"Lost Regiment by Forstchen - Good Gaming Books?" Topic

I picked up one of the Lost Regiment series of novels today at Dollar Tree - "Fateful Lightning." At the time I thought it must be the first novel in the series (no number on it!), but after some googling looks like it's #4 in the series.

a) Is the series any good?

b) Will it make any sense if I start with #4, or should I go out and hunt down #1 (Rally Cry)?

The series involves soldiers from the ACW fighting aliens on another world. One review calls it "one of the truly great SF/Fantasy series."

I suggest you read 50 or so pages to see if you like it or not. If not, you'll know not to get the other books. If so, definitely get the series starting with #1.

I have read the whole set (excepting the recent 20 years later one) and feel they are a good read as a whole. They do get a bit tiresome after the 4th book. What kept me going was to see how Forstchen (the author) kept introducing quasi-WWI technology and the "theory debates" over how the new equipment should be used.

The volume you have has some excellently described aerial action and Forstchen really catches the world weariness felt by the human fliers that parallels WWI fliers. I feel this series would make a good setting for Victorian SF style gaming.

I only read the first one. It was OK, but I was not inspired to read the others. Gamertom's suggestion seems sound - pick up the first one and read a bit of it and see if it clicks for you.

Interesting series, to say the least; I've read them all, even if it looked like he sort of stretched them out a little bit towards the end. He wrote a sequel as well, but that looks like it's died. I'll stand behind what the others have said; it's sort of ACW into VSF-WWIish stuff. Could be fun for gaming.

I believe that I have read six of William Fortshcen " The Regiment " books, they are very violent and strange. I have a friend reading them, he finds them interesting. William Fortschen and Newt Gingrich have two fiction books about the American Civil War. I have not read them.

As a whole, they are a good series of books. However after about book 4 it starts to become more of the same with each book playing a game of one-up with each other. Each book has a 'terrible' threat to humanity and in each book the threat gets bigger, meaner, and more powerful. At that point it gets kinda old.

However the first three or so books are excellent and wondeful 'steampunk' books. The rest are good too, but I honestly got tired of them.

Too much of a good thing?

Howdy

Good series until about #4...the first book really got the wargame juices flowing. Mixing ACW with Russian Boyars and Ancient races really drops into the VSF realm. Although I haven't tried it yet, I do intend to set up a campaign based on the concept but not on the books. (perhaps using mongols for the bad guys??)

Maybe you should use Orks? I got the impression that the Tugar (whatever they call themselves) were rather orc like. Just make sure that you get plenty of orkish horse archers.