Christian Lindke's Geekerati Newsletter

Claude Code Changed How I Work (Part 1)

If things go according to plan, I’ll be posting reviews of the Adventure Presents games in the near future. I like the mechanics and think they are fun scenarios, perfect for infequent play and busy schedules.

By the look of Rebellion’s marketing materials and playtest rules, I’m not sure if their version will capture what makes Tunnels & Trolls a unique gaming experience. While the rules of Tunnels & Trolls have an elegance that makes it easy to pick up and quick to play, that’s probably what draws me to the game least. For me, it’s always been the slightly punk nature of the game. Not only has Tunnels & Trolls been a largely DIY endeavor, and remained one over time, it’s also had the ironic edge you often see in punk culture. Where D&D eventually came to take itself “seriously,” Tunnels & Trolls never did. People might complain about spells with names like “Take That You Fiend!” but that’s always been a part of the charm of the game. The marketing image Rebellion shared this month lacks that charm. I think that the character in the ad might be “Fang the Delectable” (that’s the name of the sample character used to show you how to play the game), but I’m not sure. Compare the above illustration with Liz Danforth’s rendition of Fang.

I can see certain similarities, but Danforth’s Fang looks much more unprepared for the horrors he’s certain to encounter. After buying his equipment, per the rules, he doesn’t even have shoes. Now that’s a low level character if I’ve ever seen one.

While I’m not sure whether Rebellion’s Tunnels & Trolls will be a worthy successor to the original, that’s not a problem because Ken St. Andre has already provided us with a worthy successor. In fact, he provided it almost 50 years ago when he created Monsters! Monsters!. Here’s a description of the game from the DriveThru RPG entry:

In 1976 Ken St Andre, the creator of the 2nd oldest role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls created another RPG called Monsters Monsters! It was first published by Metagaming Concepts and then again by Flying Buffalo in 1979. The game remained unchanged from then until now - with the release of this completely NEW, rewritten and re-edited edition of one of the oldest RPGs in existence, Monsters! Monsters! now in a 2nd edition after 40 years!

This 2020 2nd edition of Monsters! Monsters! retains much of its original appeal and structure, but with all new art and new options like stunting and monster chaos factor. The new M! M! rules also lists 49 monster kindreds you can play, gives you their dice modifiers and now each has a special power unique to its kindred. Each monster is described in a separate section. Its also better organized and easier to use. (For example - now the monsters are separated into humanoid and non-humanoid types) There are two different types of character sheets, one that includes portraits you can add. There is a Spellbook, weapon and armor lists, new abilities and chaos factor, 18 cut-out full-color standee figures and much more!

And to really cap off the rules, we are including in the book a brand new 26 page Monster! Monster! GM adventure in the ruined dwarven city of Hael’Ku. Filled with treasures, danger and mysteries to solve... Download your copy of Monsters Monsters! today!

Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! are two of the earliest role playing games ever produced and they were created as a direct response to Dungeons & Dragons. Lawrence Schick wrote that T&T was the second role playing game ever published in the invaluable history of rpgs Heroic Worlds, but Jon Peterson’s analysis regarding the Rules to the Game of Dungeon demonstrate that it may have been beaten to the punch by another small print run game.

As I mentioned earlier, Tunnels & Trolls was created as a reaction to Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends of Ken St. Andre wanted to play D&D and handed him a copy to run. He couldn’t understand the rules, and having read the “Little Brown Books” many times I can see why. Ken St. Andre describes how he created the game in the introduction to the reprint of the 1st edition as follows:

The key point here is that he wanted a simple game that was not derived from miniature gaming. In that way, his game is very different from Dungeons & Dragons. While we may play D&D with a theatre of the mind approach, or not, the mechanics of the game are very much rooted in miniature skirmish rules. I’m working on an extensive post on this that includes references to Geoff Engelstein’s excellent Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, but it will be some time before I run it.

What is important here is that T&T and D&D have different mechanical DNA. Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! aren’t based on miniature skirmish rules, instead combat (when it’s done at all) is based on abstract die roll comparisons where the higher roll wins and the difference is the damage. For example, a player character might roll 4d6 and add 12 to the roll for high attributes, while a monster might roll 4d6 and add 20 to the die roll for its monster rating (only in the first round in some editions after which it would be +10). It’s very abstract and open to interpretation.

The Saving Throw mechanics of T&T are also very different from D&D at the onset. First, because they were attribute rather than attack type based (modern D&D “borrows” from T&T in this respect) and second in that they are given a “level of difficulty” so you might have to make a 2nd Level Strength (or Luck) Save in Tunnels & Trolls. The basic formula for a saving roll on 2d6 in T&T is:

or for higher levels the following equation minus the stat.

So a first level character with an average (11) Luck would need a 9 or better on 2d6 to save. That might seem very unlikely at first (approximately 28%), but the fact that Tunnels & Trolls is the first “exploding die” system (in this case exploding on doubles) increases the likelihood significantly and adds a nice random element to the game.

Given that Rebellion’s new version of Tunnels and Trolls is yet to be published, and because I want Ken St. Andre to see some royalties on my recommendation, I’m shifting away from recommending Tunnels & Trolls and into recommending Monsters! Monsters!. This game is a mechanical spinoff of Tunnels and Trolls, it has the same DNA and foundation, but the players take on the role of monsters instead of humans. Have you ever wanted to play a Reverse Dungeon where the monsters take out their frustrations on Humanity? Then this is the game for you. I highly recommend buying Monsters! Monsters! and giving it a spin.

Happy Birthday Ken! You truly are the Trollgodfather.

Early D&D Musings: Charisma Was Never a Dump Stat

Christian Lindke — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:23:39 GMT

Eye of the Beholder Copyright Jody Lindke 2026

Charisma: The Most Important Attribute in D&D

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about how my friend Sean McPhail and I used Basic Dungeons & Dragons as the mechanical foundation for our shipboarding actions when we played Broadsides & Boarding Parties. It’s a wonderful boardgame designed by Larry Harris (who also designed Axis & Allies) that was published as part of The Citadel’s Game Series in the U.K. in 1982 and updated with tons of “toy” elements by Milton Bradley in 1984 as a part of their Gamemaster series of wargames. Typical of a Larry Harris design, the game introduces wargaming mechanics in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. His rules tend to be elegant, but sometimes have a weakspot.

In the case of Broadsides and Boarding Parties, that weakspot was the boarding action rules. While the limited information, simultaneous movement system of the “broadsides” is a very simple system, it is elegant and fun. The battles of the boarding parties, however, are a bit dull and amount to little more than a sereis of bland die rolls where each player rolls a d6 (and adds a couple of modifiers…maybe) and the higher roll wins and kills one of the other crew. The fights happen in groups and even though your Captain adds a minor bonus, the action never evokes the feel of an Errol Flynn duel. That’s were our inclusion of the D&D Basic rules comes in. The moment we incorporated the basic combat system, it transformed the game entirely, but that was only the beginning of the wonders than using D&D combat added to the game.

You see, before I began playing Dungeons & Boarding Parties, I had largely ignored Charisma (abbrieviated as CHR in the Days When Tigers Used to Smoke as shared many seasons ago) in my early D&D gaming experiences. My first game session, where my character was ignobly turned into an Axe Beak, made me reticent to play any magic user characters for quite some time. So much so that the first D&D character I ever rolled up (the Axe Beak was a borrowed character) was a fighter named Darg. He had a 17 Strength and I never once took his Charisma into consideration when playing him. I can’t even remember what his Charisma score was.

Look, I’m the Might Gandalf!

