Books: Justice Society, D&D, and Camelot 30K

Justice Society by Levitz and Staton

-The adventures of the Justice Society in the 1970s have recently been released in two volumes, plus a couple additional volumes dedicated to the Huntress and Power Girl. They're reasonably solid stories, though very 1970s in presentation. Volume 2 contains the death of the Batman of Earth-2, which I've been wanting to track down for years. I was startled to see that Batman wasn't mentioned or depicted at all on the cover — I'd think "Batman dies!" would be a selling point.

Dungeonscape for D&D

-Another in D&D's competent series of environment-splatbooks. The highlight of this one is the step-by-step guidelines to putting together encounters and traps, including sidebars on the most likely pitfalls. On the flip side, the factotum class is great if you want a PC who can do everything, badly, and in the dungeon design bits, you can tell the authors were straining to come up with 100 words each on, say, "bone walls" or "kitchens".

Complete Scoundrel for D&D

-Despite my love for scoundrel-type characters, this book didn't quite satisfy me. Part of this may be because of their very broad definition of "scoundrel". If you can build a paladin-scoundrel, you're using the term too broadly. Part of it is that "skill tricks" strike me as rules cruft that could be replaced by a list of DCs for the tricks they describe. And part of it is that the prestige classes don't do anything for me. Out of 13 prestige classes, 3 are skill trick-dependent, 1 is psionic, and the others, meh. Flip through it before you buy.

Camelot 30K by Robert L. Forward

-That's 30 degrees kelvin, not 30 thousand, in case you were puzzled. Humanity discovers an alien race living on an iceball outside Pluto's orbit, and sends a mission to make contact. Like Forward's Dragon's Egg and Rocheworld, this novel is diamond-hard hard SF, and also a bit dull, until the last few chapters. The alien biology and culture are extremely unusual and very well presented. A warning: Do not skip ahead and read — or even look at — any of the appendicies until you're done with the book. They give away a major plot point. If you like chemistry, physics, and hard SF, highly recommended.