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Ancient Egyptian has about 400 named gods (which Pratchett satirises in Pyramids), but most of them have minor roles. Atum, Ra, Khepri, Anhur, Horus, Behdety, Harakhte, Harmakhis, Hathor, Amon, Aten, Nefertum - and they're just the sun gods (no, don't correct me about Hathor and Aten - I'm...

1e. None of the others have anywhere near enough source material to compete.

Quoted straight from the module; "The PCs start their adventure in an old inn, a few hours march east of the gates of Barovia." In short, generic inn in generic world. Once they get into Barovia, the fog stops them leaving, but there's no indication it's on another plane. The demiplane of...

Oni are appropriate. The Japanese got them from Chinese mythology anyway. The Chinese term "Gui" is a generic term for monster. Apart from them, there're the usual suspects: dragon (Long), phoenix (Fenghuang) and unicorn (Qilin) plus a whole host of animal spirits and ghosts.

There're a couple of nice encounters (the first few rooms are wonderfully laid out), a little bit of humour (the girl in the mage's closet :o ), and lots of detail, but on the whole it's pretty dreadful. It's really disjoint and unbalanced.

This guy did it in real life. He was a samurai, but he wandered about a bit. In D&D, it was probably Drizzt who cemented the relationship between rangers and two weapon fighting. However, there are much earlier representations of two-weapon fighting in fantasy art (and miniature) than Drizzt.

In an old campaign I ran, the party were being stalked by a Type III demon (glabrezu to you young'uns) with the ability to change its size. It simply became as small as a flea and hid on a different party member each day. At the end of the day, it would bite that character to feed (one damage...

White Dwarf 82 had an article about Discworld for AD&D. I believe Pratchett had a hand in it - he might even have written it, but I don't have the issue handy.

Pyramids and Moving Pictures are good stand-alones, not requiring any knowledge of the rest of the series. Pyramids is traditional fantasy (but still very funny), and Moving Pictures is an out-and-out satire about the film industry. Mort is the first, and IMHO, still the best Death book. Men at...

QFT. Don't forget the Scottish. 31 kings in 400 years. Do the maths. 1094 was a bad year to be king in. Queen Margaret was especially tragic. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett "Why does everyone want to become the king when everybody wants to kill the king?"

Bloodstone Pass has already been mentioned. There's a twist to this cliche in the FRA1-3 series Storm Riders, Black Courser, Blood Charge. Spoilers below: :]

Gygax invented another chess game, Fidchell, for the Aerth setting in Dangerous Journeys. It was a shogi-like chess variant, but one of its features were "gates" on the board to the underworld, abyss, land of fey, etc. through which bonus pieces could be summoned. If that's the one you're...

Played, then DM'ed DL1. It reads better than it plays, but still fun, and definitely railroaded Played DL2, then played DL6 and 7 together. They worked very well. Less railroaded - or rather, the railroad is more subtle. I do have the entire series. There's a varied mix of ideas in there. DL10...

That's really short. For some reason I thought that you lot had about 15 days worth of public holidays.

Space shuttle

Look at the Nordic myths as well. The frost giants are similar in concept to the titans. Makes me wonder just how far north the Pelasgians (pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece, and presumably the people for whom the titans were gods) extended.

I'd rule that the warmage/beguiler/dread necromancer can now learn the spells via their advanced learning class ability. So a warmage could learn flame strike, for instance.

Sorry to hear about your daughter's injury. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that little children are really tough. They're growing so quickly that they can bounce back from just about anything. My son, from the ages of one till two and a half, was undergoing chemotherapy and surgery...

Ah, but modern reconstructions show the apatosaurus (as well as diplodocus and seismosaurus) with a flat back and a horizontal neck and tail. Isn't this argument now prooving Henry's original answer?

Played this twice now. It's a lot of fun - you can just lark about, as the game isn't that serious and you don't know who's winning until right near the end, so everyone's having fun. It does take a long time to play. We only had three players for each game, and despite 3 hours of playing time...