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sBradford C. Walker is the mastermind behind the extremely prolific game blog Walker’s Retreat. He coined the term “mech piloting” to describe the sort of play style that became dominant in the wake of post-TSR D&D. His game mastering philosophy can be summed up as I am Crom. Now he’s appeared on Geek Gab to […]
Comrades of Time by Edmond Hamilton appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. It can be found here at Luminist.org. Are there any stories featuring the Foreign Legion that don’t have them being slaughtered to the man? Right as the Allah-invoking Tuareg is about to kill Ethan Drew, the last man standing, Ethan’s world explodes around […]
THROWBACK SF THURSDAY: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard
Thursday , 6, July 2017 Appendix N 12 CommentsHither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet. The first volume of Del Rey’s three-volume collection of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories is my introduction to Howard and almost […]
The Last Kingdom: Trapped in a World of Mediocre Inspirations
Thursday , 6, July 2017 Appendix N 66 CommentsI’ve heard good things about The Last Kingdom, so I decided to check it out. Judging from the first episode, it’s basically Vikings meets Game of Thrones… but without the most aggressively awful elements of each. It’s still bad, though. Now, I’m no historian. But the Christians depicted in this are just plain stupid. From […]
I have been thinking a lot about the pulps lately, in particular about what made some of the early pulp SF greats so enduring, and what went into making the most enduring magazines endure. In search of answers, I was perusing the Center for Fiction website today when I came across this article by Victor […]
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper Rulebook Chapter 10: Playing the Game
Wednesday , 5, July 2017 Tabletop Games 8 CommentsYou don’t need very much in the way of rules in order to play Call of Cthulhu as it is often executed. You don’t need a combat system because the monsters are unbeatable. You don’t need a magic system because spells are used by non-player characters to serve whatever purpose the plot requires. You don’t […]
I caught wind of a rather interesting game in production by Perry Miniatures: A travel-oriented Wargame, creatively called Travelbattle that is available now. The news has elicited a mixed reaction, as with any product which is neither completely new to the genre nor groundbreaking in a highly-significant way. The reason I chose to examine Travelbattle is that […]
The Ideological Conquest of Science Fiction Literature
Tuesday , 4, July 2017 Uncategorized 18 CommentsWatch the whole thing. Watch the whole thing!
Easily the most controversial observation to come out of my survey of the fantasy and science fiction canon was that they pulps were (by and large) both Christian and Western in their overall outlook. And given that word for word and sentence for sentence, many of these authors have yet to be surpassed within their […]
He’s a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech! Off to college for the education he’ll need to defeat the guardians of the hidden truth, Peter must infiltrate a deadly conspiracy, thwart an attempted social justice takeover of the school, save his professors from assassination, and somehow find time to study for finals. The stakes are now […]
The other day, after taking the Hogwarts Express to Camp Half-Blood, I took the magic Wardrobe straight through Mirkwood, used the secret tunnel to find the Mole’s home, guarded by Rat, and finally emerged to find myself in the super-secret headquarters of team Superversive. (Note: I may have left out some key locations on the […]
Community is the Abed of TV sitcoms. The Fonz emblematized Happy Days, Scrubs was embodied in the form of JD, MD, but Community’s avatar is the emotionally blind autistic savant of popular culture, Abed Nadir. Like Abed, Community focused more on pop culture than people, and it blighted the show.