Writing (Kairos): Brandon Sanderson is widely respected as a meticulous world builder, an innovative storyteller, and a prolific writer. Over the past two decades he’s made his name as a crafter of ultra-refined magic systems and dynamic characters.

Games (Kairos): The AAA video game industry stands at a turning point. Facing runaway development costs, dwindling consumer trust, and rising market instability, big studios must adapt to a rapidly changing market.

D&D (Grognardia): As I alluded to yesterday, I increasingly feel as if I don’t have anything interesting left to say about Dungeons & Dragons. On some level, that’s understandable. There are nearly 4500 posts on this blog and, though I haven’t done an inventory of just how many of them are specifically about D&D, I think it’s safe to wager that more than half of them – that’s over 2000 posts.

Tolkien (Rose Mary and Reading Glasses): If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas book—and maybe inspiration to write the small people in your life some larger-than-life letters—look no further than Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas. 

Pulp (DMR Books): The success of Fifty Shades of Grey was solely due to women voting with their purses. No boyfriend/husband commanded that they buy it. And yet, those strong, independent, empowered women made it an historic, international best-seller.

Writers (The Obelisk): Wandrei was born in Saint Paul on April 20, 1908 (thus making him almost eighteen years young than Lovecraft!). Wandrei came from an old pioneer family with literary connections. His father, Albert, worked for a publishing company that produced a large portion of America’s law textbooks at the time. For the majority of his life, Wandrei would continue to reside at his childhood home located at 1152 Portland Street in Saint Paul, and for him, Saint Paul was analogous to Lovecraft’s Providence.

Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): The cover of the 1960 Ace paperback of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen guaranteed I’d pick this up when I found it in a used bookstore in Galveston, Texas. It’s Jack Gaughan art, and I had to read the story that inspired that image.

The cover blurb states that Weirdstone is “A fantastic novel in the Tolkien tradition.” I can’t really fault that description. It does evoke elements of The Lord of the Rings, sharing motifs and thematic elements.

Robert E. Howard (M Porcius): I recently went to Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, where I saw a bunch of cool things and even purchased a few.  One of my purchases was a copy of the 1976 Zebra paperback edited by Glenn Lord, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, a wide-ranging collection of stories and poems by Howard supplemented by introductions by Glenn Lord and illustrations by MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.

Popular Culture (Wasteland & Sky): So my question is as follows: if you didn’t care years ago when all of these mediums were being beaten down and flattened into conformity for corporations’ ease of use, leading to what was already a factory belt-line production of effective automation . . . why do you care now?

Science Fiction (Por Por Books): I’ve been maintaining this blog since late 2008, so I think I have enough credibility to stand forth and declare those nine authors who, in my humble opinion, are the most overrated in the field of science fiction of the postwar era (i.e., 1945-1999).

Robert E. Howard (DMR Books): The Christmas card below is a precious relic for a couple of reasons. One is that Robert E. Howard rarely wrote out his signature, usually typing it instead. Apparently, this was because Bob held his calligraphy in slight regard. The other reason is that this card—to my knowledge—is the only REH Christmas card in existence.

Warhammer (Fandom Pulse): Games Workshop has had more of its share of controversies this year, but now multiple stores say they are going no longer to carry Games Workshop or Warhammer 40K products because they’ve had enough of the company’s antics.

Fantasy (Goodman Games): On the 18th of December, we celebrate the birthday of Michael Moorcock—a big writer with big ideas (regardless of what he thought a handful of decades ago). It’s difficult to rank Moorcock’s diverse achievements in terms of importance or influence. He’s impacted gaming through his Elric stories, he’s been a prolific writer of the Eternal Champion and Multiverse themes.

Robert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): Robert E. Howard’s story “Rattle of Bones” was first published in Weird Tales in the June 1929 issue. The story was also printed in Skull-Face and Others, Magazine of Horror #11, Red Shadows, and a host of collections by the likes of Wildside Press, Del Rey, Bantam, and Baen. The story was adapted to comic form in the Savage Sword of Conan #18. 

D&D (Grumpy Wizard): The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide has a glossary. In that glossary, there is an entry for the word “encounter.” Gary Gygax defined the term as follows:

Encounter- An unexpected confrontation with a monster, another party, etc.

Comic Books (Grim Dark Magazine): At the climax of Conan the Barbarian issue #11, the nefarious skull-headed sorcerer Thulsa Doom burst from his crypt, dealing King Kull a devastating sword blow. Master of the alien Black Stone that has been the catalyst for the deathly magic hounding Conan’s steps through the entire first year of the Titan Comics series, Thulsa Doom stands poised to not only topple Kull’s kingdom of Valusia.

