Blog Archives

D&D (Havard’s Blackmoor Blog): Jon Peterson announced at The Playing at the World Facebook Page that the new edition of his book will be ready soon:  It has been something of an epic journey since 2012. Playing at the World returns shortly in its new MIT Press edition – or at least, the first volume […]

Star Wars (Fandom Pulse): George Lucas elaborated on his critique, saying, “It’s like, ‘I saw something, let’s do something like that.’ It’s also a way that movies are sold. If you go in and say, ‘I’ve got something that you’ve never seen before and you don’t understand it,’ it’s very hard to get a deal.” […]

Comic Books (Fandom Pulse): Marvel Ultimate’s stretch has been going for some time now, but the most recent Ultimate Spiderman, which started in January, brought waves of excitement back into the comic industry. The main cover of the first issue hit over $100 on eBay! This had some fans weary that Marvel would not stay […]

Comic Books (Fandom Pulse): Disney might have accidentally dropped some damning news for the mainstream comic industry in the form of a job listing. Comic shops have been struggling at all-time lows for sales heading into the second half of 2024, and now, it appears as if Marvel Comics may be on the chopping block. […]

Science Fiction (Type Bar Magazine): A recent Washington Post articleindicated that only 12% of the reading public were interested in reading science fiction.  A perusal of bestseller lists for science fiction shows an even more alarming truth: the science fiction books that do sell are a shrinkingly small number of reprints, classics and novels that […]

Sword & Sorcery (Echoes of Crom Records): I list my top ten classic sword-and-sorcery collections by author. Knives (Blade HQ): Put simply, gas station knives cheap out on materials. Where there should be metal, there is often plastic. Where there should a blade steel with a real name and a known composition, there is mystery-meat […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]