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Second. Or first and second combined, if you look at it abstractly enough. Newton's Third Law is "for every action there is and equal and opposite reaction", now known as the Law of Conservation of Momentum.

Excellent advice! This is something I had a struggle with when 3.0 came out.

I don't think so. They would have come out 15th/15th. I think what he let them do was split 105,000 experience points between two classes, calculate the level that would give in each class, and then combine the classes into one character. Which is consistent with the way multiclassing used to...

The difference between Vance and Gygax is that Vance used words precisely (with the exception of one occurence of 'nuncupatory' where 'nugatory' would have made sense, but possibly it was supposed to be a mistake on the character's part). Gygax used them only suggestively. If Vance used...

I wrote an essay about it for the newsletter of the UNSW RPA newsletter in 1983.

Good point! And why might Anderson have cast his dwarf as a Scot? Well: 1) The dwarves are misers, or at least hoarders of moneyed wealth. And the Scots have a reputation for frugality. 2) The dwarves are artificers par excellence. From about 1800 to the 1950s at least the Scots were hugely...

Very much so! Sex, romance, families, star-crossed lovers… A colossal amount of what any character does or even strives for, every chance of dealing with him, her, or it, depends directly or indirectly on his or her role in his family's striving for perpetuity. How much of politics has been...

Is there a bad way?

There is still no discernible cause, and the symptoms don't seem to correspond to any known sort of poisoning. People are beginning to speculate that it might have been a combination of suggestion and mass hysteria.

It seems fairly severe.

It is not meta-gaming for the players to expect that the rules of the game will be applied as written. It is not meta-gaming for the players to expect that spells cast in the game world will have the effects in the game world that they reasonably ought to . It is metagaming for the GM to...

For what it is worth, the first lending library in Europe was the Lyceum in Liverpool, UK, which started operations in 1757. The very first lending library of which I am aware was organised by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. Make of that what you may, but before you place a lending library in a...

Strange. There was the Library of Alexandria, the Imperial Library in Constantinople, the Vatican Library, and at least one library in each mediaeval university before the invention of the printing press. And I think there were at least two public (but not lending) libraries in Rome in the...

The big Library in my campaign is House Azure. Only members are allowed into the stacks. Fellows have the privilege of taking books out of the rooms their shelves are in, but only to a scriptorium within the confines of the library. Anyone who is not a member has to hire a member to look...

Neurians. Check them out in Herodotus's Histories.

I'm glad to see you point out that the important stuff about the economy is other than imports and exports. The important things in a pre-industrial economy are the production and distribution of food, fodder, fuel, and fibre, plus to a lesser extent tools and weapons and building materials...

I want to know what a typical person's typical day is like: by sex and social class. If the PCs are looking for Henry Draper, JP, at 9:30 in the morning, I want to know whether he is in his draper shop, in his courthouse, or at the public baths. I want to know what people's homes are like...

I zigzagged from bottom to top. Some aspects of teh world were created from the bottom up, and others from the top down. The original germs of the world were two quotes, one from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale ("Whose voice hath oft charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas in...

While I agree that Aragorn has healing power, I don't think it has been established that kingsfoil has no medical use. Aragorn states that it was brought from Numenor as a healing herb and that it has great virtue (though few people around here know about it), moreover the ordinary people of...

In the Labyrinth. I have two copies each of Advanced Mêlée, Advanced Wizard, and it. The Fantasy Trip was my main game from about 1983 until when I took up Justice, Inc. in 1984.