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Precisely so. Thieves World presents a squalid, gritty world with troubled, morally conflicted protagonists. Xanth presents as a lighthearted humorous fantasy world, but espouses multiple problematic themes and beliefs.

It's funny, Thieves World has more mature content, but despite having read both it and the Xanth series around the age of 9-10, I feel like Xanth is the more problematic one. I kinda get why my parents where happy just to let us read whatever. Raising twins could not have been easy, and...

Unfortunately true. I also get the feeling that there wasn't a lot of oversight (at least, not from my parents) as to what was behind the cover on a lot of the fantasy books I read as a kid.

Like, I know the past is a foreign country and all, but it astonishes me that they were marketed as kids books.

Doing post-mortems on campaigns and sessions that failed is important. Had I learned to do that sooner, I would've had fewer failed campaigns and sessions. Having tried to re-read a Xanth book as an adult, that is not a solid guarantee at all.

About 30-45 minutes of dedicated prep time. Thinking about it, the prep time is about the same for my group that runs two hours and my group that runs four hours. But that's not including the couple of minutes here and there that I get struck by inspiration and scrawl some semi-illegible ideas...

Wait, so in Demon Wars, the world is called Honce-the-bear? How is that a thing?

If I recall correctly, The Canterbury Tales begins with everyone meeting in an inn to head off on their pilgrimage.

For those of us that were fairly young when we stepped into the world of AD&D, BECMI & B/X were easier to understand than the shambolic AD&D. I know a lot of how we ran AD&D was based on BECMI with AD&D rules bolted onto it.

Here's the thing about the whole "they are described as white in the original texts" argument. Old books traditionally were not great at inclusivity (because the framework, the language for it, just wasn't as widely adopted). Dragonlance has a cast of hundreds, yet how many people of color are...

I finished my final Halloween season read, Kaden love's Toothsucker. Mixed feelings on it. The book throws a metric ton at the reader. The slang used felt forced and got old really quickly. But the core concept of a bunch of tooth-eating cybernetic vampires was solid. Now I'm re-reading Walter...

I have two groups. One went all-in on combat, the other didn't. The thing about building a hardened PC is that there's no level of power that makes you completely indomitable in combat; there will always be someone tougher, and days that weak streetrat gets really lucky with their poor quality...

Cyberpunk Red is a game that can be run low-combat. In a lot of ways, how dangerous combat can be disincentivizes it (like Call of Cthulhu). And like Call of Cthulhu, it has a robust skill system. I'm not a huge fan of FATE-based games, but I'll admit the system does a good job without having...

I went to a build-a-runner workshop at Origins last year and even the guy there said character generation was so complicated you really need an excel spreadsheet or app to go through it. To my mind, that's just too much. Still going to play the game; the latest edition at least made some...

Charles Halloway's decision to accept himself, accept his age, resist temptation, was such a powerful moment. It's been almost 15 years since I last read Something Wicked This Way Comes. I really ought to revisit it. Likewise, my youth wasn't as far in the rearview mirror then. Stephen King can...

I did. They got it wrong a lot, forgot this or that modifier, effect, or aura. I'm still suspicious of the one PC's AC calculations, too. We only got as far as 15th level or so, and that was way too busy. I can't imagine hitting 20th. Yeah, high-level play remains an issue in most editions. I...

Cyberpunk Red BECMI (provided I can get fresh shiny new versions to replace my original, much-loved copies) Shadowdark or DCC RPG

I love Halloween III. The images of bugs spilling out of those Halloween masks as children died was terrifying. In a lot of ways, I think the series would've been better, had it taken the anthology route. Maybe they could've brough Michael Myers back now and then, and it would've been a big...

Bradbury's writing has this strangely beautiful heartbreak. It at once captures what it's like to be a kid, aching to be an adult but also fearful of leaving childhood behind, and being an adult desperately recalling your lost childhood. All of it done with a simple description of an autumn wind...

In my experience, running 4e towards the end, with its slew of options, classes, and abilities got to be particularly onerous. But each table can vary.