Make your fantasy tabletop role-playing game even more epic with hundreds of creative and unexpected details to keep your story fresh, your settings vivid and alive, and your friends guessing! Take your fantasy world to the next level, all with the roll of a die! Random Tables: Cities and Towns is a utility book for fans of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, allowing Game Masters to generate on-the-fly content for adventurers traveling, shopping, or simply passing through towns and cities. Adventurers love to ask tough questions that can sometimes put Game Masters on the spot and put their creative skills to the test. Never fear being stumped when the party asks: What building is across the street from the thieves’ guild headquarters? Who runs the local potion shop? Who is staying in the other rooms of the party’s tavern?

Virtual cities are places of often-fractured geographies, impossible physics, outrageous assumptions and almost untamed imaginations given digital structure. This book, the first atlas of its kind, aims to explore, map, study and celebrate them. To imagine what they would be like in reality. To paint a lasting picture of their domes, arches and walls. From metropolitan sci-fi open worlds and medieval fantasy towns to contemporary cities and glimpses of gothic horror, author and urban planner Konstantinos Dimopoulos and visual artist Maria Kallikaki have brought to life over forty game cities. Together, they document the deep and exhilarating history of iconic gaming landscapes through richly illustrated commentary and analysis. Virtual Cities transports us into these imaginary worlds, through cities that span over four decades of digital history across literary and gaming genres. Travel to fantasy cities like World of Warcraft’s Orgrimmar and Grim Fandango’s Rubacava; envision what could be in the familiar cities of Assassin’s Creed’s London and Gabriel Knight’s New Orleans; and steal a glimpse of cities of the future, in Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar and Half-Life 2’s City 17. Within, there are many more worlds to discover – each formed in the deepest corners of the imagination, their immense beauty and complexity astounding for artists, game designers, world builders and, above all, anyone who plays and cares about video games.

Before the Roman conquest there were few settlements in Britain that could properly be described as towns and their rapid growth was one of the first effects of the invasion of AD 43. This book traces the process of urbanization and provides answers to questions about how Roman towns grew and functioned: why towns are sited where they are, who lived in them, what services and facilities they provided, how they were organized, and their role in trade, industry and economy. Roman towns, with their impressive public buildings on a scale not seen before in Britain, must have had a great impact on the native population. They have attracted attention ever since and a vast amount of evidence for the Roman towns, many of which lie beneath modern British cities, has been recovered. This book draws together as much of this information as possible to present a picture of life in the Roman towns of Britain. With over 100 maps, plans, reconstructions and photographs, this is the complete companion to the Roman Towns in Britain - whether you wish to study the sites before or after a visit, or whether you are simply an armchair archaeologist.

“Her resolve was absolute. So was her vodka.” I wake up on my seventeenth birthday to receive an out of the ordinary gift - a cryptic letter and a million dollar cheque from my grandfather, whom I had been raised to believe was dead. Fascinated and puzzled on hearing from my long-lost relative, Kamal Chakravarti, in such strange and spectacular fashion, I embark on a journey to find him through his three brothers, the Chakravartis. The Chakravartis are old and wizened, each of them recapping a part of my grandfather's life that takes us back in place and time in vivid detail. Comically bumbling along this terrain of wayward youth with me are my three friends – a poet, a playboy and a peddler – as we collect pieces of information that come together like a magical puzzle, eventually leading me to my grandfather's porch! The NameFake is a humorous narrative on the Indian upper class, friendship and family, love and the loss of it, and the highs and lows of coming of age in the Millennial generation.

In literature and popular culture, small town America is often idealized as distilling the national spirit. Does the myth of the small town conceal deep-seated reactionary tendencies or does it contain the basis of a national re-imagining? During the period between 1940 and 1960, America underwent a great shift in self-mythologizing that can be charted through representations of small towns. Authors like Henry Bellamann and Grace Metalious continued the tradition of Sherwood Anderson in showing the small town--by extension, America itself--profoundly warping the souls of its citizens. Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury, Toshio Mori and Ross Lockridge, Jr., sought to identify the small town's potential for growth, away from the shadows cast by World War II toward a more inclusive, democratic future. Examined together, these works are key to understanding how mid-20th century America refashioned itself in light of a new postwar order, and how the literary small town both obscures and reveals contradictions at the heart of the American experience.

