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I'd vote for Volo's Guide to Waterdeep. It gives a lived-in feel to Waterdeep, full of rumors that might be true, or might not be. Making Volo semi-unreliable allows for the DM to take the best inspiration from it and discard or alter what they don't like. Two DMs can start with a location in...

There have been many writers that have raged against the unfairness baked into society. But the way Sir Terry articulates it is so on-point. You can feel Vimes in those words. He's a little cynical about it, but also so very angry.

Ah, that would have been a perfect ending to the series. Alas!

A nigh impossible choice, but I went with my favorite, The Fifth Elephant. Honorable mention might have to go to Men At Arms, for articulating the Captain Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socio-economic unfairness.

I finished reading Effinger's The Exile Kiss. The final Budayeen book, it's such a shame he died so young. The world he wrote was so compelling and interesting. Now I'm reading Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid. I'm 1:1 with Sterling's books so far, so we'll see how this one goes. Anyone...

I enjoyed the heck out of that trilogy when I was younger, and on re-read a few years back, still enjoyed it. It's also provides a great view of what life in the Underdark is like, in all its variations.

It really is. Fury Road is a movie that does not let up, from start to finish. I could spend an hour praising it, easily. It was a movie in a series that had been fallow for decades, and it came back stronger than ever. That's the thing I struggled with. Conan the Barbarian is a movie I dearly...

My list: Blade Runner Fellowship of the Ring Jaws Ghostbusters The Princess Bride Mad Max Fury Road Night of the Living Dead (even if Dawn of the Dead is my favorite. And that's an important distinction to make. For example, Conan the Barbarian is probably my favorite movie, but is it a perfect...

Like the spells, it's not so much that these were entirely new concepts, but that they functioned very differently. Being able to detect secret doors on a roll of 1 in 6 by just passing within 10' of them was a direct benefit of playing an Elf. Being able to Find Traps was an active feature of...

One thing that's fascinating is that, while most of those spells existed back in 1e, the ways they functioned were very different. Leomund's Tiny Hut, for example, takes until at least 8th level for it to be able to last long enough for a proper sleep, depending on the DM. And without Rituals...

The percentages on the Thief class really do stack the deck against them. And that's compounded by the fact that frequently failure has a real risk of death (Find/Remove Traps, Move Silently & Hide in Shadows), especially at lower levels.

There's a lot of alien, existential dread in Gibson's writings. Whether it's the Tessier-Ashpools, Josef Virek, Wintermute, or the Loa, his worlds are filled with inhuman beings, some of which once were human, some not. His short story Hinterlands is another example.

Or, for those of us that grew up with 1e, mispronouncing all those Gygaxian words.

Ugh. I remember having an argument with a classmate that loved superheroes but considering D&D satanic how the two genres were so very similar, but there was just no getting through.

Tiptree's The Girl Who Was Plugged In is a phenomenal piece of proto-cyberpunk. It contains so many of its tropes that I'm tempted to drop the "proto" part. The Budayeen series is one of my favorite overlooked gems. It manages to present a very different take on the genre while still hitting...

I think true Neutral only works when you take alignment as the cosmic forces of Moorcock and Anderson, not as personality guides. When it gets down to that level, I would point to 4e's Unaligned as a decent model in theory, used for beings that alignment is not applicable (like beasts and oozes)...

I finished Egan's Permutation City. Cerebral, thought-provoking, its vision of transhumanism fills me with a creeping horror. The message is shown, not told. I also re-read William Gibson's Burning Chrome. Still amazing. Again, it's striking how early these ideas were beginning to take shape...

That is the joy of a good open-world game. That it is not easily mapped out, but also that same joy of discovery can last playthrough after playthrough.

Some friends and I were just talking about how much is tucked away in Skyrim. That pretty much anywhere you explore, you're going to eventually stumble across something new. How it rewards you for wondering what's over there.

So did I. And yeah, listening to reason was not something that the people under the sway of the Satanic Panic did. Even the people that didn't believe that you could hear devils screaming when you burned D&D books, might just think that there was something harmful about the game and that was...