Pulp (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Adventure Pulps made their bread and butter on tales of brave men and women facing off against nature. The classic image is a man fighting a polar bear with only a knife. (Good luck!) But in the 1920s a new movement of storytelling culminated to portray those fierce and friendly animals not as Fantasy creatures like those in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) but as actual living beings.

Cinema (Silver Key): If you haven’t seen The Green Knight, and don’t wish to be spoiled, stop here before you enter the Green Chapel and its perils. Thou hast been warned.

Westerns (Western Genre Musings): My second Everrett [Will Cook] novel after the excellent First Command [also reviewed here.] In comparison it is the lesser of the two. That fault may be mine; it is from the POV of a boy which gives the novel the feel of a “young adult” effort. That does not prevent Everett/Cook from providing enjoyment and… A good amount of Wisdom with a capital W.

C.S. Lewis (Notion Club Papers): Lewis explains that it was a good thing for him – implicitly in a psychological sense: That he was unconcerned by the question of immortality: of life beyond mortal life.

Fiction (Glorious Trash): Well, the Internet Archive fixed itself and this final volume of the Shaft series, only ever published in the UK, is now back online. A big thanks to the person who scanned and uploaded their precious hardcover copy, as The Last Shaft is incredibly scarce and overpriced, either the orginal 1975 UK hardcover or the 1977 Corgi paperback. It’s surprising the novel still hasn’t been published in the United States.

D&D (Monsters & Manuals): Since in my previous post I raised the question, it is only fair that I deliver my own thoughts on the important matter of what I would do if I owned D&D. I find myself genuinely split. On the one hand, I think D&D occupies an important role as a sort of universal language, and that its middle-of-the-roadness and basic banality, as a Tolkienesque fantasy RPG denuded of all the things that made Tolkien interesting and worthwhile, is in its own way useful.

Writers (Adventures Fantastic): Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was born on this day, November 25. I haven’t had time to read anything to review for his birthday, and I was wondering what to write about that I haven’t said before in a previous birthday post. Anderson was a master of both science fiction and fantasy. Sometimes blending the two genres together.

Cinema (Generation Films): While the film Avatar paints the brave Humans and Marines of the RDA as the bad guys, we think the truth is far more complicated than most people realize.

Science Fiction (Stange at Ecbatan): Strange Stars is a history of science fiction themed rock music throughout the 1970s. It is Jason Heller’s thesis that, with a few outliers in the previous couple of decades, popular music (in this case specifically rock music) with themes and injury began in 1970. To be more specific, he ties it to the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and to the nearly simultaneous release of David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity”.

Fiction (Grim Dark Magazine): Cult of the Spider Queen by S.A. Sidor is the second of the “Andy Van Notwick” trilogy that loosely follows the adventures of said cub reporter as he becomes further and further immersed in the supernatural shenanigans of Arkham, Massachusetts. He was barely a character in the first book, The Last Ritual, but takes center stage in this volume. Andy is an interesting contrast to the Countess Zorzi because he’s a Jimmy Olsen-esque type who is absolutely in over his head with the supernatural.

Pulp (Pulp Super Fan): A couple of years ago we got a series of new Captain Future stories from Allen Steele. A revamped version of the classic pulp hero, the sequence started with the novel Avengers on the Moon in 2017, the first of a planned trilogy.

Mythos (John Coulthart): Three years ago I resurrected my panorama of R’lyeh from The Call of Cthulhu, a process that took five months from start to finish as I redrew a large and very detailed picture. Last month I spent a much shorter time doing the same for one of the other pieces of art that went missing after being printed in 1994, the Haeckel collage that I titled Yuggoth.

Ghost Stories (Old Style Tales): Finally a word on my own prejudices: I have never been particularly engaged by several of the most famous writers in this genre, and could not, with sincerity, find room for them on this list, but let me recommend them to your attention out of respect for popular opinion:

History (Frontier Partisans): Michael Cresap is a name once famous — or infamous — on the Ohio River frontier. He was a badass Frontier Partisan from a strong lineage of badass Frontier Partisans, a capable captain who, on his own hook, declared war on the Shawnee and other Ohio Indians in 1774 as the tensions that would come to a breaking point in Lord Dunmore’s War ratcheted up.

History (Medievalists): The Mediterranean island of Rhodes would once be the stage for the conflict between the Hospitallers and the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, Michael and Kelly talk about how Suleiman the Magnificent was able to besiege and overcome the Hospitallers and their fortress.

Mythos (Pulp Super Fan): Toward the end of 2022, we got a second collection: The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Vol. 2. Here we get 10 tales, most of which appeared from 2004 through 2022. However, three are original to this collection.