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The point I was making in post #16 of this thread is similar to the one I made in a previous thread where I wrote: Both posts are counterarguments to arguments of the form 'orcs (or other imaginary monsters) can’t be racist because they're not real'. To show that these are bad arguments all...

In An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976), Katharine Briggs describes the Redcap as "one of the most malignant of old Border goblins." However she also mentions a benign variant: "In Perthshire, however, there is a milder Redcap, a little man who lives in a room high up in Grantully Castle and whom...

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST IMAGES, BEHIND SPOILER The first two images are from the antisemitic Nazi paper Der Stürmer. The second two are from American anti-Japanese propaganda. All four depict imaginary monsters. All four are racist. Racism doesn't depend on realness. In fact, some level of...

From the perspective of a High or Late Medieval Christian thinker there could be three different kinds of magic – holy, demonic, and natural. Some would have considered only the first two to be valid. These map, not entirely comfortably, on to the D&D concepts of good divine, evil divine, and...

Regarding the arcane/divine split, the proximate source (@Northern Phoenix is right ofc that the demonic/holy split is much older) might be the novels of Randall Garrett. Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (2012): There are fantastic worlds where the distinction between a Magic-user and a...

You're both right. Influential Christian thinkers such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had always considered magic to be demonic. Many important changes took place from the High Medieval to the Early Modern periods that made the early modern witch trials possible: Learned magic was...

This post describes the resemblances between Jack Vance's short story "Mazirian the Magician" and D&D in more detail. It was published in 1950 as part of The Dying Earth. The spell memorisation and casting is very similar to D&D. But it's also a story about resource management, and those...

I think that's true. Vancian casters, to be balanced against non-casters, require many dangerous encounters, typically monsters, over a short space of time. That means D&D dungeons, and D&D dungeons are more plausible in a kitchen sink world that's filled with monsters. The most important...

Several roleplaying games of the 1980s dealt directly with the Cold War, or the possible consequences if it turned hot – Paranoia (1984), Twilight 2000 (1984), and The Price of Freedom (1986). This post is about the reviews of the latter two in the British roleplaying magazine, White Dwarf, and...

That’s similar to the treatment of dwarves in Daniel Collerton's "Irilian" series in White Dwarf #42-47. White Dwarf #43 (1983): The Irilians' views of demihumans are stereotyped and are generally the worst possible… dwarves [are] 'money-grubbing and miserly'. Perhaps because both the...

The argument that drow can't be racist because they aren't real is a bad one. All racist portrayals involve an element of fiction, sometimes a very strong element. If they were 100% truthful portrayals they could not be racist, because racism always involves a lie. Nazi propaganda employed...

Very interesting and informative post, pemerton. Thank you for the reply. I think I understand existentialism a bit better now.

I'm struggling to get my head around the idea that gratuitous female nudity isn't popular with the masses. Here in the UK our most popular newspaper, The Sun, featured topless women on page 3 until 2015.

You're right. In the AD&D 1e DMG, Neutral Evil is Social Darwinism: This ethos holds that seeking to promote weal for all actually brings woe to the truly deserving. Natural forces which are meant to cull out the weak and stupid are artificially suppressed by so-called good, and the fittest are...

You might find these posts I wrote around a month ago interesting. They're about anti-existentialist passages in the AD&D 1e DMG compared to the existentialism in the early Elric stories. One weakness is that I don't have a very good grasp of what existentialism means, but other than that I...

That sounds very similar to most Westerns. EDIT: The Conan story Beyond the Black River is very much a Western with a frontier and Picts as stand-ins for Native Americans. I think I remember reading that towards the end of his life Howard was growing tired of sword & sorcery and wanted to...