D&D General Is Appendix N Still Relevant to D&D?

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm just now reading this thread so maybe somebody already mentions it, but this is painful to see:
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The actual title of the book is "The house with a clock in its walls". I think that's an important difference! Cmon TSR, be better!

Considering how bad some of the players I've run into were at being timely to gaming sessions, I think I knew people that lived in houses like that!

 

[nyvinter]

The Dolmenwood list is solid. OSR but a more modern list of older books.

Against the Darkmaster — not D&D but a Middle-Earth Roleplaying retroclone — also have a long list which is interesting in comparison. It's more old-school than 5e but the literature list is a lot more recent.

Nothing can excuse the Yngwie Malmsteen inclusion though. (IMO.)

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

Do you think 16-25 meant the same thing in 1930 as it does now?

?

Well, by and large? Yes. Young men, high school or just after. Haven't changed all that much in the last 100 years. Other than that age group being much more highly educated now, I suppose.

But, yeah, they didn't call it YA at the time, but, that's exactly what the pulps were aimed at. It was just that they started calling it that in the 90's to distinguish it from children's lit. Something like The Hunger Games, isn't really meant for an 8 year old reader (not that an 8 year old reader is incapable, just that that's not target audience). So, they created the YA genre to distinguish works that are not targeted at the over 30 crowd but also not targeted at the under 13 crowd.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've also played with groups which still did paper mapping from DM description while playing online. Every VTT I've used allows you to draw on maps and change them a bit on the fly. If you want to do major revisions on the fly a shared online whiteboard app might be a better tool. And as WD pointed out, the DM can also do the trick of showing the players illustrations and maps over a chat tool.

A lot of it depends on the drawing tools available in the VTT and how fussy people are. The tools on Maptool are pretty minimalist--but there's a perfectly functional freehand tool as long as someone can use a mouse to draw with at least competently (I can't, but then, I had the same problem largely when using a wet erase marker on a vinyl map back in the day.

I personally think with most of the VTTs its more that people, especially GMs using them, have gotten more fussy about what they want their maps to look like (I certainly have) so they either use extent maps or prepare them offline in some other program. But there's absolutely tools to note holes in walls or an area filling with lava if you want to do it. And that's about all most people I saw ever did. The only question is how much a given GM wants to produce maps on the fly and whether he's competent to do so, and that was always something of a question.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

Weird Tales, while still skewing towards male readers in its audience, wasn't as overwhelmingly masc as one might have thought. Based on the Weird Tales fan club stats (as far as I know, the only source of demographic information for it), the audience was on average 25% women, even going as high as 31%.

REH: Two-Gun Raconteur » Blog Archive » Women of the Weird Tales Club

When your audience is 3 or 4:1 male to female, it's pretty fair to say that you are targeting a male audience. This doesn't really counter the point I was making. When the authors are 99% male, the artists creating the covers are 99% male, everyone involved in getting that magazine into your hands is male and at least 3/4 of the audience is male, saying that Weird Tales is a predominantly male targeted magazine should not be terribly contentious.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

I guess what I'm confused about is why would labeling Conan YA fiction be particularly contentious or bad? It's not like YA fiction is a bad thing. You're in some pretty heady company in the genre, both modern and older. We've had what, 20 (more) years of Marvel movies absolutely dominating the box office to show that YA fiction is REALLY popular. What, you figured Spider Man or The Avengers was adult fiction?

How is Howard being shelved in YA fiction somehow a bad thing?

Reminds me of the endless kvetching when we used to talk about how D&D players are massively dominated by the same age group - 16-25. D&D is YA fiction. Always has been.

 

[Autumnal]

The authors and artists weren’t anything like 99% male. See, for instance, Margeret Brundage, the sole cover artist for three years in the ‘30s, and Dorothy McIlwraitj, who edited the magazine for the entire 1940s. Women were among readers’ favorites under their own names as well as neutral or masculine pseudonyms. No revisionist history of this sort, please.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

The authors and artists weren’t anything like 99% male. See, for instance, Margeret Brundage, the sole cover artist for three years in the ‘30s, and Dorothy McIlwraitj, who edited the magazine for the entire 1940s. Women were among readers’ favorites under their own names as well as neutral or masculine pseudonyms. No revisionist history of this sort, please.

Oh please. Yup, you had a single cover artist for three years out of the what, about 30 years of publication? Are you seriously trying to say that Weird tales wasn't male dominated throughout it's run? That's not revisionist history, that's historical fact.

Now, to be fair, Weird Tales was better than a lot of other publications, but, even so, it was still 80-90% male authors.

 

[Autumnal]

The thresholds keep moving, and ordinarily I’d go rustle up some seats and sources for them. Unfortunately, as I type, an ambulance is carrying off one of my brothers with blood pressure 60/40 and ataxia. My heart’s not in it. Peace and goodwill to all.

 

[SothFan]

Dolmenwood has its own list of inspirational media, which I believe is in the books, and is available in the free Welcome to Dolmenwood PDF.

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Now why would you use Labyrinth when all it gives you is this:

Spoiler