Search results

John Clute’s Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction (1978) is an excellent resource with a constantly updated online edition. It points out that “soap opera” was an active term only from 1938 and that “space opera” was coined in 1941 for “hacky” “spaceship yarns”. Although it is possible to retrofit...

There’s a brilliant plain English explanation of ‘RPG Theory: Ants, Spiders and Bees’ by noisms, a practising academic theoretician, on his blog Monsters and Manuals. https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/04/rpg-theory-ants-spiders-and-bees.html?m=1

In 2003 Decipher’s Lord of the Rings RPG (designed by Mike Mearls) did give some thought to these issues so that one might have both interactive ecosystems and disarticulated generation. Here is Andy Slack’s explanation from 2016: “The thing of note on the Vertical Exaggeration is that the...

Course design rather than DM-ing. 1. Make sure it does what it says on the tin: so, based in the dungeon and fighting (interacting) with dragons (or analogous mythical creatures). 2. Prepare handouts on one side of one sheet. Avoid blocks of text. 3. Ignore anything published more than five...

Codex Martialis is a HEMA-inspired RPG running off the d20 OGL. There is a quickstart pdf for £2.50. The core game has various supplements for world-building, “realistic” magic, etc. The default setting is based on the fifteenth century Baltic.

The classic work on swords is Ewart Oakeshott, The Sword in the Age of Chivalry (Boydell, new edition, 1994, orig. 1964). John Waldman, Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: The Evolution of European Staff Weapons between 1200 and 1650 is probably the best bet for primary weapons...