic. I loved how she was just like a thief. Right. She does all these amazing. Like she did. She had a costume change. She would point out relevant information to the other, I guess, PCs or other characters and be like, hey, I. I think someone might be ratting us out. Some of the plots in the. The book I found kind of obvious, but I still enjoyed it. What was her name? The assassin?

Speaker B 00:25:18

Oh, Adelia Reyes.

Speaker D 00:25:20

Delia. Yeah. I was like, oh, this is probably her. She's probably going to try to kill them. And then like the next sentence, she's like, I'm here to kill you. But the whole time, I just loved the conflicts that Archie, that character, got into and out of. And I would want to make those similar kind of conflicts for my players. But also Archie would make it an amazing npc.

Speaker C 00:25:41

Yeah, I was going to say, building on that, there's an element, the relationship bit between Archie and Houndstooth. You know, I've saved you 10 times. No, it's nine and a half. No, it's 10. And then by the end now, it's really 10. Right. So that kind of bit was great.

Speaker B 00:25:56

That's definitely awesome. It's a fantastically diverse cast. I mean, Houndstooth. I have the audiobook, but if you look at the COVID of the actual book, he appears to be Asian. He, like, he's pictured as Asian, but he came from England and he has the Southern accent in the audiobook, and he's just all over the place, and it's just a really interesting character. And then you've got Hero Shackleby. I mean, hero is just, like, seriously badass. I just. You just cannot get more badass than Hero. And then you've got Adelia, who's, like, killing people while she's pregnant, and. And Archie, who's like a gigantically lush, gorgeous character. Like, if they're all just fantastic, I put them all in a game. I. There's. I would steal every single one of them. And even the names, like, you know, hero, Shackleby, Adelia Reyes. Those are great names. Just good names for campaign, almost.

Speaker C 00:26:57

I did like how, like, the names really meant the setting in this book.

Speaker E 00:27:02

Yeah, I agree with you.

Speaker C 00:27:03

There were. I mean, I agree with comments, you know, about some of the storylines being a little obvious. I personally, the style was a little over the top for me, but the. The names were gold.

Speaker E 00:27:12

Yeah, I mean, I. I do agree that some of the plots were. I can't say anything super surprised me, but there was just a lot of flavor in this book that kept me going. Right. Short read. It wasn't a very long read, but I was definitely hooked while I was reading it.

Speaker B 00:27:27

It's a little black dress of a book. Right? Like, it's not. There aren't surprising things, but a little black dress can do a lot. You may not be surprised by it, but it does its job and it carried us through. And we got to have, as we've said, hippos and gets river boats and really fun characters and be entertained.

Speaker E 00:27:45

I mean, what more could you ask for these days, Right? It was an enjoyable read. And as the author had said, I don't regret a moment of it.

Speaker D 00:27:54

I was supposed to say, a little black dress goes a long way, especially if Archie is wearing it.

Speaker B 00:27:58

Oh, yeah, right. Absolutely. Okay. Being mindful of our time, let's jump right into recommendations. Things that this reminds you of, of media, book, tv, anything that this absolutely reminds you of. Patro, why don't you start?

Speaker E 00:28:16

Yeah. So, I mean, it kind of got me thinking, actually, about some of the books that I've read that have animals that have been anthropomorphized, you know, to have the characteristics that are not really them. And then I kind of got thinking about capers and animals that have gotten into trouble. And it really kind of brought me back to something that I read a long time ago, Red Wall by Brian Jacques. And it just, you know, you have this mouse who's a little bumbly and he goes on this adventure looking for a sword. It just kind of brought me back to that, which was really great memory enjoying a book about animals, which is kind of really what this book was. It was a book about animals. I mean, I know, I know it was a heist and all that stuff, but I think what I took away from it mostly was the hippos. Right.

Speaker D 00:29:09

So, yeah, Colleen, it reminded me a little bit of Six of Crows. So if you're not familiar, it's a young reader book but got turned into Shadow and Bone. And in the Shadow and Bone there's these down and out gang of characters. They're your criminals, but they're the likable criminals. They have their own book called Six of Crows. And the dynamics and the relationships reminded me of that, how those characters play off of each other and that there's a low beat love interest happening throughout the book that you don't quite get into. But it's there. That's what it reminded me. But Shadow and Bone and Pixel Crows has tons of magic, so obviously that's not in it. That heist element in that series.