All I cared about with Darg, and a host of characters after him, was that his physical attributes (Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution) were high. In those early days of Moldvay/Cook play, I barely gave Wisdom and Intelligence a second thought. As for Charisma, I wondered why it was even there. I it didn’t do anything meaningful. Playing Dungeons & Boarding parties taught me how wrong this mindset was.

How?

Well, you see…we started using the Morale rules from the combat section for all non-Captain characters. We rolled up entire pirate crews of 1st level fighters, and eventually other classes as well, of which only the Captain was a player character. Yes, they earned experience and if the Captain died one of them would replace him next game, but they were still merely “Retainers.” We had recently read the section on retainers in the Basic Rulebook and it opened up a whole new world of play for us. No longer did one of us have to kill all of the pirates on the other ship, or even just the Captain, to win the battle. All we needed was for the crew to fail a morale check.

That’s were Charisma came in.

Charisma affected not just how many Retainers you could have, or as we called them “loyal crew,” but it determined their morale as well. The higher your Charisma, the more of your crew were loyal crew members and the higher their Morale. Having a high Charisma in Dungeons & Boarding Parties was suddenly as important as having high physical stats. This is because all crew (loyal and unloyal crew) had to make morale checks with the first casualty, when your side experiences their first death and when half of your side has been incapacitated.

Since the death of the Captain was an automatic loss in Dungeons & Boarding Parties, we didn’t need to check at that time but we did need to check in the other circumstances and it made a HUGE difference. We gave different morale values to the loyal and unloyal crew, with unloyal having a morale score 1 point lower than the loyal crew. This led to huge swings in the battles and sped up combat immensely. And morale was only the first way that Charisma mattered, and boy did it ever matter for that in Dungeons & Boarding Parties. It also mattered that way for Dungeons & Dragons too and it has since the White Box. The primary reason for this is that D&D was based on miniature wargames and morale is a central mechanic in those, but the secondary reason is that low level characters need retainers (more on that in a minute).

If you look at the Men & Magic book for the old White Box Dungeons & Dragons rules, there is something that sticks out to the modern gamer. While you roll up your six attributes the same way as you do in later versions of the game (3d6 all the way down natch!), they don’t have as much impact on combat as they do in later rules. While the Greyhawk Supplement eventually makes Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution matter in combat, they get short shrift in White Box D&D. In fact, the only effect Strength ever has in straight White Box is to make it so a character goes up in level faster due to an expereience point bonus. Charisma on the other hand has it’s own table that allows for more hirelings on the high end and a higher loyalty base than Moldvay Basic. Note that the description says that the players “will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics to strengthen their roles in the campaign.” This is because low level characters are very weak and hirelings let you field little platoons.

Charisma does more than let you hire poeple though, it also lets you parley with people and monsters and have them react on the reaction table. First, there’s the reaction table for hiring retainers. There is no guarantee people will want to work for you, so you need to roll. The rules are slightly different between D&D (which has “loyalty base” rather than just morale, though it determines morale) and the rolls work differently.

But wait…there’s more. Charisma doesn’t just determine how many people you can hire, whether they will work for you, and how loyal they are. It also determines whether monsters will attack you in the first place if you decide to try talking your way out of a situation first. In White Box, Charisma might not come into play.

However, as the earlier B/X table mentions above, it does help with Monster Reaction rolls in Basic D&D. You see where it says, “see Monster Reactions, page 24?” This is that table.

That’s right, high Charisma characters in B/X can talk their way out of fights with monsters. Charisma is not only NOT a dump stat, it’s a freakin’ superstat. More space is devoted to this one attribute than any other attribute in White Box and Moldvay/Cook D&D. The Holmes version pretty much ignores it, but Molvay, Cook, and Marsh knew what was up and they wrote at length what Charisma could do. It let’s you hire multiple retainers, have them be loyal and unafraid in the face of danger, it makes it easier for you to hire good retainers, AND it let’s you defeat monsters without even fighting.

As I mentioned above, this is all a legacy of D&D coming from miniature wargames where morale is very important and a lot of early D&D adventures were skirmish miniature battle scenarios more than just narrative adventures. While one might be able to argue that B1: In Search of the Unknown and B3: Palace of the Silver Princess are narrative scenarios made for a small band of adventurers akin to that in Hawk the Slayer or the Dungeons & Dragons movies. The same cannot be said of B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. The premise of Keep on the Borderlands is that the player characters are adventurers who arrive at a Keep, deep in the wild frontier, close to the Caves of Chaos. The caves are filled with several small bands of monsters who are raiding the countryside and preventing farmers from moving in and bringing the first elements of civilization with them. This isn’t a fetch quest, this is a semi-military expedition. It’s an adventure that expects you to hire retainers to aid you on your adventures.

Take a moment to look at the encounter sizes in the Caves of Chaos, these are not for a party of 4 to 6 first level characters. They are just going to die and die again and you are going to end up rolling up a lot of characters. If you want to see how many, you can run a quick and tactics free simulation of the encounter on one of my handy dandy combat simulators. This one simulates a combat, but also incorporates the effects of Sleep and Backstab have on combat. The Backstab mechanics are rough. I essentially let it roll move silently to benefit from back stab. The assumption here is that combat is fluid and not on a map, so you just have to be quiet to remain unseen in the mayhem.

I’ve put together a number of B/X widgets that I’m currently beta testing. These aren’t for sale, they are free for use as fan toys, but if you want to play test them I’d greatly appreciate it. These include applications that let you generate a random character of 1st to 3rd level. This character will have no equipment or anything, but will be completely random. I also put together a B/X Character Builder that lets you make a 1st level character and buy equipment. A widget that generates retainers that a character can hire based on their Charisma. A widget that let’s you roll to see if you can hire those retainers and test their loyalty and monster morale later. One that deals only with Monster reactions, retainer loyalty, and monster and NPC morale. There are also two additional combat simulators. One that is for a single character vs. monsters and the other that simulates combat without Sleep or Backstab.

All of these include the effects of morale on monsters and demonstrate how vital morale is as a combat mechanic. I don’t include morale rolls for retainers in the combat simulators, because these are for parties without henchmen, but that makes them better for showing you how tough fights would be without a squad.

When I look at B/X and my own experience, I am now baffled by how I ever considered it a dump stat. It is very powerful and more time is spent in the rulebooks on that single attribute than on any other.

As the kids say today, a good D&D character has Aura.

Weekly Geeklinks: Is Claude.ai My RPG Gaming Prep Buddy?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:05:46 GMT

Is It Possible that AI Might Be Fun?

Something happened while I was deep in my scholastic cave editing the chapters of my disseration that has thrown me for a bit of a loop and caused me to question my priors in a very real way. Since Midjourney poked its ugly head out and initiated the trend of AI slop imagery dominating book covers and memes, I’ve been largely opposed to AI. I think that artists, of all kinds, are amazing and deserve credit for what they are doing and I think most AI companies committed massive copyright infringement when they created their initial “learning data” for their various AI engines. I still think both of those things are true. I am also becoming a bit of a fan of AI as a tool.

