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Answering for myself: I don't run adventures set in society rather than in dungeons: mysteries and intrigues rather than dungeon raids. That being the case, individual motivations are more use to me in constructing adventures than races are, and the side people take in the war between the...

Good point. Allow me to clarify. I have drawn regional maps for some campaigns, showing the locations of rivers and cities and shorelines and so forth (like this). On two occasions I have drawn detailed relief maps (contour lines, etc.). I have done perhaps half a dozen maps of cities (like...

A story is a connected account of a sequence of consequential actions in which incident arises from character and characters repond to incident, having some sort of unity and completeness, and a point of interest to the audience.

I don't see your problem, since gay men make perfectly good, in fact excellent, soldiers. Consider for example King Richard I of England. The Spartans. The Sacred Band of Thebes. There seems from anthropology to be a link between warrior societies and homosexual or bisexual behaviour--perhaps...

I designed a dungeon back in early 1981. But since then I have realised that I prefer games to be a bit more like adventure stories, mystery stories, swashbucklering romances, and even bodice-rippers than dungeon-crawling allows. So I generally prefer games that are set in more of an open...

In Germany, perhaps. But in Western Europe a prince outranks a duke, and the eldest sons of dukes are [by courtesy, not law] marquesses. An over-generalisation. In France and England the sons of the kings were simply princes, and that only comparatively late. Edward I was known as "Lord...

Three Hearts and Three Lions, by Poul Anderson. It is also the main source for Law and Chaos and for regenerating trolls.

Mine was a doctor.

I have confirmed this belief. Baronets rank in precedence after the sons of barons, so the barons' sons' courtesy title of "the honourable" is a higher rank than the baronets' "Sir". So even if some baron held a baronetcy as a minor title, his eldest son would not use it as a courtesy title...

Umm. Under what conditions is a son a girl?

No-one says that it has to be. But a lot of people know that it is. And more just understand that a viscount is lowlier than a count then way they understand that a priest is lowlier than a bishop. Sure, you could dream up some 'why-not' rationalisation for 'archbishop' being lowlier than...

Gender. Tense is a quality of verbs. Living things have sexes, such as male, female, neuter, and hermaphrodite. Nouns have genders, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter, or animate and inanimate. Verbs and verbal phrases have tenses, such as past, present, future, past perfect, past...

I have done so. My last paladin was married, and he considered his wife to be the best thing in his life except for God. He didn't like fighting, and found the necessity of using violence from time to time in his calling very distressing. If he had not been married he would have become an...

As The_Universe says, now that there are women who hold knighthoods, 'Dame' is used in the same way as 'Sir'. But in mediaeval times women sometimes held the lands of a knight, but did not have the military training or go through the ceremonies, and were not considered knights.

Hear! Hear! "Begone, foul dwimmerlaik!, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace." "Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey. Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. Rather he will bear thee away to the House of Lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh will be devoured, and thy...

A Conspiracy Unmasked is the title of the chapter in which Merry and Pippin reveal that they know about the Ring and insist on going along with Frodo to help destroy it (or at least get it to Rivendell), while Fatty Bolger will remain in Crickhollow to keep up the pretence that Frodo is still...

Odysseus (we are discussing Greek here) not only killed all of Penelope's suitors, he also hanged all of his own concubines who had not repulsed the suitors. Well, I seem to recall that Odysseus tried to resist the advances of both Circe and Calypso. I think that Calypso even offered to have...

You aren't fooling anyone, you know.

Um. There were no baronets in any feudal system. The rank of baronet was created by King James I on 22 May 1611. http://www.burkes-peerage.net/sites/peerage/sitepages/page66-baronet.asp. Also, the lowliest knights did not hold land. There were many landless knights who served in the households...

Well, that's the full Busby Berkeley late-mediaeval profusion in its full development, with reduplication for extra redundancy (ie. you list both 'count' and its English equivalent, 'earl). One question: why did you decide to put a viscount (vice-count) above a count? You are of course free to...