Paleontology (Science.org): Dire wolves, which died out with mammoths and saber-toothed cats at the end of the last ice age, were long thought to be close cousins of gray wolves. Now, the first analysis of dire wolf DNA finds they instead traveled a lonely evolutionary path: They are so different from other wolves, coyotes, and […]
D&D (DM David): While the Dungeons & Dragons team developed the game‘s fourth edition for a 2008 release, they faced problems from several directions. Corporate owners Hasbro brought a big corporate cost structure and return on investment expectations set by Magic the Gathering and Pokémon. Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): This “Homage to Robert E. […]
Conan (Education Forensics): If you listen to “Ask Chuck Dixon” on YouTube or UATV, you’ll know that Dixon has written thousands of comic books. He created the character Bane, and wrote ‘Batman’ for DC for ten years. He’s also responsible for the Levon Cade series of Vigilante Justice novels. One of the things he talks […]
Sword & Sorcery (Pulp Super Fan): Robert E. Howard expert Morgan Holmes discusses sword and sorcery stories appearing in Weird Tales. 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the fantasy and horror-fiction magazine. RPG (Modiphius): Welcome to another chilling edition of Halloween Horrors – are you ready to be terrorised as Achtung! Cthulhu presents its now […]
T.V. (Art of Manliness): If you have only passing familiarity with The Twilight Zone — maybe only really knowing its iconic opening sequence — you might be forgiven for thinking that the classic television show centered on scary themes. In reality, however, while the show certainly had a dark atmosphere and included plenty of suspense, creepiness, and […]
Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): The new Conan adventures are starting to pile up faster than I can read them. This one is not really new though. It was originally serialized in Marvel Comics Conan the Barbarian (2019) issues 1 through 12. I didn’t read it then. Like most, I imagine, I decided to wait […]
Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): This one starts with Conan raiding a caravan. A bloody business for sure and Dixon doesn’t shy away from describing the slaughter. Everyone, except for a young male soldier, is unmercifully slaughtered. After the killing is done one of Conan’s men, Zekir al Khoraj, is upset that their raid did […]
D&D (Grognardia): Despite my somewhat negative assessment of the lasting impact of Tracy Hickman on the development of AD&D, I nevertheless respect Hickman’s dungeon designs. Ravenloft, for all of its theater kid stylings, includes an immense and genuinely challenging dungeon in the form of Castle Ravenloft. Fantasy (Goodman Games): We recently caught up with Howard Andrew […]
D&D (Grognardia): Longtime readers may object that I’ve already done a Retrospective post on The World of Greyhawk. Pedantic as ever, I must reply that, while it’s true that I have indeed written a post about The World of Greyhawk, I have never written one about World of Greyhawk. n 1980, TSR published The World of […]
Myth (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Whether you call him Siegfried (in the German The Nibelungenlied) or Sigurd (the Völsunga saga, and the Poetic Edda), it doesn’t really matter. He fights the dragon Fafnir and wins. It is one of the classic myths that lies behind much of Sword & Sorcery. In the original tale, Siegfried is […]
RPG (Arbiter of Worlds): This week marks the 24th episode of my series of instructional videos about how to be a better gamemaster. In this week’s video, I discuss how to mash up your favorite RPG system with another system to make a unique hybrid game. Car Wars + Traveller yields Driver. Cyberpunk + Runequest […]
Tolkien (Quillette): Fantasy is more popular than ever, and this is the direct consequence of Tolkien’s success. But the genre has survived by adapting, and in an age of secularism, that process has involved evaporating the religious themes Tolkien cared about so deeply. Pulp (Pulp Flakes): Robert Reeves, the author of the Cellini Smith stories […]