You see, it all started when I took a break from running regression analysis of Youth-Parent dyads in order to rest my brain. I decided to look at my Substack feed and read some of the articles from newsletters I subscribe to and to some that had been shared on Notes. Someone shared a post by where he discussed his experiments using Claude.ai to help him with his research. Scott’s an Economist and Professor at Baylor University and as I watched him engage with Claude in a couple of his videos, I began to notice a couple of things. First, that while Claude was giving him output in the form of data analysis and slide decks, Scott was doing all the conceptual work and correcting numerous mistakes (in both coding and analysis) that Claude would make along the way. For the most part, Scott was interacting with Claude the same way that I interact with R (or Python) except instead of writing something that looks like this…

hypothesis.3.i <- lm(
  youth.rep.dem.diff.norm ~ father.rep.dem.diff.mc +
    mother.est.rep.dem.diff.norm + parents.agree.norm +
    parent.political.activity.mc,
  data = analysis.data |> filter(is.father == 3))

…he said to Claude that was something like, “Hiya, I’d like to run a linear regression model with the a youth’s difference in sentiment between Republicans and Democrats is the dependent variable and the father’s and mother’s differences, as well as whether they agree politically are the independent variables. Oh, and add the measure of political activity too.” At that moment, I realized that while many of the critiques of Claude and other AI’s were very accurate, it can let you just tell it to do stuff and it will do them, they were also slightly off base. You see, what Scott was doing was programming, iteratively through conversation, with something that translated his English language requests into a programming language.

Scott's Mixtape Substack

I think this will be a multi-part series about using Claude Code because there’s too much to cover in one post. So this is part 1…

5 months ago · 133 likes · 19 comments · scott cunningham

Yes, you can be lazy and have Claude be the primary driver in this relationship, but Claude and other AIs aren’t really good at thinking in the same way as the human mind. Claude produces better code and better results from someone who knows how the code works and the theoretical foundations of any analysis being done. Claude might forget to mean-center variables (which isn’t actually necessary, but might be prudent) in the right way or might misinterpret a codebook or just make up a variable or information. Heck, it might even make major blunders in creating the code and leave ugly artifacts behind. All of those problems can only be addressed if the person working with Claude knows the material. Working with Claude for analysis is like being handed a Graphing Caluclator you can talk to with all the benefits and dangers. If you hand kids calculators too soon in the process of learning Calculus, they won’t really understand the intuitions and rules. However, once they have a foundation, it speeds things up. In other words, Claude can either make you dumber, or more productive. It is in how the tool is used and not the mere existence of the tool that determines the morality of the act in question. How and why you are using AI is important and so too is the way it got the information from which it learns. I’m still pissed about the copyright stuff, and still think using living artists is better for a lot of reasons, but using Claude to aid in analysis, to copy edit, and to make tools for my home gaming are things I am entirely sold on now.

Let’s start with that first possible use of AI, that of aiding me in analysis. I recently saw a tweet about a paper published in Theory & Society by James Manzi that used a large language model to analyze 600,000 social studies abstracts and place them on a uni-dimensional (that’s on a single line) political ideology scale. The paper found that, “the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024.” The paper got some immediate pushback from Pippa Norris, a highly respected scholar of democratic institutions, for using “oddly multidimensional” anchors and forcing them into an “invalid unidimensional scale.” Dr. Norris was also shocked at the use of the New York Times as “Progressive” and the Heritage Foundation as “Conservative.”

I won’t go into a lot of detail regarding why her initial complaint about how it is inappropriate to force a multidimensional construct into a unidimensional one, except to say this. Keith Poole designed an innovative way of analyzing partisanship and ideology in “political space” via a method called Nominate. It approaches political views as essentially multidimensional constructs that exist in multiple imaginary dimensions, hence the term political space. His theory combines Hotelling’s analysis of consumer choice in real space, driving distance maps, and probability to create a two-dimensional measure of ideology.

Hotelling Stabilitycompetition 1929

796KB ∙ PDF file

While Poole’s model is multidimensional, he found that due to polarization “a single score that measures how liberal/conservative a member is accounts for most of the choices members make” and thus that it behaved like a unidimensional score. As much as I like what UCLA is doing with their VoteView website, which builds on what Poole did, I find Poole’s clunky old website to be much more useful for learning about polarization and what the heck I mean by “political space.”

Mcpr Extreme Chap2 July 2009

260KB ∙ PDF file

My reflexive pushback to Dr. Norris is relatively minor, but that was not the case with Sean Westwood. He’s an Associate Professor at Dartmouth and Director of the amazingly useful Polarization Research Lab and who’s work has been cited FAR more than mine. I’m not doing an appeal to authority there as both he and Dr. Norris are highly regarded, I’m just being humbled by looking at his Google Scholar page. Anyway, Dr. Westwood pushed back by saying that all of Dr. Norris complaints were true of her own V-Dem scale as well. In fact, he was actually being kind to the V-Dem scale by saying it was “just as true of V-Dem” since V-Dem’s only publications admit they use a methodology that creates results that are “overstated and lacking in nuance” due to their subjectivity. That Dr. Westwood gave such strong pushback, led me to ask whether Dr. Norris was right or wrong to say that The New York Times wasn’t “Progressive” and that the Heritage Foundation wasn’t “Conservative.” I haven’t done analysis of The New York Times yet, I’m still looking for “anchors” for data, but a quick look at AllSides’ rating of them has their Opinion Page placed on “The Left” of the scale.

I have, however, done some analysis of The Heritage Foundation and I “dove into Poole” to do it. I followed the work done by Poole and combined it with ideas from Tim Groseclose, Steven D. Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), James M. Snyder, and Jeffrey Milyo to generate Nominate scores for The Heritage Foundation based on how they scored various members of Congress. I used Claude to help me, but all I had it do was run regression to get a coefficient based on the connection between there scores and DW-Nominate (and Nokken-Poole scores which are for individual sessions of Congress) and to use that to get Heritage’s score. Based on that Analysis, they were fairly conservative, but not the most conservative. Certainly, they are Right of the Conservative “center.” I don’t know if I would anchor them at 2 or 3, but it’s close enough for horseshoes. The widget I designed includes four tabs: Estimated Scores & Plots, Overlay: Heritage on Congress (see below), Regression Coefficients, and Methodology. I did it with Claude’s help and I think it wsa very worthwhile and not “slop.”

One the more “fun” side of things, I’ve been designing a number of Moldvay/Cook D&D game aids using Claude. The first was a character creator that determines everything except your equipment. That’s available on my personal website too and I formatted it to be in the brand colors my friend Darran used when he made the new Geekerati logo. I’ve designed a couple of other tools too, but I haven’t uploaded them yet, and am working on an old school dungeon crawl game through an iterative design process. All of these are, and will continue to be, free for your use.

So…I’m thinking Claude.ai and I can be pretty good friends, but if he makes me mad I’m sending Sweet Pickles Bus learning kits to his house and I still think Anthropic should be paying residuals when it uses other people’s text.

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

One of my favorite old Strong Bad bits was when he did the Olde Timey Radio impersonation and said, “Stay tuned for partial excitement” in a canned 1920s voice. It’s a joke I go back to again and again when I comment on things I only kind of like. Luke channels a bit of that same energy with the headline for his review of the resurrection of American Gladiators from Amazon. That’s right, there’s a new Blaze in town an is the best person on Earth to review it.

American Gladiators (2026) Review: Are You Not Mildly Entertained?

