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Excellent stuff, pemerton.

Fritz Leiber worked this possibility to great effect in The Big Time and the related Changewar stories. Two basically incomprehensible powers are fighting for control of history everywhere and eveywhen. A very small fraction of people can remember changed history, and they get drafted into the...

@overgeeked , fascinating. Brand-new subject for me. Everyone, awesome D&D discussion. Every influence I thought of got covered.

A conceptual exercise, then: would you want to see a doctor who hasn’t paid any attention to medical research since the 1990s? Would you feel that person is in a good position to deal with COVID, bacterial ulcers, repetitive strain injuries, and the like? Would you have confidence in.an...

Technically “blade runner” comes from Nourse, not Burroughs, but otherwise, carry on.

As a creator myself, I like “steal” for much the reasons I like “elfgames”: it encourages a good perspective about the innately unserious element in what we’re doing. This isn’t vital medical research, political criticism, legal argument, or whatever, it’s about making games. I want to make the...

I finished the audiobook of The Stand, and loved it all over again. I also encountered a good insight into a common criticism of King, his tendency toward weak endings. Booktuber Lekden is a fan of horror and science fiction, with particular attention to queer genre fiction, and also a Buddhist...

Gibson and Sterling both said explicitly that they saw cyberpunk as anti-dystopian, or at least vigorously non-dystopian. Life is bad for many people, but life goes on, and crucially, life keeps changing. No social, political, or economic power in their worlds can lock them down. Radical change...

@jian , sounds great. Onto the list it goes. William Gibson wrote his early stories with two big influences that weren’t always commented on. One is noir: there is a lot of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the Sprawl stories, including some direct quotes. This bit of dialogue from...

I’m a fan of both.

I’m big on psionics and settings after apocalypse, but not wild about heat and deserts. Give me a vast dangerous forest, or archipelago, or glacial mountains, or underwater, and I’d be more likely to go for it.

This this this. From D&D’s first year, the field has been going in several incompatible directions. So it makes all the sense that it takes different kinds of measures to get a sense of what we’re up to.

I really appreciate the distinction between being special and being powerful. Weak special characters can be pretty great.

I’ve never read any of those. Adding it to my long-term list. Sometimes I’m really up for that kind of retro.

Looking at what I’ve messed around with lately, I find PCs who have great heroic potential, who may or may not have achieved any of it yet. Sometimes they’re like Neo at the start of The Matrix, with already-distinctive talents and unusual ambitions, but who’d still be hard to pick out of a...

I’m not (yet) going to the extremes of some of my writer friends, reading wound manuals and the like, but I definitely prefer violence in my games to have consequences. Alongside that, I’ve become much more interested in adventures that have little to no violence. Give me a good chase scene...

Speaking of language, saw this today at a nearby Mexican grocery. Both goofy and cool, we thought. https://lamodernausa.com/ensenas/

Grover Gardener’s reading of The Stand is really, really good. Among other things, he does the whole spread of accents from East Texas to California to Nebraska to Maine. He’s equally good at the spread of emotions from tremendous joy to consuming fear and despair. Short of something like the...

The difference? Two classes start with W, one with S. :)

Karl Edward Wagner deserves more fame than he got. I’m always glad to see people reading his work.