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sGURPS, Call of Cthulhu, and Pidgin Roleplaying
Friday , 9, June 2017 GURPS, Tabletop Games 9 CommentsI felt betrayed when I sat down to read the Keeper’s Guide for Call of Cthulhu seventh edition earlier this year. Granted, I bought first edition GURPS Horror way back when I didn’t know anything about anything. And hey… at the time I was really only going to use it for the monsters and the […]
The Metal Chamber by Duane W. Rimel appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org. The Metal Chamber is small and claustrophobic piece written largely in the form of a suicide note from a biologist who dabbled in telepathy and found himself […]
Throwback SF Thursday: Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis by Bradley W. Schenck
Thursday , 8, June 2017 Book Review 7 CommentsMy original concept for Throwback SF Thursday was less #PulpRevolution and more a mix of Vintage SF (including Campbellian science fiction) and modern fiction that is self-consciously retro. Maybe it’s Cirsova Magazine or maybe it’s . . . Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis is […]
JUST RELEASED: The Green Knight’s Squire by John C. Wright
Thursday , 8, June 2017 Just Released Leave a commentGilberic Parzival Moth is a strange and lonely boy who has grown up without a father, raised by a single mother who moves from town to town in fear of something she will not name. His only friends are animals, with whom he has always been able to speak. But when he awakens one night […]
ON THE TABLE: Encountering Proto-Traveller
Thursday , 8, June 2017 Tabletop Games, Traveller 11 CommentsThis is a game I’ve wanted to play for a long time: Traveller with just the original three little black books. Decoupled from the ponderous rules and “official” setting material that accrued steadily through subsequent releases and editions. I rolled up a character while the other players got into a scuffle at a psionics institute. […]
This is not the Fritz Leiber you’re looking for.[1] Apparently, Fritz Leiber Jr. – born December 24, 1910[2] – is an unknown science fiction author among modern readers, at least according to this io9 article from several years ago. Seriously? Noted contemporary Poul Anderson was quoted as having said that in the late 30s and […]
This post has nothing whatsoever to do with SF/F. But if you’ll bear with me for a moment … I’ve always had a vague distaste for the genre officially known as “folk music.” But it didn’t turn into active dislike until a local radio DJ asked me to transfer an old reel-to-reel tape labeled “Woody […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Pursuit of Perfection: Gladiator: Quest for the Rudis
Wednesday , 7, June 2017 Wargames Leave a commentIn my previous article I discussed how Euro games can have much of the feel of Wargames while looking at Chaos in the Old World. This week we are looking at a Wargame set on a board instead of a traditional tabletop called Gladiator: Quest for the Rudis. It’s a kickstarted game, and while it suffers […]
Joseph Mason ran a response to a recent Crit or Miss video that will be of interest to any student of rpg history and game design. The argument there was about “The Problem with GURPS”… which actually includes one of the best pitches for the GURPS line that I’ve seen anywhere. The reviewer sings its […]
SUPERVERSIVE Miyazaki Retrospective: The Castle of Cagliostro
Wednesday , 7, June 2017 Superversive 19 CommentsThe Miyazaki Retrospective is nearly over. Spreading across three different websites and multiple authors, I’ve had a lot of fun using this semi-plausible excuse to go through the oeuvre of one of the great animators of all time. At this point, with only two films to go, we’ll go back to the beginning and take […]
Ken St. Andre’s role in the earliest stages of the development of a roleplaying games can be summed up in one sentence. It’s on the opening page of the first edition of Chaosium’s Runequest, where a small note reads, “DEDICATED to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, who first opened Pandora’s Box, and to Ken St. Andre, […]
As detailed last week, the first pair of stories in Rough Edges Press featured unapologetically pro-American science-fiction. The unexpected pro-American subtext provided a breath of fresh air to anyone suffocating under the weight of the current trend of nihilistic and globalist claptrap infesting the genre. Unfortunately, the next pair of stories in the collection failed to continue the […]