Was the original American Gladiators actually appointment viewing for anyone back in the day? It always felt like “the thing that came on after cartoons” or “the dumb fun we stay on while flipping through channels if nothing else is on.” Technically, there was a tournament every season, but given the crapshoot that syndication airings used to be, there …

11 days ago · Luke Y. Thompson

Speaking of beats that were custom made for Luke, he’s got a very good review of the trailer for the upcoming Masters of the Universe film. I have my worries about the film and fear it will lean too heavy into Whedonisms. The first trailer had about 10% Whedonesque “Whoooo!” and snark, but the new trailer has even less Whedonslop and I’m trending towards ALL-IN. I think it’s interesting that Luke begins his review discussing the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film, or rather the trailer, if only because I think I am the only defender of that film (and I don’t think Luke is a defender) in the world. I recently rewatched it and am working up a retro-review for it that will come out after a review of The Man Behind the Gun and Megaforce. Let’s just say that Stallone’s version better captures the actual vibes from 2000AD, and those in the Games Workshop Judge Dredd RPG that introduced me to the character, than the Karl Urban film. In fact, it actually filmically captures Brian Bolland images as moments. Urban’s movie is a better movie overall, but it’s essentially the same film as The Raid. The fact that those Dredd and The Raid are essentially the same plot, they were independently made and are both great. I also think Dredd is a better film than Judge Dredd, but only Stallone’s film captures the Angel family in fun fashion and it’s also the only film where the Dark Judges would fit in.

Masters of the Universe Full Trailer Brings It Home

I know better than to get too excited by trailer music, because I learned that lesson the hard way. When the trailers for Judge Dredd — the Sylvester Stallone version! — were first out, they had some amazing music cues, and I went out and bought the soundtrack album, day one. Surprise! It wasn’t there, and to this day, I don’t know what that p…

a month ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

My buddy Darran Hight has a post about the highly underrated show Almost Human (2013) in his . While I consider myself a Firefly fan, yes even after groaning about Whedonslop because Firefly was MinearGold, the show I really think Fox betrayed. It’s a creative spin on Alien Nation with Karl Urban as a human cop who is partnered with a surprisingly human robot partner DRN-0167 (Dorian) played by Michael Ealy. I’ve been a big fan of Ealy’s since I watched him in Sleeper Cell. If I was to cast someone to play the John Wells character from The Faithful Spy series, he’d be first on my list. Heck, I’d cast him in a lot. he and Urban are great together and the show is rounded out with Minka Kelly, Michael Irby, Mackenzie Crook, and Lili Taylor.

Nerdstalgia Notebook

Almost Human (2013)

Almost Human came out in 2013 and disappeared quickly, but it stuck with people who watched it. It is a science fiction crime show set in 2048 where police officers work alongside android partners. The setup sounds familiar, but the show handles it in a way that feels grounded and character focused…

11 days ago · 1 like · 1 comment · DaЯRaN HighT

The good folks over at , , have done an interview with one of my professors where she discusses some of the ideas underpinning her new book How to Feel Loved. Sonja Lyubomirsky was one of the better mentors I had in coursework at UC Riverside and is one of two Psychology professors (the other being Danny Oppenheimer at Carnegie Mellon) who make me wish Political Science professors modeled themselves on the Psychology department model. As with most of Dr. Lyubomirsky’s mainstream books, they only scratch the surface on the depth of her scholarship. She’s done a great deal of interesting work on happiness and love. Taking her course on happiness built wonderfully on the philosophic baseline I had before on the topic and taught (reminded?) me that happiness is not a goal but a byproduct.

The Power of Us

How to feel more loved

Love isn’t just something we give or receive, it’s something we communicate. In HOW TO FEEL LOVED: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis argue that many of us are already loved, yet still feel unseen and disconnected. The gap isn’t about effort or compatibility, but about how we show up in our relationships…

11 days ago · 13 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Dr. touches on my favorite horror trope in her most recent exploration of Folk Songs and horror. As a fan of the John the Balladeer stories of Manly Wade Wellman (okay, all of his horror stories) and the mythos surrounding Robert Johnson’s short lived fame. So much so that I am probably the world’s greatest fan of Walter Hill’s Crossroads. Then again, I think Walter Hill is one of the great Hollywood directors. Rebekah does a great job engaging with the genre and ties it to one of the best films (period) of the decade (Sinners). Southern Gothic is one of the richest genres in all of literature and is a central genre to understanding America.

Dr King's Curiosities

The Devil at the Crossroads: Selling your Soul for Music

My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Folk Songs…

12 days ago · 35 likes · 13 comments · Rebekah King

Speaking of Manly Wade Wellman, one of his best friends is one of the best authors of Horrific Sword & Sorcery ever published. The fact that Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman were friend is a bit of a mystery. Wellman was a relatively traditional fellow and Wagner was a hard drinking cocaine advocating Medical Doctor who looked like a biker. Wellman was a member of the Interbellum or Greatest Generation and Wagner was the personification of the Boomer’s darkest shadow. Both are giants on my bookshelf. Folk Music and Metal…yeah, that’s what they were. Just as I love John Ford and Sam Peckinpah, so too do I love Wellman and Wagner.

Karl Edward Wagner Music from Eternal Champion

Texas heavy metal band Eternal Champion has released a 2-song EP based on the novel Dark Crusade by Karl Edward Wagner. The novel features Wagner’s best known character, Kane. The album is called Friend of War, and the cover features an evocative oil painting by…

a month ago · 7 likes · Matt Thompson

Fantasy AGE by Green Ronin Publishing

The hardback copy Green Ronin Publishing’s second edition of the Fantasy AGE role playing game just arrived in my mailbox the other day and it is a beautifully illustrated tome. The cover of the book was painted by Wayne Reynolds who’s paintings gave signature style to both D&D 4th edition and Paizo’s Pathfinder role playing game. In this particular illustration, Reynolds has captured a moment of action in Green Ronin’s City of Freeport setting, a setting so deeply influenced by pulp sword & sorcery tales that it includes sinister Serpent Folk.

It should be no surprise that the cover of Green Ronin’s house fantasy role playing game features the City of Freeport, as the Death in Freeport module for the d20 system was Green Ronin’s first product. While Green Ronin, and Freeport, may have started out as a d20/3rd edition D&D company, they quickly branched out. First with the Mutants & Masterminds role playing game, which is nominally d20 but isn’t really and shares more DNA with Champions and DC Heroes than with D&D (more on that in a later review). Then with the True 20 system which took the foundation of the Mutants & Masterminds system and transformed it into a multi-genre system. Finally, with the publication of the Dragon AGE role playing game based on the Dragon Age computer rpg.

The AGE system (Adventure Game Engine) that underpins the Dragon AGE role playing game has continued to grow with the publication of Modern AGE (a contemporary RPG), Fantasy AGE, and role playing games based on The Expanse and Fifth Season properties (you can find a list here of some AGE games).

The AGE system has some elements that will be familiar to players of D&D, but it is a far cry from that game mechanically. It is in no way D&D adjacent in the way an OSR ruleset or Fantasy Heartbreaker is. My gaming group playtested the Blood of Ferelden adventure and the Dragon Age 2 and 3 boxed sets. You can see our credits (after I redacted other playtesters to remove clutter) in the Dragon Age 2 boxed set below.

I mention that I playtested the game, not only to point out that I have a personal connection, but also to highlight how much I like the game. You see, I wasn’t in on the playtest for the first boxed set. It was my enjoyment of the initial game that prompted me to request that my group be allowed to playtest other materials for the game. I fell in love with the game instantly because it offered some really distinct mechanics that I believe make gameplay more dynamic and rewarding.

Two of these mechanical innovations are rooted in the basic resolution mechanic in the game, which is based on rolling three six-sided die against a target number. This is similar to Champions, but with one big twist. One of these dice is called a “stunt die” and so needs to be distinguishable from the other die and it is the source of the two innovations I want to discuss as the die has two different effects.

The first effect that the stunt die has is to determine how successful your character is on an action. Instead of the game having the intensity of success determined by how high the overall result is (say a 15 vs a 19 total being “less successful”), AGE has that intensity determined by the value of the stunt die. So your total could barely hit the target number, but because the stunt die was a 6 you succeeded extremely well. Even though this means that very high rolls will always be very successful (they will have a high stunt die too after all), it means that even lower rolls can be large successes. I like that and think it adds a nice heroic feel.

