Blog Archives

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 […]

Art (Paperback Palette): Paul Alexander (1937-2021) was one of the premier ‘gadget’ illustrators in science fiction. This cover for Signet’s 1985 paperback edition of Isidore Haiblum’s The Hand of Ganz shows just how outstanding he was at creating believable mechanical hardware. From his eye-catching start in 1976, till his retirement in 1998, Alexander produced more […]

Book Stores (Porpor Books): Earlier this week I made a road trip down south to the Knoxville area. I had a number of goals in mind, including a visit to the newly opened Bucc-ees in Sevierville. But I also took time to visit the McKay Books franchise in Knoxville. D&D (En World): Today (Thursday 27th […]

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): Two Conan pastiches in the same year? And a third on the way? Are we in a Conan renaissance? I honestly don’t think so. Titan Books is taking a chance on Conan most likely in hopes of the long-promised Conan Netflix series. If that happens a renaissance could occur but […]

Robert E. Howard (Adventures Fantastic): Most readers of weird fiction probably know about the story “The House in the Oaks” by August Derleth, which first appeared in the anthology Dark Things in 1971, the year Derleth died. It was one of the many “posthumous collaborations” of tales left unfinished on the death of Robert E. Howard on […]

Popular Culture (Contemplations the Tree of Woe): Moreover, the change in our social mores is unpredictable in its pace and direction. Could Woodrow Wilson have predicted that his views would one day cause progressives to remove his mention from the school named for him? No, in his day he was the exemplar of progressivism. Could […]

T.V. (IGN): Aware of what Sapochnik was accomplishing on Game of Thrones, Condal asked if he would want to develop a Conan series with him and immediately agreed. “He was then off making Thrones for a year,” he explains. “I was writing scripts and sending them to him and he was sending me feedback.We wrote […]

Cinema (Looper): Let’s not mince words … “John Carter” was an okay movie. Released in 2012 by Disney and based on a series of books written by Edward Rice Burroughs — yes, the same author whose work led to Disney’s “Tarzan” — almost exactly a century prior, the science fiction blockbuster film was intended to […]

Gaming (Bounding Into Comics): In their latest effort to try and rehabilitate their public image, Blizzard Entertainment has introduced a new anti-harassment “Social Contract” which World of Warcraft players must agree to before logging into the game. As reported by 80Lv, players are presented with the agreement upon their first log-in to the game following […]

T.V. (Arkhaven Comics): The growth of Disney Plus is tortoise-like and it’s all in the wrong markets. Disney Plus needs to get subs in the West where they can charge decent prices that will actually turn the company a profit. Instead, the only place anyone is signing up is in India, where the business model […]

Gaming (Wert Zone): Sony have confirmed that one of their signature PlayStation franchises, God of War, is making the jump to the PC format, with the latest game in the series hitting PC as soon as January. The God of War franchise began in 2005 with the eponymous debut game on PlayStation 2. It was followed […]