The title does not provoke confidence

It seems that in order to pay the mortgage a number of SF writers have jumped on the better selling fantasy genre bandwagon. One would think that their experience in the supposedly more demanding and intellectually rigorous science fiction field would lead to some pretty different fantasy concepts, but well...

Take John Scalzi for example; his new "epic fantasy series" is named..."Shadow War of the Night Dragons".

Oh come ON John, surely you can do better than that. Like maybe "Dark Shadowy Night Shadow War of the Dark Shadowy Night Dragons at Night".

Maybe I'm underestimating this novel, maybe it doesn't have any actual dragons in it, and the name refers to ninjas or assassins. But my hopes aren't exactly up.

One of the worst GM railroading stories I've ever heard.

While doing a bit of research on Usenet, I stumbled across this old story. It's nowhere near the worst gaming story I've heard (the game with the police and prostitutes is definitely worse), but this one is pretty much the most amusingly bad example of railroading I've ever read. And so:

On May 7 1998, 12:00 am, m...@ottawa.com wrote:

> Story #2:
> Playing Space Opera, I had a referee whose opposition was *always*, without
> fail, able to trivially kick the PCs' butt. He also railroaded with a
> heavier hand than anyone I'veevereven heard rumours of. We latched on to
> the pattern early in the game and started to experiment to see just how far
> this referee power trip went. One of the experiments was to just attack a
> random passer-by with everything we had (and, trust me, we had *incredible*
> levels of power!--this would have been a Monty Hall campaign except for the
> fact that everything else had even more power). Sure enough, this completely
> random passer-by just happened to be an incredibly poweful psionic who
> trivially wiped the streets clean with us. Then this same NPC--the one we
> opened up relationships with by trying to kill, mind--decided that we were
> trustworthy folk who would be perfect for a military mission he had in mind.
> Here's where things got very surreal:
> 1) We refused to participate so he teleported us to the battlefield.
> 2) We just stood around and ignored everything going on around us so we got
> teleported inside a (tracked) tank.
> 3) We refused to drive the tank or fire its gun at anything so it drove
> itself and shot at the opposition (who were, of course, able to just swat
> aside the rounds).
> 4) We climbed out of the tank and jumped in front of it under its treads so
> it levitated over us with its hitherto unseen anti-gravity device.
> 5) My character tried to use a force knife to cut his own throat, but the
> force knife blade contracted to nothing whenever it got close to being able
> to injure my character.
>
> At this point we all just got up and left the game, never to return.

Seriously, can anyone come up with a worse example?