That brings me to the second innovation, the one that the stunt die is named for and that’s the “stunt system.” If any two of the three six-sided die come up as doubles, then the action generates a number of stunt points equal to the value of the stunt die. Overall, some form of doubles occurs approximately 44.06% of the time meaning that stunts are relatively frequent occurrences.

You can spend these stunt points on a variety of effects, for example if you are in combat you might choose to Disarm your opponent (see the partial list of combat stunts below). There are a wide variety of combat stunt options, and these really make combat dynamic, but stunts exist for non-combat tasks as well and the mechanic is open for expansion in a number of ways.

The stunt system makes Fantasy AGE, and other AGE games, truly unique and worth your time.

I’m working on my reviews of Judge Dredd, The Man Behind the Gun, and Megaforce, so I’ll be brief with this film recommendation. There are two films that shaped my childhood pretty strongly. One was introduced to me by my dad and the other by a friend. They both have a similar message about growing up and dealing with the emotional challenges of being a teenager and they both have almost exactly the same ending, with one exception. Both end with a scream and crashes. In one, the protagonist leaves rage behind and in the other sorrow. I’m picking the one where the protagonist leaves sorrow behind, because of the two films it’s the more beautiful. It’s soft and funny and about love. I’m picking Harold and Maude. Maybe you can guess the other film.

A Game Books Geekshelf: 13 Books About Games That Every Geek Should Own

Christian Lindke — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:03:19 GMT

Welcome to another entry in the Five-Foot Geekshelf series! This time I’m doing something a little different. Rather than recommending games you should own I’m recommending books about games. Books about the history of the hobby that were written during that history. The list includes books about design as well as books about the culture that built the thing we all love.

I was inspired to write this list when I was researching “The Stanford System” for the article I published last week. When I was digging into who the Jeffrey A. Johnson who wrote the “Fourfold Way of FRP,” I noticed that he worked at EPYX on Temple of Apshai. I also noticed the names of one of the founders of EPYX, Jon Freeman, and I immediately looked to my bookshelf where I found three books on gaming written by him. One of those books was written under a pseudonym and the other two are an interesting pairing.

As I looked at those books I remembered a list of books I put together in a 2012 post I wrote on my old Cinerati Blogger site. In that post I recommended thirteen game books that I thought every gamer should own. I hadn’t even encountered the issues of Twilight Zone Magazine that inspired the Geekshelf series when I chose to provide that list of thirteen books. I’ve always believed that a baker’s dozen of recommendations was the perfect number, but it’s nice to see a bit of serendipity between my subconscious design preferences and those of people like Karl Edward Wagner.

Every gamer I’ve ever met has, at some point, aspired to design. As Gary Gygax points out in his book Role-Playing Mastery (find a cheaper copy than the Amazon one), to design well, you need to know what came before. In case you are wondering, Gygax’s book is not in this list but it will be on another. The books tjat are on this list are the ones I reach for when I want to understand where we came from, why certain design choices became standard, and how the hobby developed from a handful of wargamers in Lake Geneva and Long Island into what it is today. It’s also a place I look to to find recommendations and comments by people who are often overlooked in modern discussions of the history of gaming. A couple of the books are fairly obvious, even hagiographical, but newer gamers might not know about them. The rest you may not have heard of, and those are the ones I’m most excited to talk about.

The original article was one I’ve been meaning to expand those brief annotations into full entries for over a decade, and seeing Jon Freeman’s name again was the perfect excuse. It’s a perfect topic for a Geekshelf entry. So, consider this the version of that post that should have existed all along.

Don’t worry I’ll be getting back to game recommedation and film recommendation lists soon. The 1980s role playing game list is coming and it’s got a couple of games that deserve more love than they’ve received over the years.

1. Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons — (2004, Wizards of the Coast)

I put this book first because it is the most “pop” of the recommendations. I figured I’d get the pure marketing book out of the way as soon as possible. I also wanted to take a moment to remember how Wizards of the Coast used to think about their game. Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons is not an unbiased history of the game. Instead, it is the celebration of a brand. It is a marketing hagiography. It was published by Wizards of the Coast when they were already a Hasbro subsidiary, it was assembled to celebrate D&D’s thirtieth anniversary, and the history it tells is the history that the people with professional investment in that history wanted told. You will not find a balanced account of the TSR/Lorraine Williams era in these pages. You will not find Gary Gygax at his most candid. There are things this book simply will not discuss. Then again, you won’t find Wizards of the Coast expressing embarassment and apologizing for being associated with the creators of the game.

This is the kind of celebration book that should have been written, again, for the 50th anniversary of D&D and I am glad I own this book.

The essays are written by people like Dave “Zeb” Cook, Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, Margaret Weis, and Skip Williams. What those essays give you is not objective history but something arguably more valuable, they give you what D&D felt like to the people who were inside it. The internal mythologies, the genuine affection, the sense of a community that had survived some genuinely difficult years and wanted to celebrate its own survival. That’s primary source material. A purely neutral history of D&D would not tell you what the players thought the story was, and that matters enormously for understanding why the game became what it became. This is a book filled with essays by people telling you how much they loved being a part of something. It is a celebration.

The book also functions as a bibliography in disguise. Every essay by a designer or writer from a particular era is an invitation to go deeper. They are asking you to hunt down the issues of Dragon Magazine they’re referencing, to track down the supplements they mention in passing, to learn the names you didn’t know you needed to know. If you want a starting place on the History of D&D as oral history, this is a good place to start. It isn’t as raw and honest as Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk is. Then again, while I might argue that the creation of D&D was punk in some respects, it was nowhere near as wild as the early punk music scene.

2. 40 Years of Gen Con — Robin D. Laws (2007, Atlas Games)

This is the second, and last, living history hagiography you will see in this list, but it’s one I go back to often. Robin Laws is one of the most thoughtful working designers in the tabletop hobby. His QuestWorlds (a generic version of his earlier HeroQuest/HeroWars work) alone would earn him a permanent place in any history of the hobby, and his Gumshoe system represents one of the clearest solutions to a long-standing problem in mystery RPG design that anyone has produced. He also writes extremely well and has written some great books that combine writing and game master advice. You really should check out his Hamlet’s Hit Points if you get a shot.

The argument that 40 Years of Gen Con makes, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, is that Gen Con is more than just a convention because it’s a living documentary representation of the hobby. The things that have happened at Gen Con over its history trace the arc of what the hobby has cared about, fought over, celebrated, and mourned. The game that launched in Lake Geneva. The years in Milwaukee. The move to Indianapolis. The rise of the collectible card game market in the 1990s, and the crash, are things reflected in the convention’s exhibitor lists as clearly as in any detailed historical or financial accounting. The board game renaissance of the 2000s. Gen Con has been there for all of it, and because it has, this book functions as a history of the hobby told through the story of a single institution.

I have a particular soft spot for convention history as a subject because conventions are where the hobby’s social networks actually exist. Games happen at conventions that never get published. Friendships form that shape decades of design decisions. The oral history of the hobby is inseparable from the history of the conventions where it was passed along. Laws is aware of this, as am I. The years I was able to attend Gen Con, both in Milwaukee and Indianapolis, forever changed how I experienced this hobby. I got to play Tunnels & Trolls with Ken St. Andre, meet Shane Hensley of Deadlands fame, and chat with Robin D. Laws and Ken Hite about H.P. Lovecraft over Old Fashioneds. It’s a magical place that is the true living history of the hobby and this volume is a wonderful celebration of that space.

