Listening to the History of the Germans podcast in episodes about the struggle for power between the Papacy and the Hofenstaufen Holy Roman ...

I've been thinking about this sort of material again, recently. The original version of this post appeared in 2021... It's well know...

There has been some discussion in various places over the last couple of weeks regarding "lore," which isn't a great term, may...

B1-9 flowchar t Recently I was reading the rpg Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo (1977). The usual take on this game is that it is les...

As a follow-up to my post on pulp teams, I thought I would address the perhaps more common issue of teams in supers rpgs. As with superhero ...

Over the years since its creation, the standard mode of D&D has become a subgenre of fantasy unto itself, codified now in the other rpgs...

Inspired by Vance mostly, people have considered spells as living entities. It was discussed in the Gplus days, and it shows up in Eric Diaz...

My recent readings in science fiction have had me thinking about Star Frontiers . The setting more than the game mechanics. I've done va...

Driving over the Thanksgiving holiday my family listened to the audiobook of  The Patchwork Girl of Oz,  and I was struck by how similar Bau...

I think there is a lineage of science fiction name coining that whose progenitor is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories but that passes t...

Thinking about the phylogenetic connection between the Lost Worlds of Victorian adventure fiction and the planetary romances of last century...

In this DIY rpg world, there are a lot of factions, cliques, theorists, declarations of movements, manifestos, categorizations. I'm not ...

Hear me out! I'm aware, course, that there are many works that we would now call fantasy that predate Lord of the Rings , but the concep...

Something I've noticed about comic book superhero storytelling over the years: often the solution to the obstacles faced don't have ...

Skeletor is the principle antagonist of the so-called Masters of the Universe myth and literary cycle . His inhuman physical appearance, mag...

I've been thinking about cobbling together a system for a Bronze Age of Comics Sword & Sorcery rpg, a rarefied genre, perhaps, but o...

Earl Norem Big monsters are a hallmark of Bronze Age Four-Color fantasy of the Swords & Sorcery mode. These creatures are often are the...

  It is possible for the determined traveler who has been shown the hidden paths to walk from the Elysian Fields to another planar realm. T...

The Immaculate Philosophy in Exalted is an engineered belief system, created by a faction of Sidereals looking to bolster the Dragon-Blooded...

 The map of Conan's world by Katrin Dirim  I shared the other day was interesting not just because her her artistic style (though that&#...