Richard Hescox I feel like planetary romance (sometimes called Sword & Planet, though I think that might be better thought as a subgenr...

Presumably no one on Earth has yet experienced interplanetary space travel. When the creators of space travel-related media go to describe i...

Thinking about my Monday post further (and reading more examples of magic in McKillip's Heir of Sea and Fire ), I feel like the part th...

 As has been pointed out before, the kind of frontier envisioned by old D&D owes more to Westerns than it does to the Western European M...

Art by Falmarin de Carme I came across this site a couple of weeks ago that compiles additional background material generated for a Finnish...

I don't know much of anything about Dave Hargrave or his inspirations for Arduin but the art and content suggest Hargrave's inspirat...

The original version of this post appeared in December of 2010. I've updated it with some newer thoughts... We’re all familiar with th...

 My "Hidden Religions of D&D" posts got me thinking about a new way to view alignment in D&D, and that is not as personal ...

Going back to the Greyhawk Folio has made me realize how it differs from modern setting material and perhaps why I bounced off of it when I...

Thinking about rationalization of the implied setting of D&D, not in the way of industrial magic or anything like that (though I've ...

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...