3. The Complete Book of Wargames — Jon Freeman (1980, Simon & Schuster/Fireside)

You would expect a book about Wargames that was written by one of the most important computer role playing game designers of all-time would be extremely well know. Sadly, that’s not the case. John Freeman was one of the founders of Epyx Games and one of the designers of the DunjonQuest series that included Temple of Apshai. His wife Anne Westfall designed, and programmed, what is probably the best Chess spinoff video game ever designed (Archon), yet I rarely here Jon Freeman’s name mentioned in discussions of the role playing game hobby. When I first picked up The Complete Book of Wargames, for pennies, on eBay, I had no idea who the author was. I just knew that it was an overview of the wargaming hobby in the late 1970s.

The Complete Book of Wargames was written in 1980, which means it was written at the absolute peak of the commercial wargame hobby, just before everything changed. SPI was still publishing. Avalon Hill was still the Avalon Hill that had defined serious wargaming since the late 1950s. The hobby was as big as it had ever been commercially, and it would never quite be that big again. By the time the decade was out, SPI had been acquired by TSR under circumstances that grognards of a certain vintage still discuss with barely contained fury, and the commercial wargame market had contracted to a fraction of its former size.

What Freeman gives you is the taxonomy of that hobby at its height. The book discusses the systems, the designers, the debates, the games that defined each subcategory of the form. The review of the book in Dragon Magazine #46 by Tony Watson argued that the book was unnecessary for experienced gamers. That was probably true at the time. Those involved in the hobby knew more than what was provided in the book, and yet so many of the games discussed in this book are now forgotten.

Freeman’s selections are broad enough to appeal to both the casual and serious gamer and while the book is far from “complete,” it is a perfect primer for the hobby. I particularly like reading Freeman’s recommendations regarding ow to play games and his criteria for evaluating the quality of games is solid. I would expect no less from someone who helped design Temple of Apshai.

4. The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer’s Bible — Sean Patrick Fannon (1996, Prima Publishing and 1999, Obsidian Studios Inc.)

Get the first edition of sean Patrick Fannon’s The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer’s Bible if you can. It’s the one with the purple cover and the stick figure cartoons. I know that sounds like the kind of collector snobbery that drives sensible people out of hobby communities, but I mean it sincerely. The stick figures are part of the book’s charm, and they’re gone in the later edition. They’re earnest and slightly awkward in exactly the way that mid-90s RPG culture was earnest and slightly awkward, and they match Fannon’s enthusiasm in a way that the revised edition’s more polished presentation doesn’t quite capture.

The book occupies a niche that very few books have filled well. It’s not an explanation of what role-playing games are for complete outsiders. There were plenty of those and I might just do a Geekshelf of just those in the future. This is a book for people who already know what an RPG is and want to understand the hobby more deeply. Fannon covers a wide variety of topics with a comprehensiveness that I haven’t seen matched in any comparable volume. These topics include game selection, game mastering philosophy, worldbuilding approaches, group dynamics, and how to find a gaming community.

The hobby has changed a lot since the book was published in 1996 document, but much remains the same. The 1990s were an interesting time in the hobby. This was a time period after the satanic panic had largely wound down, after the CCG boom had started reshaping the hobby market, but before the internet had fully transformed how gamers found each other. Desktop publishing and pdfs were new phenomena. The social infrastructure Fannon describes is its own kind of history. He examines how gamers located other gamers, how information about obscure games circulated, how gaming communities formed and maintained themselves before the internet was widespread. The funny thing is, as the internet becomes more cluttered and worse at its job, these skills are just as needed today.

5. Game Design Vol. 1: Theory and Practice — Nick Schuessler and Steve Jackson (1981, Steve Jackson Games / SJG30-3101)

While the cover says “Vol. 1,” there was never a subsequent volume. Steve Jackson promised that Volume 2 was on the way and it was going to cover component design aids, hints on the best markets for your games, and maybe more. I still wish Volume 2 had been released, but I am greatful Volume 1 was published. The book comes at design from two different positions, one from Nick Schuessler and one from Steve Jackson.

Nick Schuessler was the publisher of The Journal of WWII Wargaming and had taught a University of Texas course in wargame design since 1976. He approaches design from the theoretical and historical end. He comes at game design from a mathematical and simulation-oriented position that is rooted in primary sources. Jackson, who by 1981 had already designed Ogre, G.E.V., Raid on Iran, and The Fantasy Trip, comes from the opposite direction. He learned to design by doing. He playtested until games broke and then patched them back together. The introduction is honest about this tension. Jackson describes shouting “Playability!” at Schuessler’s theoretical arguments while Schuessler shouts “Realism!” back. This book is the playability vs. realism argument made manifest. What is surprising about this setup is that in the end they almost always agreed on what made a good game. That productive friction is what makes the book worth more than either author could have produced alone.

The chapters cover theoretical foundations, historical background, mapping and movement, terrain, combat and play sequence, combat strength and resolution, advanced combat systems, research, components, playtesting, RPG design, designing for the market, and game evaluation. That’s the full arc from “what is a wargame” to “here’s how to get it published,” and the chapters on playtesting and game evaluation are worth the price of admission on their own. Jackson’s playtesting chapter is the single most concentrated piece of practical design wisdom in the hobby literature. His “try the dumb strategies” principle alone is something many designers, and all game masters, should keep in mind. As with Jon Freeman’s thoguhts on game quality, the game evaluation chapter, written from Schuessler’s more critical perspective, is a bracingly honest account of how and why game reviews fail to tell you what you actually need to know before buying something.

I should note something that will delight anyone who has already bought the other books on this list. In the bibliography, Jackson and Schuessler describe Jon Freeman’s Complete Book of Wargames as the best general work on commercial wargaming then in print.

SJG has reprinted it as a PDF and you can buy it for a mere eight dollars. There is no excuse not to own it.

6. Wargame Design — SPI Staff (1977, SPI/Simulations Publications Inc.)

To understand this book you need to understand SPI. Simulations Publications Inc. was, alongside Avalon Hill, one of the two companies that defined serious American wargaming in the 1970s. Where Avalon Hill was the older and more commercially cautious company, SPI was the more intellectually and ludically ambitious operation. While Avalon Hill published a significant number of games, their house magazine (The General) merely included support for existing games. I say merely because SPI’s house magazine (Strategy & Tactics) included a full wargame with every issue. SPI published Strategy & Tactics while simultaneously churning out a constant stream of complex historical simulations like War in the East, the notorious Campaign for North Africa, and the Napoleon at Waterloo series. SPI had ambitions that outran its business model, and it was acquired by TSR in 1982 in circumstances that the wargame community has never fully made peace with. They say that winners write history. If this is true then TSR was the big loser with the purchase and I’ve explained why in an earlier entry.

While SPI existed, it was producing some of the most serious thinking about game design happening anywhere. Wargame Design collects that thinking. It is part history, part design manual, and part manifesto. It reads like a document produced by people who genuinely believed that simulating historical conflicts was an act of intellectual and perhaps even moral seriousness. That sounds grandiose, but it was a real position that real designers held. If you could model Stalingrad accurately enough that players understood why the Germans lost, you had given them something that a history textbook couldn’t. The fact that many of their designs, and designers, have influenced real world military wargaming proves that they were right.

That doesn’t mean you need to believe that every war game should be a serious simulation or an argument about logistics or why and how medieval war changed over time. While the focus of Wargame Design is heavily on the simulation end of the ludic spectrum, the design advice in the book is sophisticated and still useful. Even more important than the design advice though is the history contained within the book. You get a rare glimpse inside the sales figures of SPI and their competitors. They give you a sense of how large the wargaming market was just as AD&D, and D&D Basic, were about to be released.

