Recent content by humble minion

I wouldn’t be reading too much into that quite yet. Legends and Lattes (which I read yesterday) itself started on a very similar note. The scene of ‘adventure-typical’ violence. It serves as a contrast to what comes later, to emphasise why the MC might see the cosy life as desirable.

I might be romanticising the past here, but I think the internet right now is probably at its worst. From the earliest days it was very bad for some small number of people, but the whole low-grade continual awfulness it grinds out that affects absolutely everyone is imho much more a product of...

Thanks, I thought i remembered something vaguely like that. But yeah, an adjustment like this is necessary for Dark Sun's exploration/survival pillar to be meaningful at all, and that just can't happen if we're using PHB rules as written. But I don't think that WotC has EVER, in the lifetime...

I'm fuzzy on Create Water, but I'm 99.9% sure that Goodberry at least DID exist in 2e. The kicker was that you had to provide fresh berries as a material component that the spell consumed, which limited its usefulness in Athas. I think it was 2nd level too. Besides, the big deal was that in...

I think races and classes are probably the easy bit. You can do a 'soft' exclude like Dragonlance did, just have a sidebar talking about how X, Y, Z races are the most appropriate and talk to your DM if you absolutely desperately want to play something else. There's fundamental elements of 5e...

There's a fair bit more that defines the 'cosy' fantasy genre than simply the explicitness of the sex scenes. Cosy fantasy doesn't even need to HAVE romance in it or as a major element, really. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (which won a Hugo) might be an example there. Violence and...

I'm playing a halfling warlock currently, possibly my first ever halfling. The high Cha warlock synergy is a good opportunity to play a mostly-true-to-type halfling - curious, sociable, a little bit innocent, interested in other people and so on. I've wanted to play a dwarf in 5e for a long...

I’m not exactly a guru on the genre, but 'romantasy' is a category that covers a LOT of ground these days. The steamy shadow-daddy BookTok faves like Fourth Wing and ACOTAR probably get the most hype (and according to a friend of mine who is a very successful writer in a not-unrelated field...

Polk is a genuinely good writer and is seriously worth the read. And while I haven’t read Fourth Wing , the blurb on this one says ‘cosy’ rather than ‘spicy’ which is genre-speak for ‘very non-explicit’. So not sure the BookTok ACOTAR etc fans are entirely the demographic they’re after. Though...

One of my main concerns with a 5e Dark Sun is that it’s likely to have the same problems. Goodberry make wilderness survival trivial, and Create Water is a trivial option to fill your water skins at 1st level too. WotC have been supremely unwilling to disallow spells on a setting by setting...

Um, yes it did. It ignored the Prism Pentad and the many subsequent supplements or parts of supplements that discussed the post-Prism world, it ignored Mind Lords of the Sea, it pretty much brushed over the existence of Kurn and Eldaarich and the Obsidian Wastes and even Ur Draxa. From memory...

I'm in the IT sector, which probably has a higher proportion of gamers than most, but I've never seen the need to hide anything. I talk about 'game night' when asked what I've been doing over lunch and am happy to elaborate if asked. Hell, in my current gig the project leader wore a D&D tshirt...

'Everywhere' is pushing it. I'd certainly managed to avoid the plot point in question without too much effort up to that point. I mean, if i went into a spoiler-tagged review of the module, yeah, I'd expect to hear about it, but a miniature set? And of course the spoilery miniature in...

Yes, agreed - in general terms. But the plot element in question is (spoiler!) 'evil NPC A is disguised as friendly NPC B', and they've not done that by having miniatures of both A and B in the set, which would have been perfectly fine and actually useful if you were running the game. They've...

Yeah, at some point a spoiler ban stops having validity. I mean, if you're surprised about Strahd, I've got some bad news for you about Luke Skywalker's father too. And Strahd is literally illustrated as a pale black-haired aristrocrat in opera cloak with fangs etc in pretty much every piece...