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My group loved Glabbagool! Most groups will recover from losing a problem player in no time. It's easier than ever to find prospective players - it kinda amazes me that when a player is on thin ice, they don't realize this. But again, small problems are oftentimes symptomatic of larger issues.

Sometimes, when a player quits over something small like that, it can be a blessing; if they were mad about that, I suspect that there would be other problems from them further down the line.

They are very chonky. But worth reading. The way the narratives weave and thread together, the epic stakes, the characters. The series is a great read, though I think towards the end it could've done with sharper editing and a less rushed pace of production.

Died way too young. Wish he could've lived to see just how highly his work is thought of these days.

Going back to old Judges Guild books in the 70s and 80s, those were filled with NPC monsters you could interact with in towns and settlements. Heck, some of the dungeons even had taverns in them.

The 1e Lich remains tops in my book. It's threatening and eldritch, as a Lich should be:

Finished reading Qiufan Chen's Waste Tide. A great intersection of environmentalism, castes, colonialism, humanity, culture, and technology. Now I'm reading Steven Barnes' Gorgon Child, the second in the Aubrey Knight series.

High-wire act is an apt description of what running that sort of adventure is like. But there's a certain joy of the DM finding out what happens next at the same time (or rather, a few second before) the PCs.

That is one I'd love to run. Unfortunately, in both my gaming groups there are people that have either run or played in it already. The Stygian Library is great. It can be a lot of work, or it least it was for me as I ran it all on the fly, making the rolls right there at the table. It's wildly...

Been thinking about this, and I think it is important to make our entertainment, games, media, books, all unfriendly to fascists. D&D and DCC RPG have gone the route of using positive inclusivity to that end. But it is also valid to pick fights with fascists. Entertainment is filled with people...

Gaseous spiritual beings working for death is wild. I'm also particularly a fan of them including the Olivia Hill rule in the beginning:

Would 100% agree on The Spire. It's so full of flavor, encourages the PCs from the get-go to engage with its strange world. For pure creativity of premise and setting, I might put Necronautilus up there. I can't think of another TTRPG like it.

My first character was Fairblade, a Fighter, back in the Red Box days. I didn't get to play him much as I ended up being the DM most of the time. In his own words..." I know when to steal and when not to."

J.G. Ballard's sense of humor could be very sharp indeed. My favorite of his short stories is "The Secret History of World War 3."

I think engagement is about as good a metric of success as I can think of. When you see players deep into roleplaying their characters, cheering as they roll a critical hit or sweating as they roll badly to avoid dangerous consequences, seeing their sense of wonder grow as they discover and...

It generally takes me about 3-4 weeks to get through a book that size. As I've gotten older, my tastes have skewed more towards shorter reads, more compact storytelling.

Love those Jack Crane Dragon covers! It always surprises me when I see Katharine Kerr writing for Dragon, considering she's an established author and here she is writing game stuff. It'd be like, I don't know, GRRM collaborating on a D&D book today.

Been slowly re-reading the Thieves World series. Considering they crafted a collaborative world without modern communication tools, it really is an exceptional feat. One day I'll re-read The Wheel of Time, but that's a real commitment. I think it took me about a year when I first read them.