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“It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage.” I don't think it's about necessarily how long it's been, but who I was at that time I had the experience, how much impact it made on me, that makes me nostalgic. Whether it's being a wee kid and picking up then Red Box, an ubergoth teenager sitting...

My take on avoiding burnout is the following: Seek out your joy: Examine the moments in the game that make you smile, make it all feel effortless. Examine the tropes in whatever genre you're running a game in that resonate with you. Then focus on bringing those to the game. Seek out your...

Fritz Leiber, especially the latter stuff, is a notably, ahem, horny author. The Locked Tomb series is exceptional. Great characters, cool worldbuilding, and each book challenges you in a different way. As you said, it's never a one-trick pony. Yeah, there has been extensive discussion of the...

Queue Radark Windpassing: Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler! Ahh, Thieves World. The names definitely were evocative. Tempus evokes time - he is immortal, temple - he is god-ridden, and its Latin points to his own references to, and possible roots in, our antiquity. One of my favorite opening...

Glen Cook's The Black Company works with these bold names. Croaker, Raven, The Lady, Soulcatcher, Silent, The Limper, etc. Combined with the scant details you generally get about how the characters look, they still somehow manage to be so evocative. Terry Brooks' names seem like they're just...

Not going to lie, part of it is nostalgia. But I do think the art on the whole in the 89 versions is better. Oof! Yeah, there was a ton to carry. It wasn't until 5e that I finally had enough of that and told people if they wanted me to DM a game, it was going to be at my place. The conciseness...

This is the second time within the span of a week that song has come up.

The presentation and artwork of the original 2e books just brings too much nostalgia for me - the revised books just have an uncanny valley feel for me. The number of books I'd have to lug around just to run a game was ridiculous! I remember I had a backpack and a duffle bag filled with books...

I finished reading Effinger's A Fire In the Sun. The second book in the Budayeen Cycle matches the quality of the first book. The series began in 1986, so while some of the language used hasn't aged well, it's still impressively inclusive for the 80s, with multiple trans characters, and a...

Unfortunately, absolutely. My FLGS is smart in that they balance retail with online sales, but even still, this is going to be a hit - not just the direct costs of gaming products, but everything else that's going to get more expensive.

It's clear that this is going to have a disastrous effect on the market, for years to come. And this is going to also put the squeeze on gaming stores. Just depressing.

Hmmm 1e - official settings; 2e is known for settings, and Judges Guild started setting books earlier, sure, but the first official ones came on the scene here B/X & BECMI - race as class; it's a drastic simplification, but considering how many OSR games model it, clearly one that resonated...

In no particular order: Cyberpunk Red BECMI AD&D 1e Dungeon Crawl Classics Problem players get stuck with the worst chores for a week.

DCC is such a smooth system. The Crawl zine Bard class has specific abilities that would be useful for a face character in that scenario, but otherwise, yes, a simple Personality check would make the most sense.

My preferred system these days is Cyberpunk Red. First off, for something so complex, I'd probably have everyone roll initiative to keep things straight. Either that or focus on each player's part, one at a time (which is generally my preference when out-of-combat netrunning is going on, as I...

There are a handful of causal factors that contributed to me getting back into gaming in the early 00s. The Fellowship of the Ring movie was one of them. Another was picking up this Dragon magazine from the shelves of a grocery store: