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 Jones, sword-and-sorcery scholar and novelist, as well as the Managing Editor for our very own Tales From the Magician’s Skull. We talk about his work on the magazine, the writing of fantasy series, and get a taste of his latest all-new epic sword-and-sorcery series, The Chronicles of Hanuvar!

Firearms (Guns Magazine): They Say that on a cold night, when you walk past the stern figure of Samuel Colt standing as a monument on his grave in Hartford, Conn., there can be seen a faint smile on his cold marble lips. And many people wonder why he is smiling. Maybe it is because some 3,000 miles away, in the City of the Angels in the land of California, there is a man who is doing the same thing Colt did back more than a century ago.

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): It is definitely a silly thing to concern myself over. But the spelling difference keeps popping up every now and then. As far as I’ve been able to determine the spelling difference first occurred in Conan the Conqueror, Gnome Press, 1950.

Fantasy (Sprague de Camp Fan): This was sparked by a book I just bought. Though it goes on to wander all over the map, really. Who ever buys a book completely on the strength of the introduction? Few, perhaps. I’m sure we’ve all judged books by their covers, especially Frazetta covers, purchased them accordingly, and, alas, often been burned. (They did slip a few stinkers behind his paintings.) Me, I’ve often gone to the introduction, if there is one, and neither the front cover painting nor the back cover text quite succeeded in hooking me.

Horror (Por Por Books): It’s only a one-page article, but it shows that by the early Fall of 1988, Splatterpunk was getting attention from one of the largest-circulation periodicals in the media. The subjects of this profile by Robert Sabat: Skipp and Spector, Richard Christian Matteson, and David J. Schow, are perfectly happy to bear the splat label and are adamant about replacing ‘pedestrian horror’ with something ‘….fast and frenetic and in your face.’ Cool !

Weird Tales (M Porcius): Weird Tales, Jan ’38: Quick, Hamilton and Keller In our last episode, we read a story from the 1937 December issue of Weird Tales by a woman we’d never read before, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and it was pretty good.  So let’s read another story by a female weirdie with whom we are unfamiliar, Dorothy Quick’s “The Witch’s Mark” from the 1938 January issue.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tellers of Weird Tales): No author is identified more with Weird Tales than is Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) of Providence, Rhode Island, and–for a short time–Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights, New York. Lovecraft was thirty-two years old when the first issue of Weird Tales was published in March 1923. I imagine that he had waited all of his life for such a title to appear.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaclii): Anyway, David McCallum also recorded vinyl L.P. records of Lovecraft tales, for the Caedmon label. As you might expect, these are now on Archive.org…

Cinema (DMR Books): I feel as if Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963) combined too many things into one. Too many themes seemed to manifest in this movie, a movie that is unbalanced. Much of the movie felt languid, and I would say that its prevailing mood was foggy, mysterious. Nevertheless, there is a disturbed motion pulling events along in the story, a kind of randomness or incongruity, merging the plot with details that seemed unwarranted or incompatible.

Sad Puppies (Jon del Arroz): What are the Sad Puppies? Does anyone care about the Hugo Awards?

Swords (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The enchanted sword has been a part of heroic fantasy since the beginning. Beowulf slays Grendel’s mother with an elder blade he conveniently finds in her underwater cave. The entire Arthurian canon is powered by Arthur’s blade, Excalibur. The Jabberwocky is killed with a Vorpal blade. I mean it is half of “Sword & Sorcery”.

Robert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): I want to simply highlight the stories including in each paperback, beginning with the very first Lancer edition aptly titled Conan. The collection was first published in 1967 and features a Frank Frazetta cover. The paperback, weighing in at just 221 pages, includes two of Howard’s most respected and well-known Conan stories, “The Tower of the Elephant” and “Rogues in the House”, with the latter selection influencing the book’s cover art.

? (Wormwoodiana): I bought this May 1920 issue of Metropolitan magazine on eBay, several years ago, in good condition, for $70. I was writing an article on Wadsworth Camp, the father of Madeliene L’Engle, and compiling a list of Camp’s stories that were published in vintage magazines. I found his “The Signal Tower” in this issue of the Metropolitan, but what caught my attention was the unrelated cover line: Bernard Shaw   H.G. Wells   A. Conan Doyle   Sir Oliver Lodge   G.K. Chesterton and Sir William Barrett talk of SPIRITUALISM: Truth or Imposture?

Pulp (Comics Radio): Dan Fowler’s second appearance was also written by Geroge Fielding Eliot (using the house name C.K.M Scanlon). Dan’s first case was an action-packed adventure against armed bandits. This time–well, I didn’t count bullets fired or corpses found while reading it. I have an impression that “Bring ’em Back Dead” has a little less action than “Snatch.” But if so, the difference isn’t much. Much like the Robert Stack version of Eliot Ness, Dan burns through enough government-supplied ammo to probably contribute to the federal deficit.

Fantasy (Paperback Warrior): This fourth installment in Ace’s Red Sonja paperback series places the fiery-haired swordswoman in the city of Shadizar, the sister city to Zamora. She’s in town searching for work, but struggling for fair payment. Mostly, the jobs consist of guard duty for the various merchants and shippers traveling from Shadizar to neighboring cities. As proficient as Sonja is with a sword, she faces discrimination for being female.

D&D (DM David): In April 1977, TSR went too far by releasing an unlicensed game based on The Hobbit called Battle of the Five Armies. A note under the title said, “From ‘The Hobbit’” and revealed that TSR had applied to trademark “The Battle of the Five Armies.”

Cinema (DMR Books): Charlton Heston’s centennial was a couple of days ago. I’ve been having the usual connectivity issues—living out in the wilderness has its downsides—but there is no way I could let this anniversary pass. Heston was that titanic in his field and he was that admirable as a man.

Fantasy (SFF Remembrance): I’ve been itching to cover a Theodore Sturgeon story on here for a long time now, pretty much since I started this site over a year ago. Thing is, if we’re talking strictly short fiction, Sturgeon might be in my top five authors—he’s certainly in my top ten short story writers. He’s most known for his novel More Than Human, because novels have always sold more than short fiction and will continue to do so until the end of time, and while that is a very good novel it doesn’t show the full breadth of his talent.

Games (Misha Burnett): Tonight I ran a game for the first time in… dunno. 20 years, maybe? I’m using 1st Edition Gamma World rules, set in the Kansas City, MO area a few hundred years after an atomic war. The setting is designed to be in the same world as The Mixed GM’s Long Florida campaign with an eye to eventual crossovers.

T.V. (Murray Ewing): Earlier this year I started working my way through The Walking Dead, after only being vaguely aware of the show up to that point. I’m now a little over the halfway point of its entire eleven season run. It has obvious affinities with some of the post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve covered on this blog, such as Day of the Triffids and The Death of Grass — the opening, with Rick Grimes waking up in hospital to find the world has ended being straight from Wyndham, while the brutality and descent into ruthless survivalism is John Christopher cubed.

Horror (Wyrd Britain): Spanish director José Ramón Larraz‘ channels both his European contemporaries and the British gothic tradition in this fabulously gory sexploitation horror as murdered lovers Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska) return to ‘life’ as vampires and lure unsuspecting men back to their mansion in the woods (actually the much filmed Oakley Court in Brey, Berkshire) for sexy time and, well, dinner.

History (Aureus Press): Hailing from the North Caucasus and the northeastern Black Sea coast, Circassians are an ethnic group historically famous for their alluring females. Many writers and travelers through the ages have described Circassians as the most beautiful women in the world.

In the Russo-Circassian War (1763–1864) the Circassians were expelled from their homeland by Tsar Alexander II, forcing 1.5 million to flee to the Ottoman Empire. This resulted in the death of approximately 400,000 Circassians, mostly from epidemics or accidents during the long journey to the Black Sea.

Cinema (Glitter Night): Recently, Balladeer’s Blog examined the 1937 Jungle Jim serial as well as the first six Jungle Jim movies starring former Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller beginning in 1948. Here are the remaining ten Weissmuller films as the pre-Indiana Jones and pre-Crocodile Dundee, but post-Allan Quatermain hero.

History (Lotus Eaters): This week Beau chats with Shad Brooks (aka Shadiversity) all about castles. Join them as they discuss ten choice examples of the best castles men have ever had the audacity and vision to build.