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Hello, A lot of this thread could have been avoided, maybe. I don't know that it would have made his book seem any better to me; I hadn't heard his opinions before I read it, and he isn't ragging on other authors there, beyond the sense of trying to be different for the sake of being...

Hello, I do think there's a lot of stuff in there that distracts from the story rather than advances it, I think it's in there just for the purpose of being both "cool", and different from standard fantasy ideas, and I think the "coolness" is lessened by the fact that a lot of this stuff...

Hi again, the monster bones big enough to encompass a city, right out of Heavy Metal, the tough cactus-people, lacking only a "10,000 Needles" attack to have come straight out of Final Fantasy, Motley struck me as a winged Gibbering Mouther, with perhaps some Mongrelman elements thrown in...

Hello, Mystara fans in da hizz-ouse! :) But Pants' list shows Red Steel (which you're presumably counting for one) and Hollow World (which I would guess is the one-half). Do you have any other info on a straight-up Mystara or Known World article? That would be awesome! Or are you...

Hello, Module X2, Castle Amber, anyone? Explicitly based on CAS's works, set in the Principality of Nouvelle Averoigne in Glantri, includes Genevieve de Sephora and Malachie du Marais as supporting characters. One of the family members, or their allies, is also Viceroy of the Fortress of...

Hello, Not sure on this. The only other Sterling I'm sure I've read is The Artificial Kid, and that was a while ago; I may have caught some of his short work in Mirrorshades or other places. Nothing in the writing of The Difference Engine seems beyond Gibson's capabilities, to me at any...

Hello, The PrC does have its combat abilities, too. If the recent TV news is any indicator, Attorneys can dodge bullets like Neo in The Matrix. Well, at least against guys who can't shoot for beans... Dude emptied a full cylinder at the Attorney, who was standing about a foot from the...

Hi Hong, Sounds wicked cool. Somehow I wouldn't have guessed you'd be running an Ultima-based campaign. Ultima IV is one of the best CRPG's I've ever played; it was really ground-breaking, and far superior in role-playing terms to many games that came out much later with way better...

Hi again, Haven't read any Brust myself, alas, but I'll throw Tim Powers' name into the discussion at this point. I don't know that I'd say he's pushing fantasy boundaries, but he certainly is blurring them in interesting ways with other branches of genre fiction. It's certainly debatable...

Hi again, That paragraph isn't really an argument or debate of the sort that might contain ad hominem or other logical fallacies - heck, I flatly agree with his premise in the opening statement :). It's just speculation on why he'd bother writing such an article, that happens to express some...

Hello, [topic drift] JLI broke my Marvel Zombie status - Giffen's art was cool, DeMatteis was succeeding in what he failed to do with the sinking ship of The Defenders, and Guy was a GL who was a polar opposite from one in the Denny O'Neill mold... My own favorite Guy period is when he had...

Hello, No. But it's about what I'd expect from the author of the vastly overhyped Perdido Street Station, which reads like a so-so William Gibson pastiche written after a two-week LSD and Final Fantasy bender. Even a cursory reading will show that Tolkien's villains were much bigger fans of...

Hello, To me, the epitome of old-school munchkiny goodness is to be found in the original "Sick Sword" story. Here's an excerpt, in which the munchkiny villain group is doing some recruiting: "Name?" Clerasil questioned the latest entry. "Rango." "Class and level?" "Ranger, level 17."...

Hello again, It's in the "Dragon Magazine CD-ROM Archive", which is an amazing value in and of itself. Issues 1 to 250 of Dragon, plus all seven issues of its predecessor the Strategic Review. Truly a piece of gaming history. And supposedly often in the cheap racks at many software stores...

Hi again, There's another movie based on Charles Dexter Ward from the early '90s called The Resurrected. It's the best Lovecraft adaptation I've seen yet - Re-Animator, From Beyond, The Unnameable, and all the others seem to me to resemble Troma films that take themselves too seriously...

Hello, The prototypical space-opera epic, E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" series. Some social conventions that now seem a bit quaint, some currently-unfashionable attitudes, some overtaken-by-events alternate technology paths, and the fact that many of its ideas have since become space-opera...

Hello, the monstrous mummy of some ancient king still crowned with untarnished gold but turning to my gaze a visage that more than time or the worm had wasted. Broken swathings flapped about the skeleton legs, and above the crown that was set with sapphires and orange rubies, a black something...

Hi again, What Staffan said... :) It wasn't outright prohibited to use the "wrong" version, just vaguely discouraged. IIRC Neutral Clerics had to choose which was their "standard" version of reversed spells, but limits and penalties for overuse of the "wrong" version were unspecified for...

Hello, Ah, the days of reversible spells. I remember some brag talk before the 3e PHB came out comparing numbers of spells in the 1e, 2e, and 3e versions, but I don't seem to remember WotC admitting that many of the "new" spells were the reversed versions of old ones that now had to be...

Hello, Drow weaponry being back is hardly a thing to be celebrated, to me. It's one of the most blatant and cheesy hose-the-players mechanics I've ever seen in a game. "Let's see, I want to face my players with large numbers of enemies packing potent magical weapons, but I don't want...