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Two of my favorite books, those. Discovering them for the first time as a teenager was mind-blowing.

I think Patrick Rothfuss gets by on a lot of his flaws due to how gorgeous and lyrical his writing is. While I am hoping that there's a degree of unreliable narrator at work, particularly with some of the more absurd stuff in Wise Man's Fear, to date there has been no indication that that is...

CISO was a groundbreaking release, coming out four years before the Greyhawk Folio, six years before Flying Buffalo's Citybook I. That was one trippy adventure.

Anyone else remember in the 90s when a VHS tape with 2-3 episodes of an anime show on it cost $20? So good. The psychedelia is something that went over my head as a kid, probably because it was too heavy and out there for me to encompass.

I read Lumley's Necroscope series when I was younger, but I didn't discover his Titus Crowe series until much later, when I went deep into Appendix N research. It's a decent take, though I think the second book in the series is a bit of a wobble.

That sounds way better than the paperback I grew up reading - it had such a hideous cover, like a bad illustration of Bela Lugosi. Still, I read it until it fell apart.

Yeah, it's got to be Dracula, with all apologies to Sauron. Dracula's impact is just massive, and as a villain he is loaded down with symbolism that continues to resonate through the ages.

The works of Ruthanna Emrys, Victor LaValle, Kij Johnson, even Brian Lumley take HPL's ideas and run with them either without the bigotry, or directly addressing it. I love M.R. James! Perfect for creeping dread and whelming superstition. HPL was not the only one doing cosmic horror, or the...

Frankenstein is a complex tale, and one that continues to cast a spell on readers. I revisit it and Dracula every once in a while and find that both stories retain their impact, continue to evolve as I do, continue to horrify.

As much as I want to say the Free City of Greyhawk, it's Waterdeep. A city I've run so many games in that I can vividly see and smell it. Now, if the question was "Favorite Iconic D&D Village," that's going to be Solace or Hommlet.

I finished reading Lisa Mason's Arachne. A great and oftentimes forgotten entry in cyberpunk fiction, with protagonists far different from the norm (a young lawyer and a misanthropic robot). A bit of Gibson, a bit of legal drama, a dash of Pynchon-style absurdity. I also finished Nalo...

The Carter/ De Camp contributions don't always work, but I would posit "The Thing in The Crypt" in the first one stands tall among them. Certainly, its influence on the 1982 movie is clear.

I can say that I've never seen a player take over another player's character in their absence. We generally just fade out that character and they rejoin when they show up. As far as what the threshold is for absent players and cancelling a session, I think it depends a bit on the system. Some...

Making one of the oozes only come out at night could be pretty creepy.

A definite point, that. I first read the OD&D books when the deluxe reprints came out. I have a strong doubt that I would've been able to make sense of OD&D at all without either someone to explain it to me or the years of gaming knowledge I came to it with. I did run a game of it a few years...

Yeah, as @billd91 pointed out, even doing that is fraught. It might be possible to pull it off, but there are so many landmines inherent in the character. As influential as Tarzan is, his time may have passed. I'd be down with another go at adapting Pellucidar. If I recall correctly, it would...

Energy drain was a beast back in the day. My experience was, yes, without a cleric, the best strategy was running away. The risk of losing a hard-earned level was just too much. Backstab was hard to pull off (in part made more difficult by the vagueness of the wording, and the difference in...

True enough. Thieves also had a bad time of it, with them being terrible at the things they were supposed to do in the beginning. And with poison being save or die, being terrible at finding and disarming traps was not great for life expectancy.

I quite like Monarch...until you said something, I didn't think of the Pellucidar connection, but yeah, it's totally got a bit of that in its DNA. There are definitely some inherently problematic elements of Tarzan. Not sure what Sony is thinking on their approach, but we shall see (if the...

I want AI to help me with drudgery. When I can't figure out why my code at work isn't working, asking AI for help is a whole lot faster than spending 30 minutes combing Stack Overflow for the answer to that question. I do not want AI to replace my creative efforts. Those are a joy, and one of...