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I realized something while reading Night Shift. It includes a D&D lich in the monster chapter, but this is anachronistic. The word lich is Anglo-Saxon for "corpse." It wasn't until D&D that it was associated with undead wizards. It would be less anachronistic to refer to this monster as a...

Several ways. I give each fantasy race their own planet. Elves come from Alfheim, dwarves from Nidavellir, humans from Midgard, etc. I try to differentiate fantasy races as more than rubber foreheads. My elves are plant people a la Glorantha, my dwarves are maggot men a la Norse myth, my...

I think that's subjective. Morally complex villains were pretty rare up until the mid 20th century and now it's a bandwagon that writers are criticized for not jumping on. Less than admirable heroes, on the other hand, go back to Gilgamesh. (As in, the story itself criticizes his actions, not in...

I understand that modern stories like The Sick Land love to wallow in surrealist incomprehensibility, but a lot of the HPL stories are largely explainable. Largely. Like, we know what the mermen want because they explain it to the human characters: give them sacrifices, marry them, convert to...

It’s more that whole “the fishies are vastly superior to humans” comes across as self-deluding propaganda even in the the original story if you read it with even a slightly critical eye. The US military destroys Innsmouth and Devil’s Reef, but fish granny claims in a dream that it isn’t...

I prefer Hahn’s analyses over the Chaosium-influenced fanon

Okay. I’m only interested in HPL mythos for the scifi horror. If I just want scifi, then I have a plethora of alternatives.

Are you aiming for horror or non-horror?

Hahn speculates that they were engineered as an experiment by the starfish heads because they’re subject to similar hypnotic conditioning as shoggoths are. “Oh look at those poor hominids that can’t breathe water, communicate telepathically, or live indefinitely. Let’s create a hominid that can...

I’ve been trying to interrogate these beliefs and it’s been an exercise in insanity. The people I talked to categorically don’t believe in the concepts of coding or othering… or internalized racism, or pretty much any kind of racism that is more subtle than the KKK or Nazis. The kinds of people...

This is why I prefer 13th Age’s take on orcs. They pop out of chasms in the ground as adults holding weapons and don’t reproduce, so all the “other” symbolism is absent. I don’t understand why 5e couldn’t have taken a similar approach. They retconned the ecologies of tons of other monsters. I’m...

Did the thread mention these articles yet? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/checkpoints/202004/no-orcs-arent-racist http://dmsworkshop.com/2021/04/03/evil-orcs/

I agree that they’re a racist allegory. I cannot understand the minds of people who claim otherwise. The people in group #2 that I mentioned. They believe that HPL’s fish story cannot have racist themes because the fish people are fictional. When challenged, they’ll point to sources that confirm...

I don’t want to bring in politics, but I’d like to note that people’s approach to the “evil races” debate depends on their existing biases. One group thinks that fictional species can be coded with traits reminiscent of real world ethnic stereotypes/caricatures, whether intentionally or...

I had a personal liking for the orcs in Warcraft 1 and 2. Not because they were an "evil race" (which is debatable), but because they were fantasy conquistadors and their culture had more depth than typical depictions of orcs. They had multiple religious schools of thought (e.g. necrolytes vs...

Did you mention Planetary Romance and Sword & Planet genres yet? Those are two genres that it is hard to distinguish from one another, and they're basically the scifi equivalent of Sword & Sorcery.

Have you actually read the lore? The baatezu backstory alone changes several times with every edition! What's even the point? You can just check a wiki now.

There is a canon? I was under the impression that every edition was a complete reboot of what little continuity did exist (and there were huge inconsistencies even within editions). D&D never had any kind of ongoing metaplot like certain other long-running RPGs do. So saying that novels, video...

Nowadays I’m basically inured to systems. I just want something simple that supports whatever themes the game is going for.

In my experience of many bad paranormal romance novels, fairies are just human but with big slang words. The fair folk that haunt the nightmares of humanity are overshadowed by that, sadly. I did have this idea for a vaguely Nightbane inspired night world where all the monsters draw their power...