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I don't agree that DM railroading is a new term, or a new idea. Douglas Niles, AD&D 1e Dungeoneer's Survival Guide (1986): Linear adventures work well for tournament play, since all players encounter the same series of challenges, but for less structured play it is generally undesirable...

Thanks for your contribution to this thread, @Sepulchrave II. Your posts here and elsewhere on ENWorld lead me to believe you're an academic specialising in the history of religion so your expertise is much appreciated. If I understand you, you're saying that it's very difficult to distinguish...

Are D&D Phylacteries Jewish? Introduction The Oxford English Dictionary gives four different meanings for the word "phylactery". The fourth is not relevant to the question asked by this post. The first three are: A small leathern box containing four texts of Scripture… worn by Jews during...

In the Dragonsfoot thread, Gygax regards lawful good as very different in its approach to neutral good or chaotic good. Source Upthread, Gygax says that the second lawful good option "taken as prisoners to be converted" can be followed by immediate execution. Source This seems to be...

Sexism in rpgs -- artwork and different attribute limits for female characters -- was a contested issue in the 1970s and 1980s. Taking one side or another was a choice. My post on the subject from an earlier thread, with several examples and quotations from the period. What struck me, reading...

Here's my old post about Gygax's use of the phrase and some of the historical background. Gygax does seem to be saying "it is an observable fact", in our world, that if the children of those considered enemy peoples are permitted to live they will inevitably become enemies too. He uses that...

These are from the glossary in Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds 2e (2006). Note that goes and hariolus have negative connotations: Greek goes 'wizard, sorcerer, juggler, charlatan'... The word can designate the "wizard" (a low-class type of magos) or...

Phoenix Command, perhaps. According to Wikipedia "Phoenix Command is regularly held up as an example of the extreme end of RPG complexity."

The Fiend Folio was completed in 1979 but not published until 1981. Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons: '70-'79 (2014): Interest in D&D was growing in the British Isles thanks primarily to Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine. Within its pages, one Don Turnbull was editing a regular...

I really enjoy the combat minigame in D&D 3e, 4e, and 5e. My enjoyment of it is similar to my enjoyment of cardgames, boardgames, and videogames.

This post consists of quotations from AD&D 2e and D&D 3e/3.5 on the subject of the source of spells for clerics who worship demon lords and archdevils. They mostly, with two exceptions, repeat the same idea – such clerics exist, they can cast spells, but the power source is really a god or an...

OD&D I think this excerpt from Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (2012) is correct: Dungeons & Dragons has almost nothing to say on the subject of the divine, on the god or gods that might be revered by Clerics; although later supplements fill this gap, the 1974 woodgrain box gives us priests...

The medical use of the term was racist. Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History (2008), talking about Tolkien's usage of "Mongol-types": This statement is important from an anthropological point of view, as it seems to reflect popular ideas of the traditional hierarchy of the three...

The importance of the quotation, in my view, is that it shows that when Tolkien used terms such as "sallow-faced", "squint-eyed", "slant-eyed", "crook-legged", and "bowlegged" his stated intent was to give his orcs the features of "Mongoloid" people -- Asians and Native Americans...

Tolkien scholar, Roger Echo-Hawk, offers, in my view, the most plausible explanation for why he gave his orcs the appearance of a subset of Asian people – it was a response to Japanese involvement in WWII. Blog post, Tolkien's Squinteyed Orc-men: When Tolkien's orcs / goblins made their debut...

A summary of my argument against orcs and similar beings such as goblins. Orcs and other evil humanoids are very similar to humans, except that they are evil and possess other features falsely ascribed to people of colour. They can thus be improved by breaking this linkage between human and...

The demon-worshipping cult require an exotic ingredient for their rituals -- a plant that grows only in the desert. They hire the PCs to acquire it. The noble who hires them doesn't admit the true purpose of the plant -- they claim to be merely a dabbler in alchemy -- but it's something the PCs...

The farmers in the outer city scrape together whatever resources they can -- maybe they can offer a minor magic item -- and hire the PCs to deal with the rat problem. A friend or associate of the PCs is kidnapped by the demon-worshipping cult to be sacrificed. The dwarven ambassadors hire the...