Recent content by Parmandur

Yeah, that is fairly minor. For me, the thing that makes it a real mess structurally is trying to give four entirely different possible Antagonists...whichis also interesting and clever! But it makes sense they didn't try that again. I do think given the sheer number of low level Dungeons, and...

I do like a decent trade paperback too, but there is just something about that small pulpy book form... Long story short is, yeah, basically ebooks and smartphones means the market for people looking for a quick and cheap read at airports and drugstores basically dissappeared...or at least...

Yeah, the thing is the Magic team probably asked them to do a Strixhaven tie-in because it was tracking to be an incredibly popular card set (and it was), but the Magic world team did no work to build anything outside of the School itself...whicbh is, yeah, kind of shady. I'd be inclined to...

His wife is a school teacher, so I doubt he is looking to pull up stakes and move at his stage of life.

Like some of the other behind the curve 5E products (thinking Waterdeep Dragon Heist here), a lot of the problems also come from genuine attempts to innovate and try something bold and new. I agree that I don't know if it works)(I would have to run it to get a better handle), but the "what if...

Yeah, even since I was a teenager in the late 90s it is a total collapse. Heck, not even just short fiction, the same marketplace and technological forces that were the death knell of literary magazines are destroying my favorite form of book now. mass market paperbacks were everything in my...

Working my way through Tailored Realities, the new anthology collecting Brandon Sanderson's Science Fiction short stories and novellas. In another era, he would have done well with magazine submissions, I think, a very old school Golden Age sci-fi edge.

Oh, for Murder ot it was a absolute necessity...the novels are fully first person with tremendous interiority. While I like the interiority of the Stormlight Archives fine...not necessary to capture that in an adaptation in the same way. If Sanderson is using Jackson's Lord of the Rings as his...

LOL, don't have the time these days to go that deep, but thanks! Sanderson does not have the strongest writing on that front, voice wise, I would agree, though I think he does a good job drawing out different characters personalities and motivations. When he gets to write Wheel of Time, he...

The black and white maps are also less cluttered with specific details, so easier to mentally repurpose. Also, the old blue tone maps were a copy protection technjque: 70s era Xerox machines could not pick up that blue color.

One of the softcover models for the Stormlight Archives RPG, The First Step, does something like this. Provides a series of scenes with multiple choice questions to create a guided life path that all the players go through together...

Indeed! Frankly I would love it if someone did a long form TV version someday that has all the songs, Tom Bombadil, the Scouring and all the walking not simply montages away. On the other hand, to tie the LOTR films back to the topic, Sanderson has apparently been re-reading the Lord of the...

I do not agree with Kendi across the board myself, but I find the separation out of racist ideas very helpful. Anyone can have racist ideas, and they are always bad and should be addressed, but the racist ideas of the rich and powerful are generally mrle dangerous. I do not read Kendi's analysis...

In terms of thinking through these issues, I have found that Ibram X. Kendi definitions of racism super helpful, particularly framing "racist" an adjective rather than a noun (people aren't in some metaphysical category of "racist", people have ideas which can be kdealogically racist) : So, by...

Robert Jordan had a much stronger prose style than Sanderson, for sure. For me, even in the stretches where Jordan loses the plot, his prose styling and attention to detail carry it through. I swear you can write a 120 page thesis on how the Wheel of Time achieves world building through in-depth...