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I was nine years old when a slightly older hessian kid introduced my brother and I to D&D. It was a completely bizarre version of the game, with stats and levels way beyond the standard range. The DMPC had a wizard that lived in his hair. I got a pair of lightning-charged crystal daggers that I...

I just don't want to read these giant tomes of fiction anymore. So many of them to me feel like they could've had 100-300 pages trimmed off to make them better works. I would posit that had GRRM written A Song of Ice and Fire series as, say, a dozen 300-page novels, he would not have ended up...

As much as I enjoy REH's works, they contain some deeply racist elements, full stop. Far more overtly than Tolkien's writings. If I recall correctly, he wrote the stories of Mirt the Moneylender and Durnan as his own riff on Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, too.

I would disagree. Having read every Barsoom novel, I think there's plenty complexity to John Carter's background. He's a straightforward character, but that doesn't make him boring. And on Barsoom, John Carter is an alien. Agreed. Even the stories that were eventually collected into novels...

That's the thing about ERB (and Lord Dunsany and REH, whom I mentioned in another thread) - people might not be able to name their stories and characters, but I guarantee if you magically removed them from existence, the shape of fiction would be irrevocably altered. I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury...

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a brother. I remember going to a seminar of his at the first virtual Gary Con; his love of gaming and his enthusiasm really shined.

Conan remains a favorite of mine, one I will continue to return to for years to come. But I am also a bit of An Old. I do think that REH continues to exist in fantasy DNA in much the same way Tolkien does. It perhaps isn't always as obvious, but if someone were to remove REH's works from...

Reading about events like that, makes me wonder whether I would've been even able to conceptualize this future existing as a young kid. When people were still getting bullied for playing D&D, the idea that people would sell out Madison Square Garden for a an actual play would seem an...

Hmmm...if I were tasked with removing concentration (and again, I think doing so within the context of the current edition of D&D is not feasible), I think the trick would be to make the durations of spells much shorter, and reduce the wizard's HP back to d4. Even a spell that just lasts a...

While I think John Carter of Mars is a better movie than its box office take would indicate, it still fell short of the source material. Seeing a proper adaptation would be great. I think one of the problems adaptations of pulp works runs into (see also the Momoa Conan the Barbarian) is that...

The Tiffany Aching books, while ostensibly YA, are every bit as profound as the main Discworld series. So good!

Yeah, it's one of those things that is a fairly core component of balance at this point. It would not take much for martials to get completely outclassed in such a game. I know Spiritual Weapon is now Concentration. I would assume that there were other tweaks as well.

Definitely. Out of 19 short stories, I only skimmed/skipped two of them.

Depends on the context. If it's someone that I don't think will get the distinction, or I just don't want to get deep into the weeds, yeah, whatever I'm playing is "D&D." Otherwise I will say what I'm actually playing.

I finished reading the Cyberfunk! anthology. Like most anthologies, a mixed bag, but the quality is generally good, and it opens very strongly. Published in 2021, one of the stories features a social media owner attempting a hostile coup of the US. Cyberpunk, ever the Cassandra of genres. Now...

Same. Having been to a couple of his seminars, he's a showman and a salesman, sure, but he has such a flair and passion for talking about dice. Not to mention a ton of knowledge. I had a tough situation once with a player that was losing his eyesight. And he would declare suspiciously high...

Yeah, if you're running D&D 5e and want high fantasy without any hint of sci-fi or magitech, Forgotten Realms is probably your best bet. I've done patchwork settings and it's fun being able to draw from disparate worlds to stitch together your own. One of my favorite 5e campaigns took pieces of...

Yesss!