In 1976 there were at least 841,000 sales in the wargaming market. Business was booming, but by 1982 SPI would be owned by TSR and eventually Avalon Hill would be absorbed by Wizards of the Coast (who own TSR). Wargaming thrives today. There are a host of companies ranging from desktop publishing to medium sized business (GMT Games). While it thrives, it is not the giant it was trending to become. The thoughts on design from that time are an interesting read and are both informative and a cautionary tale.

7. A Player’s Guide to Table Games — John Jackson (1975, Chilton Books)

I don’t know why Jon Freeman wrote A Player’s Guide to Table Games under the name John Jackson. I don’t know if he was writing under a pseudonym or if he later changed his name from Jackson to Freeman. What I do know, because The Playboy Winners Guide to Board Games (see below) makes it clear on its copyright page, is that they are the same person. It’s also clear if you read The Complete Book of Wargames. The stylistic fingerprints are identical. The characteristic way the author situates a game within its historical context before evaluating it, the particular balance of enthusiasm and analytical distance, the breadth of knowledge that ranges comfortably from Monopoly to Squad Leader are not coincidental similarities. They are the same writer, writing for different publishers under different names.

Freeman wouldn’t form Epyx with his partner until 1978, so it’s pretty impressive that he got a book on Table Games published at all. Though once you’ve read the book you understand why. Jackson/Freeman knows his games and how to play them. He’s a great pitchman for the industry. His combination of enthusiasm and insight make the book a good read for any gamer, new or experienced. Keep in mind that the late 60s and early 70s were a boom period for Table Games.

The book predates The Complete Book of Wargames by five years, and it catches the tabletop hobby at an earlier moment, one where the line between mass market and hobby games is just beginning to solidify into the distinction we now take for granted. Jackson writes about Sid Sackson with the same seriousness he brings to hex-and-counter wargames, and that’s unusual enough to be worth noting. Sid Sackson’s designs like Acquire, Can’t Stop, Sleuth, and eventually Focus helped to supercharge not just “Ameritrash” gaming. His emphasis on elegant mechanics that reward deep play connected directly to what would become the Euro game tradition. In this book, Jackson/Freeman traces those connections before they were conventional wisdom. Where SPI’s book focused on the simulation side of playability vs. simulation, Jackson/Freeman is a huge advocate for playability.

8. Family Games: The 100 Best — edited by James Lowder (2010, Green Ronin Publishing)

There are two books in the Lowder 100 Best series, and I’m going to discuss them together across this entry and the next because they’re companion volumes that are best understood in relation to each other. Own both. Read both. Then play every game on both lists that you can find.

Family Games: The 100 Best is the more accessible of the two. Like A Player’s Guide to Table Games, it covers games that can be played with non-gaming family members, games that bridge mass market and hobby, games that serve as on-ramps. The contributors range across the hobby: designers, writers, historians, enthusiasts, each assigned a game they love and asked to make the case for it. The games range from 10 Days in the USA and Apple to Apples (you should be playing this instead of Cards Against Humanity which “is similar”) to Guillotine, Monopoly, and Zooloretto. That’s right. This volume defends Monopoly, and it’s Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games who does the defending. Take that gaming purists!

The format is what makes both volumes more than lists. Each entry is written by a different person with a different relationship to the game they’re discussing, which means the book becomes a mosaic of perspectives on what games are for. One contributor emphasizes mechanical elegance. Another talks about family ritual. A third traces a game’s influence on everything that came after it. Read all the essays and you end up with something like a genuine theory of why tabletop games matter. You’ll learn game design theory through case study from a hundred individual arguments, none of which is making the whole case but all of which contribute to it.

9. Hobby Games: The 100 Best — edited by James Lowder (2007, Green Ronin Publishing)

Hobby Games: The 100 Best tilts toward the specialist end of the hobby. These are games with steeper learning curves, games aimed at dedicated hobbyists, games that were influential within the hobby even if they never crossed over to mainstream awareness. The contributors include many of the most significant designers and writers working in tabletop at the time of publication, and the games range from classic wargames to Euro imports to landmark RPG supplements.

Published three years before Family Games, this book has a slightly more urgent quality to it. You can feel the writers aware that they are making an argument at a particular moment in the hobby’s history. The board game renaissance was just beginning to gather the momentum that would eventually make tabletop gaming a mainstream leisure activity rather than a specialist pursuit. Some of these essays read like dispatches from the front lines of that cultural argument. There are arguments praising Button Men and Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons and Gettysburg. If you want a book that serves as the foundation of a games collection, you could just buy every game in this book and you’d never need another game. This is a true list of bangers, written by some of the best designers in the history of gaming.

There is one caveat for the book some of the games included in this volume are out of print, unlikely to return, and receive no other substantial critical treatment anywhere. The essays written about them are the most considered accounts those games are likely to get. That’s its own kind of value, separate from the recommendation function the books are most known for. The hobby’s history is not well documented, and every serious piece of writing about a particular game is part of the documentation.

10. Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games — Lawrence Schick (1991, Prometheus Books)

Lawrence Schick is not just a historian of the RPG hobby, he’s a participant in it. He designed White Plume Mountain for D&D, did significant work at TSR during the early AD&D years, and later at other companies. His position inside the industry gave him access to designers, to primary documents, and to institutional memory that an outside historian simply could not have obtained. The result is the most comprehensive survey of the RPG hobby as it existed in the early 1990s that has ever been produced.

The book is organized as a reference work. It catalogs an enormous number of games and supplements with brief descriptions and assessments. but Schick’s analytical voice comes through clearly. His brief notes on individual games often contain more genuine critical thinking than much longer reviews from gaming magazines of the era. He has opinions, they’re grounded, and he’s not shy about expressing them. He has also translated a some very entertaining editions of The Three Musketeers, but that is a discussion for another time.

What makes the book indispensable now, in 2026, is precisely what might seem like its limitation. It was published in 1991. Vampire: The Masquerade had just come out. Shadowrun was in its first edition. The long shadow of the satanic panic was still visible. The games Schick catalogs are the games that defined what role-playing meant to the generation that built the hobby, and understanding that foundation is essential for understanding everything that has come since. It makes a wonderful companion guide to Shannon Appelcline’s history of the role playing hobby, with one added benefit. It is also an extremely good completist checklist for the collector. I’ve been using it as one for thirty years.

11. The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming — Nicholas Palmer (1977, Hippocrene Books)

Palmer is an Englishman writing about what was, in the 1970s, largely an American hobby. That slight angle of outside observation gives the book a quality that insider accounts often lack. He is genuinely enthusiastic about wargaming but he’s not reverent, and he’s willing to say when a celebrated game is celebrated more for historical reasons than because it’s actually good. That makes his evaluative judgments more trustworthy than those of writers who were more deeply embedded in the hobby’s commercial and social networks.

The book covers the major game systems with unusual clarity. He examines the different approaches to combat resolution, supply, command and control, and scale. Unlike many reviewers, it is clear that Palmer has PLAYED these games. Palmer explains not just what these design choices are but why they matter, which is a harder thing to do and more valuable. His discussion of how you model historical uncertainty in a game where the player has perfect information about their own forces is as good an introduction to the fundamental challenge of wargame design as I’ve encountered anywhere.

He also presents a number of “problems” in the book related to the games he discusses. Palmer presents a series of tactical problems drawn from published games and asks you to work out the best approach, usually one per chapter with each chapter highlighting a design concept. They’re not just rules-application exercises, they’re genuine problems about how to balance competing considerations under time pressure and imperfect information. They illuminate, in a very direct way, what wargaming as a hobby is actually for.

