Recent content by Ralif Redhammer

I finished reading PKD's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Definitely a head trip to read, reflecting on how fast celebrity can fade, the dangers of a police state, and how easy it would be to fall between the cracks. I also read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I feel like it hasn't...

Absolutely. I grew up with books. Heck, one of my earliest memories is my mom reading Beowulf to me before I knew how to read. Yeah, I don't know that my parents were all that aware of the contents of the books we were reading. They knew we liked fantasy and sci-fi, so they just picked stuff...

Looking at the amount of reading I was assigned in college, it was more than even I could keep up with on a weekly basis (and I was and am a fast, voracious reader). That's a sure recipe for ending up burnt out. I think the teacher can make a lot of difference. When I think about the books I...

Seeing a bunch of people in suits and masks instead of cgi is encouraging. I'm not sure what compels a person to reboot Deathstalker out of all the 80s fantasy properties, but I suppose it's better to remake something with issues than something that's perfect (not that that's ever stopped anyone).

I enjoy Lin Carter's work quite a bit. I also think that if you want to understand Conan's place in Appendix N, the Carter/De Camp stories are important reads, even if they don't always hit the mark set by REH's originals. "The Thing in the Crypt" was a direct influence on the Conan the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

As much as I think 1e Mothership mostly maintains the vibes and feel of the original, there's something to be said for how concise 0e is, how much it manages to do in a release that's barely much more than a zine in presentation and size.

Something being a problem for someone does not mean that the game itself is broken. Though, I suppose that's quibbling over semantics at this point. I think the difference is that OD&D fundamentally was broken. When I finally read it, I would have been hard-pressed to understand the game...

Exactly! If you want to write an RPG, write an RPG. I dunno, I think there's a line between someone creating an RPG and someone claiming to have fixed a game that wasn't even broken most of the time. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with modding a game. We all do it in varying...

Any time someone talks about "fixing" a game system, I kinda tune out, because most of the time I'm about to hear some person's glorified homebrew.

I started playing D&D at age 9. And I wonder, today, would I be able to understand the current edition of D&D well enough to run games at that age. I don't think so. Ever since the ending of the Basic line, D&D hasn't had a strong on-ramp for brand-new players.

Lin Carter has the pacing of a Formula 1 Race! But I think it's important to note that he was a fan, and it shines through in his writing. It's not only that if he wanted more stories in a certain vein, he went and wrote them. But if you look at the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, he proved...

These days, I'm absolutely going to reach for Cyberpunk Red. I can grab some pregens and come up with a quick scenario in no time. If they were to specifically want a fantasy RPG, once I would've said DCC RPG, but I'm kinda in holding mode with that, waiting to see whether Goodman Games is...

I normally am not that way, but every once in a while, I read a book that is so profoundly good, that I feel pressure as to what I want to read next. Normally, I'll gleefully move between modes and levels of quality. I can enjoy Lin Carter as much as Dostoyevsky (even if the latter is certainly...

A Basic edition of D&D that runs up to 10th level.