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I’m a fan of both.

I’m big on psionics and settings after apocalypse, but not wild about heat and deserts. Give me a vast dangerous forest, or archipelago, or glacial mountains, or underwater, and I’d be more likely to go for it.

This this this. From D&D’s first year, the field has been going in several incompatible directions. So it makes all the sense that it takes different kinds of measures to get a sense of what we’re up to.

I really appreciate the distinction between being special and being powerful. Weak special characters can be pretty great.

I’ve never read any of those. Adding it to my long-term list. Sometimes I’m really up for that kind of retro.

Looking at what I’ve messed around with lately, I find PCs who have great heroic potential, who may or may not have achieved any of it yet. Sometimes they’re like Neo at the start of The Matrix, with already-distinctive talents and unusual ambitions, but who’d still be hard to pick out of a...

I’m not (yet) going to the extremes of some of my writer friends, reading wound manuals and the like, but I definitely prefer violence in my games to have consequences. Alongside that, I’ve become much more interested in adventures that have little to no violence. Give me a good chase scene...

Speaking of language, saw this today at a nearby Mexican grocery. Both goofy and cool, we thought. https://lamodernausa.com/ensenas/

Grover Gardener’s reading of The Stand is really, really good. Among other things, he does the whole spread of accents from East Texas to California to Nebraska to Maine. He’s equally good at the spread of emotions from tremendous joy to consuming fear and despair. Short of something like the...

The difference? Two classes start with W, one with S. :)

Karl Edward Wagner deserves more fame than he got. I’m always glad to see people reading his work.

Reading Cassandra’s stories can give you many such moments, yeah. :) Probably the Cassandra Khaw book least likely to give you a complex is Hammers on Bone, a modern-day Cthulhu Mythos that gives a look at the other side of an exchange in Lovecraft. Highly recommended.

Oh, they reminds me: Neil Peart’s travel books are all great. He loved being out on the road in his motorcycle, seeing new sights, meeting people and discovering what’s interesting about them, the whole deal. Combine that with the inside view of being part of Rush, and you get these uniquely...

Mesoamerica: I’ve read Aztec Thought And Culture and loved it, though it’s more academic and presumed you know more already. I can’t speak to the others yet. Edit: is The Aztecs published by Reaktor? If so, I’ll recommend it sight unseen; the whole line is great for introductory info and...

@SkidAce , that’s awesome. Thank you.

Getting back into the reading groove is great!

Peter H. Wilson’s books on the Holy Roman Empire and on the Thirty Years War are amazing. Huge - each is more than 30 hours long - and meticulously organized so that I almost never got lost, with great narration. Everything by M. David Litwa is worthwhile, bringing all kinds of fresh light to...

I remember finding it a big letdown for pretty much the reasons you did.

It’s like we’re all geniuses! Genii. Genuses.

This is why I read a fair amount of Warhammer 40K fiction instead of a similar volume of technically better f&sf that heavily features sexual violence.