D&D is Cultural Appropriation?
A British gamer travels to America for the first time, and speaks of the way finally “gets” the tropes behind Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, yes. I have long been aware of the ‘borderlands’ theme of...
View ArticleSo who played Dungeons and Dragons?
Interesting post on Crooked Timber about writers and D&D David Mitchell said he always asks other writers whether they played Dungeons and Dragons as teenagers. He keeps a mental list of writers...
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Emirikol the Chaotic
This iconic image by the late Dave Trampier from the first edition A&D Players Handbook epitomises Dungeons and Dragons for me. Here’s a figure on horseback firing Magic Mssile spells while a...
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You can’t have an entire party of Bards
Sometimes you see a band’s publicity photo, and your first reaction is “You can’t have an entire Dungeons and Dragons party made up of Bards. Although it has been pointed out that the guy with the...
View ArticlePolitics by AD&D Alignment
This is a rewrite of an old post from a couple of years ago that got accidentally deleted from the archives. The Internet Wayback Machine does not seem to have saved a copy, so this is a reconstruction...
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Unearthed Elf – Into the Catacomb Abyss
You are in a 20′ by 20′ room. You see a metal band. They are singing about finding a vial of holy water in an ancient, cobweb-laden mausoleum. What do you do? Visigoth had one song called “The Dungeon...
View ArticleFantasy Elves and their True Nature
Zak Smith has written an interesting blog post on elves in fantasy gaming and literature. Elves in fiction draw from two conflicting archetypes. There are the elves of Tolkein’s Middle Earth, noble and...
View ArticleThe Literary Origins of RPGs
Interesting post on Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog on how the first generation of roleplaying games from the late 1970s weren’t influenced by the ackowleged greats of the golden age of science fiction such...
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Farewell, Jack Chick
Jack Chick, author of the awful but compelling badly-drawn fundamentalist tracts railing at Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Gays, Freemasons, Rock and Roll, Dungeons and Dragons, or anybody who didn’t share...
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On D&D Skills.
There’s an interesting post by Zak Smith on the skill list for 5th Edition D&D, the reasoning behind the skills, and how OSR games handle similar situations. Zak was a consultant on the 5e project,...
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