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  1. Paul Farquhar

    Worlds of Design: In the Shadow of Tolkien

    Maybe, but there is usually some sort of seed that multiple people pick up on. For example, the occasional Welsh dwarf comes from the association dwarves=miners=Welsh. I would suggest that for the Scots, the association is stubbornness. In The Hobbit, he dwarves are certainly extremely...
  2. Paul Farquhar

    Planescape Looking for sources on how alignments phsyically function as substances

    There is the pink slime in Ghostbusters 2.
  3. Paul Farquhar

    Worlds of Design: In the Shadow of Tolkien

    It may have influenced Warhammer, which influenced Warcraft and so on. Influence can grow virally. Anyone remember what accents the dwarves had in the BBC radio adaptations of Tolkien?
  4. Paul Farquhar

    Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 Viewing (Spoilers)

    It doesn’t seem to work for me.
  5. Paul Farquhar

    Worlds of Design: In the Shadow of Tolkien

    Nah, it was Warhammer that made dwarves Scottish (specifically Glaswegian) in the 80s. Terry Pratchett has both Scottish and Welsh dwarves, also dating from the 80s. Warcraft just picked up an existing trope.
  6. Paul Farquhar

    Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 Viewing (Spoilers)

    I always felt Mass Effect “borrowed” a lot more from Babylon 5 than from Trek. Aside from the obvious similarity of B5 and the Citidel, we have a properly military organisation, jump gates/mass relays for FTL, cosmic horror antagonists, experiments on humans to give them psionics/biotic powers...
  7. Paul Farquhar

    D&D General I finally like non-Tolkien species for PCs

    I'm pretty sure a thousand year old elf is a lot more alien to a human than a goliath is, yet old school players never object when players completely ignore the impact of having been born long before the humans' kingdom was founded.
  8. Paul Farquhar

    Musings on Sci Fi Campaigns/Adventures

    Classic Doctor Who is a gold mine of plot ideas.
  9. Paul Farquhar

    Musings on Sci Fi Campaigns/Adventures

    Space 1999 is a variant on this too. It may not technically be a derelict, but they are travelling through space in something they can’t control, surviving whenever they encounter until they can get off.
  10. Paul Farquhar

    General video game discussion

    Owlcat are extremely ambitious. What they lack are resources and the judgment to know what is important and what to cut. Wrath of the Righteous is very similar to BG3 (especially in turn based mode). About as close as you can get. WH40K yeah, has it's issues as a setting that might be...
  11. Paul Farquhar

    Are Ghosts Real? (a poll)

    I think I should mention that Spiritualism is an officially recognised religion (at least in the UK). Ergo, criticising it's beliefs are against this forum's rules on the discussion of religion. IMO, it doesn't matter if someone's beliefs are objectively "True". One thing you learn by studying...
  12. Paul Farquhar

    D&D 5E (2024) Here's The Covers of BOTH of November's Forgotten Realms Books

    There is more to it than that. There is technical quality and ranged of techniques, which is objectively measurable. Those images you post are poorly composed, however they appear to be cropped from much larger works, so it might be the fault of whoever did the cropping. The first one has...
  13. Paul Farquhar

    Musings on Sci Fi Campaigns/Adventures

    Actually that’s Blakes 7.
  14. Paul Farquhar

    Musings on Sci Fi Campaigns/Adventures

    Some more thoughts on classic Traveller adventures. Research Station Gamma (Adventure 2). This was a mission based adventure, in the style of a fantasy RPG that was popular at the time. Go and investigate the dungeon research station and kill the monsters robots. Leviathan (Adventure 4). This...
  15. Paul Farquhar

    D&D General More Details Revealed for Forgotten Realms Digital Expansions

    I didn't realise how cheep the digital book was.
  16. Paul Farquhar

    Musings on Sci Fi Campaigns/Adventures

    If you look at the classic Traveller adventure Twilight's Peak (Adventure 3, 1980) it assumes the players are doing these things, whilst at the same time seeding an arc plot, which, if they follow the clues, will eventually lead them to exploring some alien ruins. This is structurally similar to...
  17. Paul Farquhar

    D&D General More Details Revealed for Forgotten Realms Digital Expansions

    The book is listed as $60, these are listed as $15. Last time I taught maths that was a quarter, not a half.
  18. Paul Farquhar

    General video game discussion

    It's as different as D&D and WH40K are. Now, most of my D&D players also like WH40K, so the assumption that there is a big overlap between people who like D&D and people who like WH40K seems reasonable. But it's obviously not 100%. The Owlcat game is tonally faithful to the IP - full of...
  19. Paul Farquhar

    D&D 5E (2024) Here's The Covers of BOTH of November's Forgotten Realms Books

    Just because you wrote about it doesn’t make it not a steaming pile of horse manure. The person who commissions the art can describe to the software what they want. No artist required. Not that anyone will be able to afford to buy art anyway, since everyone is unemployed, having been replaced...
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