Speaker B 00:29:50

Roger.

Speaker C 00:29:51

Yeah, a few things came to mind for the fantasy oriented kind of focused on, you know, a band of thieves, you know, pulling together to do things. Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series starting with the lies of Locke Lamora. And then I really love that series. Then I would also another fantasy recommendation, Brandon Sanderson's Wax and Wayne series for the more western feel. Again, it's got magic, you know, it's the Mistborn universe. But spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. The next iteration of the Mistborn world is where Wax and Wayne take place and it's got a very western feel to it. And then lastly, because I mentioned it earlier, the movie Maverick because of the riverboat thing. I mean, yes, there isn't a poker tournament in this book, but the fancy riverboat experience, you know, that jumped out at me as well.

Speaker B 00:30:36

All right, awesome. Taking this from least appropriate to most, I just read a fantastic heisty capery book by Nicholas and Olivia Atwater. A Matter of Execution was the short story that had the caper. There's a series that follows it that's not as caper y but this one caper book really made me feel good. But it takes place on a ship, but that's a flying steampunky kind of ship. So that's where that ties in. Next, Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Rayborn. This is a group of American CIA type assassins who kill Nazis from the 1960s, but now it's modern day and they're old ladies and they're on the run from their own ages agency. So there's this well developed team of assassins that's happening there that that gives me a little bit of that feel. But the two books that I think are the the clearest ones is Sarah Gailey herself has written another book called Upright Women Wanted, which is a book about traveling lesbian librarians in the old West. Again, it is exactly what the title says and it is an amazing book. I enjoyed it. It's a nice short story. And there's another book by Stark Holborn and the book is called Triggerometry and it takes place in a world where mathematics has been banned in the west and we they never really explain why. But a bunch of retired mathematicians go on a heist for reasons and I don't want to give it away because it's really fun. But Trigger Nometry by Stark Holborn is definitely in the same slightly wacky slight change to history. Still not a lot of magic kind of thing. So those are all favorite books of mine that would touch on this.

Speaker C 00:32:34

I'm so putting that last book in my my week list.

Speaker B 00:32:37

Oh God. Yeah. Trigonometry is again another short story, but man, is it fun. Sorry, Colleen.

Speaker D 00:32:43

No, I just hang right. It's like every time you say any book, I'm constantly just writing them down. I'm just like everything Eric says, just write it down. Put it in your audible wish list. That is what you're reading next.

Speaker B 00:32:55

That brings us to the the last part of our discussion here. Petra. Another plug. I can't guarantee this is going to be out before the con, but go ahead.

Speaker E 00:33:04

I will absolutely do my shameless plug for Rising Phoenix Game Con. We are a great con. We are super inclusive. It's really about the community of gaming and great games. We have board games, we have Panels, we have RPGs and it's just a huge amount of fun. It's in April this year and actually it's April every year, typically around Mass. April vacation. This year it's the 24th to the 27th and it's in Milford, Mass. We would love to have you check us out. Rising Phoenix Game Con is the website. Please join us.

Speaker B 00:33:43

Roger, did you finish the book yet?

Speaker C 00:33:45

No. Work has been kicking my butt, but I am in revisions and hoping to open my book up to beta readers very soon.

Speaker B 00:33:53

Colleen, anything new coming down the pike?

Speaker D 00:33:55

Nothing to announce yet.

Speaker B 00:33:57

Oh, that sounds tempting. Definitely have to have you back.

Speaker A 00:34:03

And that's our discussion of Sarah Gailey's river of Teeth. You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-squareproductions.com GMBC. You can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media, on bluesky, at gmbookclub, bluesky social, on Facebook, @gamemastersbookclub, and on Instagram gamemastersbookclub. You've been listening to the Game Masters Book Club brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions. Thanks again to our Game Masters Petra Jackel, Colleen Noctrib and Roger Alex Kudrow. Look for them to return when the Book Club analyzes the last hour Between Worlds with the author Melissa Caruso. Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music. Later, gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Speaker B 00:35:01

Sam.