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If your hyperbole inadvertently sidelines black and female writers that drew on Howard like Saunders or CL Moore, get better hyperbole This and 'well I don't see it much on Reddit', at the same time as Monolith's widely-discussed Conan RPG Kickstarter raised almost half a million dollars, says...

This is true to a point, but: It's ten minutes of noodling for an internet forum, not an academic article; and that's why I said things like 'seems to show'. The correlation in pattern between a bunch of REH stories and between his stories and those of other authors is however suggestive that...

Riffing on this post where Google's Ngram viewer seemed to show an increase in interest in Howard since about 2000, I thought I do a similar thing for some other classic authors: Leiber, Smith, and Vance. I fed in a bunch of their stories and kept the best representative result for each. The...

It seems appropriate in this thread to point out that the current New Edge Sword & Sorcery Backerit Campaign only has a couple of days left. In the words of Howard Andrew Jones it is one of the current crop of magazines that takes this as their starting point:

Ngram viewer, so appearances of the string in the google books corpus. I didn't add 'red nails' as I expected there would be more noise than signal with such a common string. No idea why Queen of the Black Coast is so much higher than the others. Bêlit is a well-loved figure, though, and some...

The publication of 5e more or less exactly coincided with the historical high-point of interest in Howard's stories, and interest remains far higher than it was at the birth of roleplaying. This thread is based on a false premise.

I didn't need a reason to embrace different systems. I would have needed a reason not to. I started playing as a teen in the UK in the 80's and all the groups I knew played several different systems. Our mental image of the hobby was that you play lots of different things, and kit-bash systems...

Yeah, that's what I meant about events just snowballing. My players came across a radiation ghost while they were quarrying porcelain in Potsherd Crater. It silently pointed off into the distance. After trying some different things, they followed it. It led into an area contaminated by magic...

I've run it (using modified Traveller for characters, but by the book for the Caravan procedures) and this was my experience as well. With the right players, debt and a chance to get rich has them setting off; and as soon as they're out in the grasslands the caravan procedures mean that events...

Classic Traveller in the form of The Traveller Book. It has everything you need to play for years : character gen, combat, starship gen, starship combat, world and sector generation, a trade system, still the best animal generation system in an rpg, random encounters... It's an amazing piece...

Same! Back in the day, I liked the ideas in Tunnels & Trolls, but never really got it to work at the table. Just the fact that this is meant to be more a fleshed-out version makes it kinda intriguing.

The characters should be very competent - neither normal people nor superheroes. Combat should be fast-flowing and brutal - combat rounds should be quick and long slow battles of attrition should be very rare. It shouldn't be too worried about tracking every arrow and ration used. I like that...

It's my favourite OSR system for S&S, though not quite at Barbarians of Lemuria standards overall to me. It's basically Swords&Wizardry with a bunch of mods. The S&W single save becomes your base roll to perform skills too; and this forms the basis for a lot of class abilities. Basic classes...

Unfortunately it wasn't released for S&W that I've ever seen. I'd have loved that. There are 4e, 5e, Pathfinder (1e) and 13th Age versions though. It's the S&S setting that I've never got around to running that I most want to. The only reason I haven't is because I had a long-running homebrew...

This year saw the new Mythic+ version of Barbarians of Lemuria successfully kickstarted and sent out to backers. It's gorgeous, and will be out for retail in the new year. Still easily the best S&S game. A light version Barbarians of Legend (link is to DriveThru PDF, the PoD is on LuLu) came...

This is fair, and the OP did ask for horror-specific tools. My answer probably reflects the fact that I have never, whether as a player or referee, found those tools actually add to the horror of a game (and this goes back to early Call of Cthulhu for me). Fragile characters and uncertainty do...

The full version does have a stress/panic mechanism - it's pretty straightforward based on INT checks

I would still (after 40 some years and many sci-fi games) use Classic Traveller for this. Of the ones you mention, I've read all of them except Alien, but only played Death in Space. Here are my, probably slightly idiosyncratic, takes: The reason I've not bothered with Alien is that I'm not a...