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Yup. The astral plane renders you effectively sterile and removes your need to eat or breathe. Congratulations, the writers have now removed any possibility of thriving ecologies or civilizations living there that aren't opportunistic parasites. The IP already has huge issues with making the...

I can understand rebooting a setting or addressing genuine structural flaws with extensive rewrites, but this I don't agree with. At the very least they should add subtitles indicating that this is a very new take on the brand rather than a continuation of the original IP. Like, Spelljammer...

So the writers should just port in the astral rather than go to the work of making the phlogiston (or deep ethereal or whatever) more interesting? My issue with this is that the astral plane has different planar properties to the inner planes. For example, the timelessness. Has that been...

Sure, I can agree with removing the term "phlogiston." The original term meant the substance released by combustion, whereas in SJ it was a highly combustible substance. I recall at least one fan suggestion that it could have been folded into the deep ethereal, since that shared the most...

So they removed the crystal spheres, phlogiston, and breathing in space that defined Spelljammer cosmology?

I would love to see more new urban fantasy games. Games made with the benefit of hindsight, making use of a less dated and more modern zeitgeist, full of mysteries to solve, devoid of problematic issues, full of multiple campaigns settings and guidelines to make your own, supported with pre-made...

Wow. Blast from the past. A number of the materials have been updated to PF1 and D&D5 by the latest Scarred Lands books. You may want to check out those.

I also think tempest in teapot. My objection is to Gygax and co took archaic dictionary words and invented unrelated meanings that drowned out the original (and fascinating) meanings in fandom. A word like animarium is versatile. It can be used for the secret heart of a heartless immortal or...

Again, you can’t copyright a word. Consult a lawyer if you don’t believe me.

And Gygax posted that disturbing dragonsfoot post claiming that it’s lawful good to kill people after converting them to prevent them from lapsing. And Hitler ate sugar. Every author ever born is going to be problematic if you comb their works and biography to find something problematic. Some...

There are several benefits to calling it “horcrux”: “Horcrux”, as a single word, cannot be copyrighted Horcrux is not trademarked either, and that wouldn’t prevent you from mentioning it. Kleenex never sued anyone for mentioning characters blew their noses on Kleenex Horcrux already has the...

We should be using “horcrux”. It may be a recent invention (which is irrelevant imo but whatever), but it doesn’t have pre-existing linguistic baggage, already has the desired meaning, and is free to use because words cannot be copyrighted. I see it used in Nos4a2 and some original fiction on...

No. I’m making my own settings. Maybe I’ll publish them one day. Altho I’m probably better off writing novels or video games because the tabletop market is definitely not a growth sector. I kinda hate WoD now after receiving years of abuse from elitist fans and consequently losing interest in...

I think this “diversity” has been part and parcel of urban fantasy since its inception, not a “modern” phenomenon. Unfortunately, no contemporary style urban fantasy tabletop game I know of has tapped into this zeitgeist and been able to get noticeable market share. Shadowrun is post-apocalypse...

I saw a recent video on Monstrum youtube briefly arguing that the zeitgeist of modern urban fantasy is all these monsters—werewolves, vampires, fairies, etc—learning to live together, reflecting the increasing diversity of modern society. What do you think?

I'm currently doing some conversions of Nightlife to Feed on my blog: Ramblings on Vampire Fiction

I'm currently working on a homebrew for werewolves. While it should be easy to represent Nightlife-style werewolves in Feed as is (and I plan to do a Nightlife conversion one of these days), I am devising special rules for representing werewolves as uniquely as vampires are. You can find my...

Feed is a self-described "vampire mythos" RPG, funded thru kickstarter and released in 2013/2014, that provides groups with guidelines for inventing their own strains of vampirism. It has a humanity mechanic not unlike 90s urban fantasy games, but this works more like a lightside/darkside...

I was under the impression that the "nobody dies" rule was macabre. As in, you're still alive and conscious even if your body is dismembered, melted, turned to sand, burned to ash, etc. For example, the Tin Man's original severed head was still alive and able to talk in one book.

Neither fits, yeah. The Americana influence was most obvious in basic D&D with its emphasis on frontier settings (e.g. Keep on the Borderlands). But the PC races were mostly Tolkien (e.g. humans, elves, halflings, dwarves). D&D was initially a strange mishmash of influences from Americana...