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Heavy stuff for ostensibly a kids' show. Optimus Prime's death, along with a bunch of other Transformers (including Brawn, the first Transformers toy I ever had), was a heck of a tone switch from the cartoon, that's for sure.

Originally my 1e campaign (after it had graduated from "generic fantasy world with dungeons" took place in Waterdeep. That same campaign kept going until 2e, when the group decided that they wanted to pick up and move to Shadowdale. Going from such a dense locale to Shadowdale, I was at first...

When you've got spells flying around, characters with 100HP, and all these weird monsters, I think by nature the violence becomes somewhat absurd and cartoonish. Vampire, on the other hand, while it can devolve into "vampire action heroes," at its best it should give violence weight and...

None of the cavaliers I saw in long-term play made it very long. Even if they didn't get themselves permanently killed sticking to their code, I think a lot of players also got tired of being a shining knight on horseback continually ending up in dungeons. We likewise went with method I back...

It's been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. Like LOTR, it's a book I keep returning to as the decades pass. Sticks is good. KEW has a talent for building dread slowly but surely, infusing small things with fear at first. Three Hearts and Three Lions is what I consider the most concentrated...

Since switching from D&D to Cyberpunk Red, I've found how I describe the violence in the game has changed. I find myself less comfortable describing gun violence. Certainly, critical injuries require a certain degree of narrative gore, but for your average attacks I find myself more likely to...

I've read his Kane stories, but have slept on his horror works until now.

The Satanic Panic probably nixed the Witch, if it had at all been planned as an eventual class. I think the earliest official book release of it was in 1990's Complete Wizard's Handbook. I suspect a lot of tables ignored the behavioral requirements of those classes. Which would net you some...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

I always go all-in on the Halloween season - movies, books, even my gaming sessions get spooky adventures when I can work them in. However, I'm not one of those people that starts talking about Halloween on August 1st. I figure Labor Day has to finish up first, and you should be able to feel...

UA was a major release after D&D had surged in sales, so maybe? But the Anti-Paladin and Witch were NPC classes - I don't recall any of those appearing outside of Dragon magazine.

I finished reading Scott's Trouble and Her Friends. Really enjoyed it, with all its 90s vibes. The epilogue left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied, but upon reflection, I wonder if that was the point... Now I'm reading Karl Edward Wagner's In A Lonely Place. The spooky season is here.

It's definitely gotten a glow-up since release. I find myself repeatedly returning to that game.

They are similar, but not the same. You can see the DNA of Cyberpunk 2020 in both, but they diverge in some key aspects. I think Cyberpunk Red is pretty simple, with a few quirks like netrunning (which, granted, is more simple than Shadowrun's Matrix). Once you get it down, it flows very...

If you look at the abilities, where the Barbarian really excels is outside of combat. They get so much stuff for when they're not in combat and traveling in the wilderness. But lots of people see the d12 HP and think of Conan.

I remember quite liking it when it came back. Revisiting it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Barbarian and Cavalier classes were power gamer traps. Like, the Barbarian front loads you with a ton of abilities, but then saddles you with not being able to use magic items and an extremely slow...

What struck me about The Last Wish is just how rooted in folklore and fairytales it is. They might be subverted, but they're very much part of the weft and weave of the tales. Back when I was a librarian, my test of a dictionary was to see if it had defenestration in it.

I don't know that I'd describe either as that nebulous. There are certain themes that carry across all the iterations of Conan-esque and Tolkien-esque. For example, in Conan in just about all takes, you're going to have themes on the decadence of civilization, ancient fallen elder peoples...

I would agree that there are better systems out there if you want to run a full-on Conan-esque setting. But there have also been scads of lines written about how you can't do X with D&D, yet that doesn't stop people from trying. Sometimes they make it work, sometimes not. That article is such a...

A steampunk character could fit into D&D just fine. But so could a Conan-esque barbarian, a snarky Locke Lamora-style rogue from not-Venice, or a dwarf straight out of Tolkien. At this point, I kinda think of D&D as being its own genre. To some extent, it's always been a mishmash of influences...