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I just figure if people were drinking something as amazing as coffee, it would be attested to in a lot of documents. The absence of that documentation suggests it had not been discovered yet. Like, we have clay tablets from 1750 BC complaining about a business transaction - Complaint tablet to...

I just found this link - The History of Coffee: The Story Of Civilization In A Cup - which mentions 7000 BC (citation needed). That definitely does not match what Wikipedia says about the history of coffee, which says the earliest records are about 1000 AD. History of coffee - Wikipedia

Halewei is a Middle English word for 'healing water'. Not sure what that is, though. MiddleEnglishDictionary Kashdug is the Sumerian term for 'sweet drink.' I skimmed a Sumerian lexicon and didn't find anything better for a beverage like this. Tisane could work too. Well, I'll figure it out...

I'm writing a bronze age fantasy novel, and in a bid to stay with the aesthetic of the era, I keep running into fun challenges of world-building. My latest: tea. Tea is a beverage made from steeping leaves of the tea plant in hot water. There are numerous other types of plant you can steep in...

Rock is the character equivalent of 'a great place to visit, but you wouldn't like to live there.'

The way I usually run it in my games is that clerics have to be formally invested in a priesthood in order to be able to use power greater than a certain minor threshold. If you have faith, you might be able to come become a first level cleric. To become anything third level or higher, the...

Oh man, the vehicle rules are silly, because they max out at the same 100 tons as mechs. Even in the 1960s our small gunboats were running about 250 tons.

It apparently cost 100 million to make BG3. So if I win the lotto, I will bribe their hiring manager to let me write for whatever their next game is.

There's also, perhaps, a philosophical element, where we expect 'warfare' to have high stakes, when really it might just be super petty. It's a lot easier for villainous a-holes to justify sending in the military to kill a bunch of civilians if it takes a minimum of 2 weeks for news to reach...

I actually am going down this rabbit hole specifically because I came up with what I think is a rational technological justification for mechs. The idea is basically instead of just armored walking tanks (which is what Battletech canon says), mechs have really strong forcefields that shed a lot...

Now this is making me think about the Cold War, and how in an attempt to prevent 'dominos from falling,' the West got involved in a lot of local conflicts to try to keep different countries on their side. And even if resources are ubiquitous, I guess it's still valuable to have access to...

Hence why I think I'd prefer going with my own setting. I just don't buy it being possible to suppress all the scientific knowledge before people figure out what you're up to and stop you. I dunno. Maybe if, like, every planet got bioweaponed or nuked, and civilization entirely collapsed...

I just personally find the whole, "Nobody saved any records on how to build reactors" or whatever to be pretty silly. Disrupting supply chains is a thing, sure. Like, one narrative I read about the 'Bronze Age collapse' is really just that a few sources of raw materials had local disruptions...

This reminds me of when a friend ran a D&D campaign where we all had to play lizardmen. Our city of lizardmen was going to have a big Aztec-esque sporting event against other lizardmen to see if we could go to the championships, where they'd play the forces of the dead to keep the sun from being...

So yeah, there could be lots of worlds that are kinda inconsequential. People colonized them to look for resources, and you might have thousands of millions living there, and no one bothers to invest in major defensive weaponry because no one has a reason to attack. Most places would just do...

I like the Balkanized idea. Even if you do have large interstellar nations, the conflicts would happen in places that are not in alliance with them, sorta like what we have these past few decades in eastern Europe. As for rare resources, a deep dive into the Battletech wiki reveals that someone...

I recently got bit by the nostalgia bug for Battletech. Big robots, no magic or psychic mumbo jumbo. Fun times. But thinking back on the novels I read in the 90s and the video games over the past couple decades, and comparing them to the understanding I have today about how war works, and my...

At what point? In canon he tries to rescue her and gets fed up that she's not the woman he remembered. He thinks she's weak, but he'll obey her instructions. I suppose a PC Kasvarina might try to bring Asrabey along as extra firepower, but you could play up his ego. If she insists on having...

I work at a library, and a coworker and I had a conversation about me possibly running a 1 hour game for some staff who've never played RPGs before, as part of a series of staff members sharing their hobbies. I've run simple systems before, but how simple do you think I could go and still have...