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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...

Reading Lost Souls by Billy Martin was my introduction to Chartreuse: "the liquor is green, bright green, made from a thousand herbs, made from altars. Those who know enough to drink Chartreuse at Mardi Gras are lucky, because the distilled essence of the town burns in their bellies. Chartreuse...

It works pretty well. It's got that complex herbal character. The only way I caught the missing orange notes was doing a taste test comparison between it and the last bottle of green chartreuse I have. A few bars here have it, but there's no chartreuse commercially available within 100 miles of...

Red Nails is such a great story. Shame that the animated version with Ron Perlman voicing Conan never saw the day.

Yeah, those are kinda what they say they are on the tin. If you show up to an adventure title Queen of Spiders, it should come as no surprise that there are spiders involved. If it's just some random Adventurers League con slot that just so happens to have drow and spiders show up, then that's...

I've been using Genepy for green (it lacks the orange notes, however, so maybe a dash of orange bitters would help) and Strega for yellow. Speaking of which, I picked up an older cocktail guide from the 80s and it had a few drinks that called for orange Chartreuse. I had never heard of it...

Good point. Dragons show up a bunch in Appendix N besides Tolkien. Just not in Howard and Leiber (unless you count the dinosaurs of Conan).

I loved all the weird gangs in the story, like the Zombie Analytics. I've had Trouble and Her Friends sitting on my Kindle for ages. Long overdue for me.

That's one of the things about being a good player in organized play - you need to balance playing your character and playing ball with the adventure. Same goes for regular at-home play, but doubly so for con games.

I finished Kadrey's Metrophage. Dug it, and how the grime and grit of the world practically oozed off the page. Wasn't expecting the Zen themes in it, but they helped elevate the book. Now I'm finally getting to Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends.

Love that Morrissey cover. The blend of genres and times really gives it an otherworldly feel. Yeah, it's one big stew. The wargaming inspirations are there, too - implicit in the higher level domain game. Were D&D solely Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, you wouldn't have dragons, for example.