So you think you can come up with a good story using nine Talecraft cards?

Find the cards on the Talecraft contest page and submit your story. The best four stories will be chosen and read during the Talecraft event on March 30 at Booktopia. Prizes await the winners!

Visit the contest page and make sure to read the rules. To learn more about the game, make sure you visit the About pages of the Talecraft site.

Baen Free Library

Baen, a leading publisher of speculative fiction has made available for free some of its titles through the Baen Free Library. The home page, if you are interested, has an extensive discussion on book piracy and how the library came to be. Contributing authors to the library are well-known science fiction and fantasy authors like Mercedes Lackey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Eric Flint, Larry Niven…

LibraryThing

It’s like a library thing, you know, a way to catalog your personal library and arrange your books on virtual shelves. And then it’s also more than that because their BookSuggester gives you recommendations for books similar to books in your library. Strangely enough, they also have a device called the Unsuggester which will give you “humorous recommendations of books you probably wouldn’t enjoy.” You can also meet other members with the same interests by forming communities like the 50 Book Challenge group or the Read YA Lit group. Take their tour of the site to find out more.

The Best Book Ever is many a writer’s dream.  Watch this short animated film on writing “The Best Book Ever” from Lev Yilmaz.

Join us for a night of creative exchange! Come to the Talecraft Event at Booktopia on March 30, 2007, Friday, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

We first encountered Talecraft at the Read or Die convention. People were gathered around a table near the entrance to the convention hall and we couldn’t quite get a good look at what was going on. It turns out, they were playing a game, a storytelling game using a deck of cards. Ah, we thought. Interesting.

A few weeks later, I sat down with the artist and creator of TaleCraft, Ria L., and she showed me what Talecraft was all about. It is a deck of 86 cards composed of three types of cards: genre, archetype, and key cards. Players take a combination of random cards from the deck to come up with a story of the chosen genre, with characters based on the chosen archetypes, using the chosen key cards for plot elements. During RodCon where they assigned judges, the best stories were judged and chosen. It’s really very engaging.

* Designs for the Adventure genre card and the Pied Piper archetype card.

If you think playing Talecraft is difficult, think again. At RodCon, players who never thought they could tell a story from start to finish did surprisingly well. TaleCraft traces its roots to a game that Ria and her siblings used to play as children. (We’ll let her tell you that story during the event on March 30.) So it’s something that young adults can play too. Perhaps younger players will need the assistance of their parents to be able to understand some of the more difficult words printed on the cards.

You and your friends can invent different rules for the game and you can find helpful suggestions on how to play from the Talecraft website. Better yet, come to the event we are hosting on March 30. See the game at play, meet its creator, and take home your own story-creation deck.

Tell us if you are attending and how many friends will be there with you.