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You've got a very Kantian view that certain actions, such as breaking an arm, is always wrong regardless of the circumstances. While that's certainly a legitimate point of view, it's not one I share. And while this discussion doesn't involve religion or politics, it's probably beyond the...

What we have here is a philosophical impasse. I don't believe in necessary evils. At least not in a moral sense. I agree it's the circumstances that matter when calculating the morality of an action. Mind controlling someone to prevent deaths isn't merely morally acceptable it's morally...

This might be another reason why Arthurian RPGs aren't popular. It's difficult for a lot of players to get into the mindset that seems so very different from ours. "Wait a minute! Arthur, our hero, the dude who created Camelot, ordered a bunch of babies born on May Day to be murdered?" Can...

In the interest of full transparency, I've put a subliminal message in this post compelling you to like it.

James Vicary was a market researcher in the 1950s who claimed he was able to increase concession sales in theaters through the use of experimental subliminal advertisements. It turns out his experiments were entirely fraudulent but demonstrated Vicary was good at marketing baloney. Here in the...

I'm willing to accept a rather broad definition of mind control that includes deception, directly controlling someone's physical actions, charming them, etc., etc. Was old Ben Kenobi wrong to convince that stormtrooper those weren't the droids he was looking for? No. It's the equivalent of...

Honesty, you can look at the Beast of Gévaudan for some inspiration for an Arthurian/Ravenloft style adventure or campaign. In a nutshell, the beast was an actual creature that terrorized south-central France in the mid 18th century and more importantly inspired the 2001 film Brotherhood of the...

It does. Quite frankly, given RPGs are in and of themselves a niche, we should count our good fortunes to even have Pendragon. When I was in high school, we read several Arthurian stories at different points in our English Literature courses, and in particular I remember reading Le Morte...

The Force is withy you, young Skywalker. But you are not a Jedi yet.

Dexter's code was created by his father to protect Dexter from incarceration and to protect normal people from Dexter. Dexter is generally compelled to kill others simply to satiate his bloodlust rather than a desire to protect others. We see a few examples where he targets a person to protect...

I don't think I've ever played a D&D game where this was true. Oh, our characters are killers, but the motivation is very different from what we think of for the likes of Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, or Dexter Morgan who seem compelled to kill with no clear motivation. In my experience, most...

I have a confession to make. My name is MGibster, and I hate steampunk. Steampunk is the triumph of aesthetics over substance.

I always thought The Culture series was a dystopian future where humanity was no longer the master of their own destiny having been relegated to the status of pets of god-like AIs.

We tend to separate the natural from the supernatural, but I'm not sure that was as common in the past. And if we're to posit that magic is real, well, it's just another natural force rather than the supernatural.

Vader is a work in progress. I need to let it completely dry before applying the icy Hoth base. Then when that dries, I’ll give some object source lighting another try.

Fear is the oath to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Darth Vader scares the hell out of me. I mean painting Darth Vader scares the hell out of me because black is not an easy color to paint. A friend of mine asked, "What's so hard about it...