The game I’ve been playing the most, without a doubt, and for something like the past year, is Lord of the Rings Online. I’ve written about it around here before, and I’ll write about it again soon. More fun than reading about the game, though, is playing it. So let’s get you started.

We’ve got a free copy of the Complete Edition of Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria to give away to a Gameplaywright reader, just in time to make a great belated holiday gift for yourself.

Update: The contest is now closed and I’m going through the posts here and the emailed submissions I got and picking a winner this weekend. With not a single bad entry in the bunch, this is going to be tough. Wonderfully tough. Thanks to everyone who entered!

// Read on and learn how to win

Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales, by Kenneth Hite, from Atomic Overmind Press

Ken Hite is a genius. He’s so bright that if you stand next to him you cast no shadow. He travels the universe absorbing books whole, transmuting information into knowledge in a clean-burning process that produces only text and conversation in its wake. In the winters, when I tend to go home to Chicago, I make a point of stopping by his house and warming my hands on his brain.

// Click to read why you would like to read this book

Demimonde by Justin Achilli

The holiday-season promotions continue. Justin Achilli, long-time developer of Vampire: The Masquerade and creator of Vampire: The Requiem, has a reputation. At game conventions, he’s a maniac, a debauchee, and a DJ. Around the office, he’s a pranking elitist in the very best sense. Online, he was known for forum fisticuffs and epic sass. Behind a pen, he’s a writer with high standards. When he left White Wolf (for what turned out to be a sabbatical), he did what most RPG developers want to do: he wrote a novel.

// Read this one.

I heard last week on a mailing list for USC film school alumni that Nina Foch has passed away.

Nina taught the course on directing actors that was required of all first-semester students in the graduate screenwriting program at USC. As new students, none of us knew each other*, and most of us were new to Los Angeles. Some incoming students had directing and acting experience, while some of us… um… didn’t. It was the kind of “forged in fire” instructional experience that sticks with you forever. Nina never put a kind spin on a review of work she thought was crappy, and never pulled any punches. She was tough, and mostly fair.

Nina instructed obliquely, but with force. It took me more than a month to start to figure out what she meant when she talked about “intention.” And it turned out that the class would have been more accurately entitled “Deciphering and Assigning Intention, Because That’s The Only Thing It’s Important To Understand When You’re Directing Actors.”

// Find out what I found out, and how it might help us make better games…

‘Tis the season, as they say, so this week at Gameplaywright I’ll be plugging a few things that I’ve gotten my hands on in the last few weeks which might also make fine gifts for yourself or the other game/story fan you’re shopping for. First up, though, is a quick plug of our own damn book. Yes, again. The brilliant and cunning fantasist, Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen and the still-new Predator novel called South China Sea, dropped some props on our book over at the Amazon blog, Omnivoracious. He implies that we may have even justified ourselves!

Want five good reasons to pick up our book? Click this link and there they are.

VanderMeer is also the co-editor of the wicked anthologies, Steampunk and Fast Ships, Black Sails (one is about pirates, the other gathers seminal or landmark steampunk stories, and I leave you to figure out which is which). Those are fine gifts, too, for your friends who are fans of the piratical and the steampunky. Gamers, it is a good bet, are either or both. They’re sure to find stories to love in each.

Later this week I’ll be celebrating very-small-press books from game writers you should know — though none of these books are games. I’ll also be giving away a copy of the Complete Edition of Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria, so do return for that.