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Well, then here you go: South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. No (official) permanent settlements and nothing of particular value, but Argentina and the UK have rattled swords over them many times. Clearly, something's up... For Tristan de Cunha, I dunno if I'd go with the Innsmouth angle...

I've got Cry Havoc, and it's pretty decent. But mostly I just wing it and have the outcome of a battle be determined by what works best for the campaign.

I think it'd probably be some kind of science fiction setting - maybe aliens abduct a representative sample of Earth's population and set them up in some convenient space station to study humanity.

The wealth concentration is correct. According to this article there's about 575 million personal computers in the world today, which means there's 8 or 9 computers in the village; given that many of them are owned by businesses, it's not too suprising that only one would be a home computer. The...

We always used this method. I've always been kind of amused by the "THAC0 is teh DEBIL!!!" meme in 3E marketing, since the 3E method is almost identical to me. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. While the concept is in the 1E DMG, I think the term was first used in fanzines and...

Yes. Didn't get the job itself in a bar, but once when I'd just left one job and was at loose ends I ran into one of my college instructors in a local bar, and it turned out his brother's company was looking for someone right at the same time. He passed on my resume, I had an interview within...

Karl Popper, by no means a "layman", disagrees with you. He believed that pure mathematics was not a science because it was not falsifiable via the experimental process, and that's one reason why the notions of "theory" and "proof" are used differently in mathematics than they are in the...

Er, no. 3d6 straight is 1 in 100 trillion or thereabouts. It's probably never happened in the history of D&D (or any of the other games that use 3d6 for some stats, like BRP). 4d6 drop lowest is on the order of 1 in 50 billion, again it's probably never happened. Legitimately, anyway, I run into...

The movies, yes, not so much the books. Tolkien notes in one of his letters that Legolas was the character who accomplished the least of all the Fellowship, and that was intentional - the glory days of the Elves are long past in LoTR. You could argue that the Silmarillion is the original elf...

Went through is tough... I mostly DMed, so my memories of all the classic starter modules (B1, B2, T1, etc.) are from the other side of the screen. For AD&D, the first published module I went through might be DL1. I'm pretty sure I went through modules for other games before then, I'm thinking a...

That's about as reasonable as saying that humans don't generally know that there's a difference between Great Danes and Shetland Collies - both dogs, who'd notice more than that? Sure. The various pygmy tribes average around 4'6" tall, and some of 'em hunt elephants. But that's a good 1'-2'...

Closer to a direct yank from the period in the Silmarillion between the Nirnaeth Arnoediad (the battle of Unnumbered Tears, where Morgoth triumphed over the Elves, Dwarves, and men of the Edain and ultimately extended his rule across Middle Earth) and the War of Wrath, where the Valar defeated...

I try to find cool niches for 'em, but what features prominently in all my campaign worlds is the PCs, and IME most of my players ain't that happy with gnomes. One of the problems I have with them is their size (same with halflings) - I have three nephews, aged 4, 2, and almost 1, and the two...

For me, the stuff that sounded good but hasn't turned out so great is: Grappling - reads well, but it's a separate subsystem with its own rules, in play it tends to disrupt the flow of the session when players who aren't familiar with the rules get grappled. Turn Undead - another separate...

It was campy fun, in a soap opera kinda way. I don't think it lasted a full season, didn't really appeal to a mainstream audience but was a bit too mainstream to appeal to WW's goth-punk audience. I'm guessing this Midnight film will be on DVD fairly quickly (assuming it's not already planned...

I've got the print version. Hefty hardcover, decent quality. It's one of my favourite sourcebooks.

Well, the "discussion" right now is you saying "I had fun, so it's great". I don't share that experience, but that doesn't matter to you because all that counts is you had fun. And as a result of your criteria, there's no room for discussion about whether or not it's well-designed. So to have...

Yes. Most of the people I know were pretty disappointed in the sequel. They fondly remember T1, and think T1-4 is a bit of a mess that didn't come anywhere close to living up to T1's legacy. See, my personal experience differs wildly from yours. This is why personal experience is not a good...

"Fun" is not an objective quality, and thus makes a pretty lousy example of a design criteria. I think it's pretty safe to assume that for any given module, someone somewhere thought it was fun. What a decent set of design criteria will do is increase the likelihood that the target market will...

Six years later (1985 for the big book, T1 was 1979). Note that T2-T4 didn't exist as separate published entities, so any haphazardness is almost certainly a function of the writing rather than the editing. At the time, my reaction to T1-4 was "it took six years to get me THIS pile of...