Immerse yourself in 45 spectacularly imagined virtual cities, from Arkham City to Whiterun, in this beautifully illustrated unofficial guide. Spanning decades of digital history, this is the ultimate travel guide and atlas of the gamer imagination. Dimopoulos invites readers to share his vision of dozens of different gaming franchises like never before: discover Dimopoulos’s Half-Life 2’s City 17, Yakuza 0’s Kamurocho, Fallout’s New Vegas, Super Mario Odyssey’s New Donk City, and many more. Each chapter of this virtual travel guide consists of deep dives into the history and lore of these cities from an in-universe perspective. Illustrated with original color ink drawings and—of course—gorgeous and detailed maps, readers can explore the nostalgic games of their youth as well as modern hits. Sidebars based on the author’s research tell behind-the-scenes anecdotes and reveal the real-world stories that inspired these iconic virtual settings. With a combination of stylish original maps, illustrations, and insightful commentary and analysis, this is a must-have for video game devotees, world-building fans, and game design experts.

Colorado's spectacular ski towns—like Aspen, Vail, Telluride, and Crested Butte—offer far more than just skiing: they offer some of the best hiking, mountain biking, fishing, shopping, dining, and lodging in the world, and all year round to boot. Author Evelyn Spence, a former editor at Skiing magazine and avid outdoorswoman, has turned the state's classic mountain towns upside down to find quirky annual festivals, superb Rocky Mountain cuisine, historic B&Bs, trout-filled streams, powder-choked runs, Manhattan-worthy shopping, and jaw-dropping drives, and combine them in this unique travel guide. Whether you want to sleep under the stars or inside a toasty wilderness lodge, this guide will help you plan the ultimate Colorado mountain experience.

"Examples of faux authenticity abound in today's marketplace. Trading on the commercial appeal of the ersatz real, however, is far from a twenty-first century invention. As Consuming Traditions investigates, the allure of commodified nostalgia and the selling of the "genuine" article emerged as powerful forces in early twentieth-century Britain." "Elizabeth Outka redefines the debates surrounding literary modernism and the market as she explores the marketing of authenticity, a crucial but overlooked development in the history of modernity. With an interdisciplinary approach that probes novels, plays, advertisements, and architecture, Consuming Traditions presents a convincing case for how the "commodified authentic" - the selling of objects and places allegedly free of commercial taint - marks a critical turn in modern culture and offers a new way to understand literary modernism and its complex negotiation of tradition and novelty. Drawing on cultural studies, theories of consumerism, and works by Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, and others, Outka examines how literature both enacted and critiqued the larger revolution in material culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Greer Hennessy is a struggling movie location scout. Her last location shoot ended in disaster when a film crew destroyed property on an avocado grove. And Greer ended up with the blame. Now Greer has been given one more chance—a shot at finding the perfect undiscovered beach town for a big budget movie. She zeroes in on a sleepy Florida panhandle town. There's one motel, a marina, a long stretch of pristine beach and an old fishing pier with a community casino—which will be perfect for the film's climax—when the bad guys blow it up in an all-out assault on the townspeople. Greer slips into town and is ecstatic to find the last unspoilt patch of the Florida gulf coast. She takes a room at the only motel in town, and starts working her charm. However, she finds a formidable obstacle in the town mayor, Eben Thinadeaux. Eben is a born-again environmentalist who's seen huge damage done to the town by a huge paper company. The bay has only recently been re-born, a fishing industry has sprung up, and Eben has no intention of letting anybody screw with his town again. The only problem is that he finds Greer way too attractive for his own good, and knows that her motivation is in direct conflict with his. Will true love find a foothold in this small beach town before it's too late and disaster strikes? Told with Mary Kay Andrews inimitable wit and charm, the New York Times bestseller Beach Town is this year's summer beach read!

Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in Eastern India presents an analysis of class formation in the industrial town, Rourkela in the eastern Indian state Odisha, and the ways this process relates to regional ethnicity and caste. This study is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the 2000s and oral histories covering the period from the inception of the steel plant, and it focusses on the region’s ‘tribes’, indigenous people or Adivasis who lost their land when the Government of India established a large steel plant in Rourkela in the 1950s. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, historians interested in industrial labour and work, in class, caste, Adivasis, ethnicity and their dynamic entanglement, as well as students and activists. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)