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Well that was some serious whiplash.

Given how both Bilbo and Frodo were corrupted much more subtlely and slowly, it's hard to square Sméagol's corruption into committing murder with such immediacy. That is, unless it turns out that Sméagol was a pretty sick personality even before Déagol found the ring - which I think we might be...

And it's not like people hadn't seen things like this before, literally. When the Nazis asserted control in 1933, they had a very effective German bureaucracy to work with (that they then politicized). But they also relied on the party imposed Gauleiters to maintain control - and those...

There may be imperial supporters on a rebellious planet, but it's not like the Empire needs them like a democratic form of government would. Their obliteration will terrify the other systems just as effectively as wiping out rebels. And, aside from organic resources, plenty of the planet's...

I can't remember what game convention we were at - maybe Winter Fantasy one year(?), but a friend of mine got to sit in on a play test with a version of European Axis and Allies that Tom Wham was noodling around with. It was just the European powers with the US eventually having some presence...

That's the challenge of writing a bunch of lore - it can be polarizing. I found 4e's treatment of tieflings limiting, not least because they had all become infernal rather than descendent of any lower planes inhabitant as they had been before, and are again much to my preference.

We have: Netflix Disney+ Apple TV Hulu+Starz We sponge off our elder daughter's Amazon Prime + Max account. She started getting it as a student and has kept going with it. But then, she sponges off our other accounts, so we feel vindicated. We dropped Paramount+ despite being big fans of Star...

It's sad that Mad Monkey would be relatively niche because, having run it, it's a lot of fun. I'd have voted for it over WG7. That said, WG7 still beat out the rest of the options, none of which are what I would describe as any more niche than a Greyhawk campaign product. It clearly had its fans.

Just because you're not seeing a lot of action against Lego, doesn't mean that things aren't happening in the Lego-fan community. For example, Tips & Bricks, a prominent web-resource and reviewer of (nearly) all things Lego, pointedly refuses to review the Potterverse sets. And I'm sure that...

I just try to remind myself that not everyone lives in the same media bubble I do. I certainly couldn't explain anything going on in the Czechia these days, literarily or in the media. So I try to extend grace, particularly when they're in countries outside of the US/UK media world.

I discovered recently that Czech Games Edition (CGE) ignited a firestorm when they announced a new edition of their Harry Potter-licenced game as Codenames: Back to Hogwarts. The disapproval was fierce and furious given JK Rowling's persistent persecution of trans women (the latest being an...

I'm not a fan (and never have been) of the idea of different maximums for species in D&D. For my money, halflings having to invest more to reach a Strength of 20 than a goliath does quite enough to satisfy my sense of species differences while allowing a halfling fighter or barbarian to reach...

"Houston, we've had a problem." Apollo 13 commander James Lovell has passed away. https://apnews.com/article/james-lovell-dies-obituary-apollo-13-astronaut-ed08c1efc0a74fbd9d47868ff9983a23

In one thread, you're talking about how increased profits means a company can pay its people better, meanwhile over here, you're excoriating a company for trying to make more money for the effort they're putting into stuff (and the 4e play test PDF has some pretty high production value). I mean...

Yeah, that Bogle's a tough one. "My Youngest Son Came Home Today" is fairly brutal.

Except for the part that a lot of game design choices are all about the aesthetics of those choices. Game design isn't science or math - though those are also involved. Aesthetics, the art of game design, is always also a feature and it's a strong part of why and how games differ. If they were...

There are some songs that get me for fairly personal reasons or when I'm feeling particularly emotional about certain things - and this can be highly variable. A song that really moves me right now might not have done so 10 years ago. Or I might just have been a particular mood and vulnerable to...

It's way more complicated than that, particularly since ERB introduced the white and supremacist Therns in 1913, years before the Nazis were an itch in their founders' metaphorical political pants. Moreover, while ERB detested fascism and Nazism, he was a fan of eugenics. That kind of makes the...

Did we just lose the 20-posts per page setting? I just noticed I'm suddenly getting 10 posts per page and I'm sure it wasn't that way before.

Maybe because there's a semantic difference between a profession and a role or job within a community. Profession generally connotes a more specialized calling - the kind of thing that might not strictly be based on community subsistence or basic necessities.