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I really like the idea of Ravenloft with more modern settings. Mash ‘em good!

Yes, DM’s Guild and its equivalents all exist at the will of the publisher, and would cease to exist if that sanction went away. For me personally, it’d have no effect on my purchasing and gaming. I used to dream that in the absence of WotC, games I like would enlarge their audience...

It’s what I was thinking of as an indirect consequence, as opposed to being assessed with tariffs themselves, yes.

Good point. And thanks.

I have a probably stupid question. Will these tariffs directly affect the price of PDFs? Indirectly, sure, in various ways. But are purely digital publications about to get hosed?

In the Sprawl trilogy, the real through line is But this isn’t at all obvious reading the books, particularly if you were reading them as they came out or spread apart reading them later.

Thomas Metzinger speculates that early AIs will be the equivalent of brain-damaged, schizophrenic, and otherwise messed up, because we simply don’t know enough about consciousness, either our own or anyone else’s. It could take a lot of generation equivalents before we haves. Good grasp on what...

When I came from Southern California to Tacoma in 1985, you could. Manage fine without air conditioning and almost everyone did. There’s be one, maybe two miserable weeks in the upper 80s and 90s when you were very glad for fans and wet towels, then to y ended and it was back to life as usual...

Mark Twain thought that Scott played a significant part in preparing the South for secession and civil war by making utterly groundless romantic fantasies of the past so popular. He was not no obviously wrong about that. And whether he was wrong or not, it’s certainly true that Americans have...

This is where I do my usual thing. K.W. Jeter coined “steampunk” as a name for the Victorian fantasies he and his friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing because he hates punk. Jeter is bourgeois through and through, the kind of person who subscribes to symphony and opera seasons and...

I didn’t think I had anything for this thread, but then I remembered: City of Heroes’ minions for masterminds. So much fun for me, and never really matched by anything else I know of. Tiny Supers has the closest approach.

Yeah, there are. Early on the book introduces five campaigns: vintage space opera (where the astrogator’s job includes slide rule use), dark-edge steampunk cities amid the frozen arctic wastes, 1970s New York superheroes, Renaissance-era explorers of the inner earth, and a more D&D-ish fantasy...

Okay. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have energy or enthusiasm to get into those questions further at this time. I’m just sharing bits I find interesting while waiting around for answers on medical and legal fronts affecting my family right now. So for the next however many weeks, this...

The archetypal untipped hand is the early editions of D&D, which did a truly terrible job explaining what play was expected to look like and how rules were intended to support that. I’ve been quoting a bunch from Questworlds in this thread, and this quote exists in that context.

I would never suggest you’re old. I’d just start talking about gerontocracy and the decayed legacy of Numenor and bristlecone pines & sequoias and like that.

Robin Trower, of course. Without Batman his music would have taken a totally different turn.

Replay is one of my very favorite obscure novels, a classic “more than the sum of its parts” cases. And thanks, @Alzrius.

First a pedant’s note: portal fantasy was a name and category decades before isekai and has a far wider scope. Isekai is one subset of portal fantasy the way military sf is one kind of sf. I’ve found very little isekai I like - mostly me being too old and out of sync with a lot of the cultural...

What kind of device are you reading them on? I have an iPad Air that’s a bit less than 8.5x11, so that letter-sized pages are shrunk just enough to be somewhat noticeably harder to read. Digest pages, on the other hand, get zoomed up noticeably and are that much comfier to read. I want to get...

Gonna see if I can get in a few posts while waiting on news about family stuff. First up, the kind of thing I wish more RPGs told us about their intents. Some OSR games do, Onyx Path has gotten better and better at it, and like that, but there are far too many un-tipped hands out there.