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It really depends on the game system. In most flavors of D&D, yeah. But most of what I've been playing over the last 6 or 7 years have some sort of gradation in place so that the end of every fight is not measured in terms of "the losers are all dead."

I had a DM when I was in college who was very proud of the fact that he had named all of his DMPCs with backwards store names. The paladin brothers Tram Law and Tram K, Tegrat the monk, Sraes the bard, Synnep (but you can call me CJ) the mage. Acted like it was the wittiest thing ever.

"Finished" the last of the first three Black Company books. All told it probably took me about six months start to finish. I blew through the first one in about a week, went maybe five pages into the second book, and then put them down till about 4 weeks ago. The last 100 pages of the third...

We made characters for a Temple of Elemental Evil campaign where everyone named themselves after different pieces of IKEA furniture. Played a short lived campaign of Tomb of Horrors, where we all decided that every character was picked randomly from a stack of Legends set Magic cards and then...

Yeah, I guess I'm remembering more of the novels that fell into the "There's a secret race of people with magic powers that used to live hand in hand with humanity, but then mundane people turned into jerks and forced the magic people into hiding. Also the magic people were the ones who...

I don't know how much I would have personally classified his writing as cosmic horror. Lots of body horror, but it always felt like when the veil was pulled back in his stories, it was more about the wonder and fantasy about the forgotten reality that mankind had lost somewhere along the way...

Probably one of my favorite derived character team ups was Dirty Deeds and the Thunder Chief, a hand crossbow wielding, goblin assassin and buff-spell druid patterned after T Hawk of Street Fighter fame. It lead to the other players in the campaign attempting to adopt similarly themed rock n'...

Stephen King touches on cosmic horror frequently. The underlying mythology and cosmology of his world(s) is an incomprehensible chess game between cosmic horrors, even though his horror tends to ground itself much further down the hill. By far my favorite mythos story is Neil Gaiman's "A Study...

Whoa! How did that bit of trivia pass me by all these years?

Scum and Villainy is a scifi game using the Blades in the Dark engine. You piece together a ragtag team of ne'er-do-wells, hunting bounties, smuggling goods, and/or rebelling against the Hegemony. Like Blades, in S&V the group has a single shared character that they level up along with the...

Just remembered that Everway had a combat via single (not) roll system. It's been a long time since I cracked open that rulebook, but it was essentially a game whose RNG was a modified tarot deck and the outcome of conflicts were figured out by either a single, or three card tarot reading...

I'm not opposed to learning new games or systems, and I'm thrilled that we're well out of the woods of "This is a new RPG that looks suspiciously like D&D with a couple coats of paint on it!" The overwhelming majority of the RPG rulebooks I've read over the last 15 years are for games that I...

Every game or campaign has been different for me. Back in my E6/3.5 days it was RPG Soundmixer over video game (mostly TOEE) and movie scores when we were playing at my house. For one shot games, I usually try to cobble together more of a specific location by location playlist. Blades in the...

See Godzilla and the advent of the modern day Kaiju story as an allegory of nuclear war, or pretty much any successful modern horror or monster movie you can pick off the shelf. Just look at the themes from the most popular horror films from the last 5 or so years: xenophobia and home invasion...

Frazetta, Frazetta, Frazetta, Frazetta.

Though it is not impossible, there's a world of difference between a lone, indy developer depicting that fictional version of a culture that they are not a part of, and a multi million dollar toy company hiring someone to do it.

It is times like this where I am reminded that there are plenty of really spectacularly themed settings out there managed to create worlds that are apparently not directly derivative of any specific cultural influence.

Correct. However real life stereotypes in fictional worlds, especially of marginalized people, are exceedingly problematic. Just because there is no intent to harm or insult someone, does not mean you won't accidentally, but honestly, harm or insult them. Especially if you are perpetuating...

You do see how this is practically indistinguishable from what the original OA was, and why it, along with so many other "Eastern Themed" products are problematic? If you're making a series of recognizable generalizations and stereotypes about hundreds of different cultures that have been...

Be careful, positive stereotypes are still stereotypes, and still have a negative impact on the people you attribute them to. Making the assumption that someone is automatically hard working or automatically good at math just because they're Asian is #1 not true, and #2 makes the bar...