Recent content by Ralif Redhammer

I was completely oblivious to it. I was deep in grad school and hadn't gamed in about 2-3 years. I wouldn't discover that there was a new edition until early 2002, when I picked up an issue of Dragon magazine I saw in a magazine rack on a whim.

See also Robert Jordan and GRRM. Though, if I recall correctly, the Wheel of Time was edited by Robert Jordan's wife. But though there are great things about that series, it needed some serious pruning. Though you can say this about a lot of Discworld's characters, Granny Weatherwax feels...

Would second Talislanta. At a time when most of the fantasy RPGs were either solidly in the Tolkien or Arthurian mode (though the aforementioned Runequest also bucked the trend), Talislanta was gleefully not, gleefully strange.

Yeah, they're so gross, but their place completely fits in the worldbuilding. Huh. That's pretty darn accurate. When those details are the plot, that's one thing. When they distract and delay, that's when you start running into problems.

Agree with you. To my mind, the pact is the source of the familiar. Without that source, there would be no Quasit.

I'd definitely start out in Port Nyanzaru rather than having the PCs be imported in. As others have pointed out, the timeline on the Death Curse gets pretty wonky, and probably needs to be adjusted. By the time my party finished the campaign, just about everyone afflicted with it at the start...

First time I watched Blade Runner 2049, I turned it off when Deckard showed up because I was so afraid they were going to try to wrap the central mystery of the first movie up in a neat bow. I was very relieved that they did not. Agreed. Jason Momoa was a decent Conan, but it lacked the...

Really digging it so far. I was a little worried at first that it would feel too sci-fi and not cyberpunk enough, but it's got grit and grime in spades.

Back when the Complete Book of Humanoids came out, I had a brief-lived campaign of goblinoids in what was essentially Mordor-with-the-serial-number-filed off. Kinda wish it had gotten more of a chance than it did.

Something I think about from time to time is whether I'll see a remake of Lord of the Rings in my lifetime. Probably. It took, close to 30 years for a remake of Conan the Barbarian, to little avail. It's also fascinating to me when I read Lord of the Rings, I have the images of Gimli, Aragorn...

I dig the dragon turtle on the label. Dragon's Milk is already a tasty beer (too bad I can no longer drink beer!).

I actually shelved John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Should have been up my alley, but after about 50 pages, the writing style and story structure got to me. Instead I switched to Samit Basu's The City Inside. Really good read; it felt frightfully relevant and is likely only to get more so...

That's Hardwired. Metropolitan is urban fantasy. The Hardwired sourcebook is fascinating. I wonder how many times an author has been so actively involved in bringing their fiction into the RPG world? I think there's a fine line between details that bring the world to life and just faffing...