Monthly Archives:
sON THE TABLE: Titans Versus Dreadnoughts in Space Empires Close Encounters
Sunday , 18, June 2017 Tabletop Games 7 CommentsThis was our third game of Space Empires 4X with the Close Encounters expansion. The first session I managed to blitz past my sons defenses with a stack of cloaked destroyers thanks to the “Cloaking Geniuses” Empire advantage. The second session my son went all in with an all-destroyer fleet and large amounts of ship […]
In the far-flung grimdark future, the Emperor of Mankind sought to unite the fractured and isolated colonies of humanity under his rule. To help in his plans, he created twenty sons, the Primarchs, genetically-engineered demigods who would serve as enlightened governors and inspired generals. To each, he gave a legion of space marines, medically augmented […]
The psychedelic era of rock music had a distinctive look for album covers. That artistic style spilled over into mass paperback book covers. One could argue that Charles Moll was the most psychedelic artist for sword and sorcery fiction paperbacks. There is nothing out there on Charles Moll. He painted covers for paperback books in […]
Son of the Pulps Part 3: The Wold Newton
Saturday , 17, June 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Fiction 2 CommentsWe conclude our discussion of the influence of pulp on Philip Jose Farmer with a look at his Wold Newton family. In Tarzan Alive, Farmer links his favorite British lord to dozens of fictional characters, many from the pulps, including Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond, The Shadow, Sam Spade, Nayland Smith of Dr. Fu-Manchu fame, James Bond, Professor […]
You Just Went the Full Mr. Peanut. NEVER Go the Full Mr. Peanut!
Saturday , 17, June 2017 Appendix N 11 CommentsEvery few months lately we get another round of comment from people that are concerned about the #PulpRevolution getting co-opted by infiltrators. I’m not really worried about this sort of thing. Seriously, bring up the topic of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the snake people will out themselves every single time! This post from the ODD74 boards […]
ON THE TABLE: Going Off the Rails with Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition
Friday , 16, June 2017 Tabletop Games 23 CommentsSo I’m several sessions into an ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign. I’m aggravated because the last session it became clear that we effectively had no autonomy. I burned through all my luck points to do something awesome, but this isn’t a “go do awesome things” game. It’s more of a “pretend to investigate stuff while […]
The Swine of Aeaea by Clifford Ball was the featured cover story of the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org. The Swine of Aeaea was probably the best story I’ve read for Short Reviews since Leigh Brackett’s the Moon that Vanished. Like Brackett’s story, The […]
Classic Traveller: Freetrader Economics
Thursday , 15, June 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 31 CommentsIn two posts I’ve outlined my Classic Traveller setting: first by rolling up an entirely random subsector and secondly by musing on the nature of one of the polities with a focus on its capital and its location within the polity it leads. The capital of the Empire of Reason is the Ladfaus system which […]
Whole swaths of my commentary gets accused of being “errors of pattern-matching”, but the thing is… there does turn out to be more than just coincidence involved in the connections and trends I’ve been pointing out. And as this episode of Geek Gab: On the Books reveals… sometimes there’s an explicit connection even in places where […]
#SteamPunkMonth: Recovering a Genre that Never Existed by Jon Del Arroz
Thursday , 15, June 2017 Just Released 29 CommentsSteampunk is more than just cosplay. The concept of it was brought into the public zeitgeist by people cosplaying in 2010-2012, which created a lot of hype about the concept of Steampunk. All that was clear at the time was that Steampunk had a Victorian theme, but also one that was vaguely dystopian. The Victorian […]
Regress harder. The phrase has become something of a motto for the Pulp Revolution, describing a look back to the giants of pulp and beyond for inspiration to create something new for today. But who stands in the shadows behind the pulp fictioneers of the 1920s and 1930s? What characters inspired the heroes and villains […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Fifth Corps: The Soviet Breakthrough at Fulda – Central Front Series, by SPI
Wednesday , 14, June 2017 Wargames 5 CommentsAfter The Red Storm, my dad and I continued our WW 3 series with Fifth Corps, part of the Central Front Series. Let me tell you – this game was a slog. I don’t think I’ve ever played game more stressful for the offensive player. The map is impressively large, and we actually had one […]