The Gutter Prayer
I am in a sci-fi and fantasy book club, surprising absolutely no-one. We take turns picking the book we read. We usually give ourselves a month to read, meeting at the halfway point to discuss how it’s going and then again when we have finished the book. It’s fun, we spend a lot of time delightfully dunking on duds but, thankfully we also have plenty of time for praising the good ones. The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan (AKA Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan) is one of those. It is rich and evocative and full of cool and interesting characters that you either hope won’t die or hope will die.
The author has a long and storied history as an incredibly prolific RPG designer. You can check out what he has written here. I personally only just encountered him through the recently crowd-funded Heart sourcebook/scenario, Dagger in the Heart, which he wrote. When I went and looked him up, I was intrigued to see that he was also the author of several novels. Since it was my turn to choose a book for book club, I decided to go for his first, The Gutter Prayer.
He has designed a city that is alive and full of fantasical and very dark elements. Guerdon is based partly on Cork city (Hanrahan’s home town,) Edinburgh and New York and you can feel the influences of all three in the writing. The story revolves around three scoundrels, Carillon, heir to a murdered aristocracy, Rat, a ghoul who is trying to fit in on the surface and Spar, a stone man, inflicted with a terrible disease and the son of a famous thief and revolutionary figure. They are the unlikely trio who find themselves embroiled in intrigue, the battles of saints and the magic of the crawling ones, fighting for the city itself against the most unforeseen of divine threats.
It reminded me so much of China Mieville’s Bas Lag trilogy and his own rich and lived-in city of New Crobuzon. It’s also got a lot of Cthulhu references what with the ghouls and the crawling ones and the menacing ancient gods and all. In our latest book club meeting we also talked about how it felt like a book written by a game designer. It was something about the richness of the locations, the depth of the “NPCs” and the deft construction of the set-pieces. Please go and read it! I can’t wait to start on the next one in the trilogy, The Shadow Saint.
The Book, the game
Also, he made a game based on these books! I mean, of course he did. You can get it for free on his blog:
It’s only 17 pages long and contains both the rules and a one-shot adventure to play. Go check it out!
Are you a Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan fan? If so, have you played any of the games he has written?
The Dice Pool 