12. The Best of Board Wargaming — Nicholas Palmer (1980, Hippocrene Books)

The Best of Board Wargaming is an excellent companion to The Comprehensive Guide. Where the Guide is organized around systems and concepts, this one is organized around specific games. These are the games that Palmer, and polls, consider the best the hobby has produced as of 1980. Where the Guide goes into detail regarding a few games, this one is a true survey which means the two volumes are best owned and read together.

The Simulation versus Playability debate gets its most extended treatment here, and Palmer’s version of the argument is worth sitting with even if you’ve encountered the same debate framed differently elsewhere. The basic question he keeps returning to is. “when does fidelity to historical reality start working against the game, and when does simplification for playability start working against the history?” There is no universal answer, which is why designers are still arguing about it, but Palmer maps the terrain of the disagreement more carefully than most.

Because of when they were released, these books end up documenting a specific moment in the history of a hobby that has since changed enormously. The commercial wargame industry Palmer was writing about in 1977 and 1980 has a thriving fanbase, but is not as mainstream as it once was. You saw those SPI numbers above. Modern wargames don’t tend to sell anywhere near those late numbers. The era of publishing giants with a relatively large fan base has been replaced by a smaller, more passionate community of hobbyists who support companies like GMT and MMP. You still see a lot of wargame DNA in video game strategy titles. I see echoes of it every time I play a Total War game, but the modern environment is different enough that Palmer’s world can feel like a foreign country. It’s a foreign country worth visiting.

13. The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games — Jon Freeman (1979, Playboy Press)

This book is a reprint of the earlier published “John Jackson” book on table games, but I include it as its own entry for a couple of reasons. The first is because it was published 4 years later and adds additional material filling the time game. The second is that Jackson is now using the name Freeman, signalling he wanted to connect the book with his design work at Epyx. Third, because it is a “Playboy” branded paperback book, which signals that board gaming was WAY more mainstream by the late 70s than it was in the middle of the decade when the book was originally published.

The book is an anomaly by any measur. It is a serious, analytically rigorous treatment of tabletop games published under a Playboy imprint, which means that substantive discussions of hex-and-counter wargame design appeared alongside whatever else Playboy Press was publishing in 1979. Freeman acknowledges, with characteristic dryness, that there are no pictures. You are reading it for the prose. The prose justifies the reading. In this case, readers really were reading a “Playboy” for the articles. There wasn’t anything else in the book. Other than the branding, this book is Kindergarten appropriate.

The extension into role-playing games and the serious treatment of Squad Leader alongside Risk and Scrabble is where the book earns its place as an addition to the earlier volume. Freeman is doing something here that none of the other books on this list quite attempt: he is arguing that all of these games belong to a single tradition and can be understood by a single analytical framework. For him, the mass market ones your grandmother owns, the hobby games your game group argues about, the wargames that take six hours and a bookcase worth of rules, are kindred spirits. It’s an ecumenical position that I share. I love “Hobby Games.” I love Miniatures Games. I love Role Playing Games. Heck, I love Candyland. To me, these are all different forms of the spirit of Homo Ludens. We are creatures that play and all of these forms of play are in the same family.

Freeman discusses the Simulation versus Playability question in all three of his books on this list, but that discussion reaches its fullest expression here precisely because the scope is broadest. You can see the whole thing from up here.

That’s thirteen books, and I’ve already thought of several I left out. Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons series should probably be its own entry when I get to post-2012 game books. It’s the most comprehensive history of the RPG industry that exists and it belongs on every serious collector’s shelf. Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World is probably the single best book about the origins of D&D ever written, but it was published after the 2012 post this is expanding on, so it’ll wait for a future list. And Rick Swan’s Complete Guide to Role Playing Games should have been number fourteen here, but I’ve already written about it separately and I can only be so self-referential in a single post.

What else have I missed? Tell me in the comments. I’ll make sure to write about them in the future.

The California Role Playing Scene: Lords of Chaos #2, Phantasmagoria #1 and the Stanford System (1977)

Christian Lindke — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:24:06 GMT

There’s a moment in the history of any hobby where the people who are going to change it haven’t quite changed it yet. They’re playing games in basements and dormitories, arguing about rules that don’t quite work, and writing things down for one another in typewritten fanzines that almost nobody outside their immediate circle will ever read. The California RPG Scene in the mid-1970s was full of those moments. Some of those moments, Cal-Tech’s Warlock, the creation of the Thief Class for D&D, Supergame by DAG Design, and The Arduin Grimoire, are relatively well-known in gaming historiography circles. There are probably far more that have been lost.

There is one that I think is for the most part lost and forgotten and I’d like to rekindle interest in it so that we can hopefully get the full picture. If I hadn’t been stopped in my tracks by an aside in an article in Different Worlds #11, and pursued a relatively long Google dive, I wouldn’t have known about this D&D variant at all and it’s possible you didn’t either.

How much do you know about “The Stanford System” for Dungeons & Dragons? They were the house rules that a particular community of Stanford gamers used in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are rules that may, or may not, have influenced Epyx games’ Dunjonquest: The Temple of Apshai, because Jeffrey A Johnson (the author of the article in in Different World #11 that mentions the Stanford System) was one of the designers of Temple of Apshai. Prior to re-reading the Four-Fold Way article last December, I hadn’t known about The Stanford System at all.

Text from Temple of Apshai Marketing Materials (left) in Poptronics March 1980 and “All About Epyx” in Commodore Magazine August 1989

Given how many times I’ve read Different Worlds #11, there really is no excuse for this oversight, but it remains true. I missed it and I thought you might have too. Different Worlds is, as I’ve mentioned many times, one of the most important gaming magazines ever to be published. While it was a Chaosium house organ, it covered the wider world of role playing games and, like Alarums and Excursions and Lords of Chaos, was at the center of the California Roleplaying Scene.

Jeffrey A. Johnson’s article “The Fourfold Way of FRP” in Different Worlds #11 was a response to Glenn Blacow’s article on Role-Playing Game Styles in issue #10 of the magazine. Both of these articles are cornerstones of roleplaying game design theory that you’ll see discussed widely, often by people who’ve heard of the articles but never actually read them. The articles are insightful and speak to many of the conflicts in the modern hobby as much as they spoke about the cleavages in the 1970s and 1980s. When it comes to gaming styles, it seems there is nothing new under the sun. Early in the article Jeffrey A. Johnson writes the following:

He writes that the “Stanford System” is heavily on the simulation/wargaming end of the pure fantasy/wargaming axis. The context in which he makes this statement implies that he expects his readers to know exactly what he is talking about, but after asking around my gaming circles I couldn’t find anyone who had any idea what this system was. To be fair, the article was written 46 years ago. I’ve reached out to Tadashi Ehara, the editor of Different Worlds, and George MacDonald of Hero Games and SSI who worked with Jeffrey A. Johnson, but I haven’t heard back from them on that.

After getting as much as I could out of my social network contacts, I decided to see if my Google-Fu could uncover anything. That’s when I stumbled across Tom Van Winkle’s 2020 blogpost on the topic. It’s a pretty rich discussion of The Stanford System and led me to another source of information, a personal zine called Phantasmagoria #1 written by Barry Eynon (whom I think I identified, but who didn’t respond to my LinkedIn attempt to connect). Another Google search later and I discovered that I could get a copy of Phantasmagoria #1 to examine on my own.

Phantasmagoria #1 was published in the Fall of 1977 as part of The Lords of Chaos #2, three full years before Johnson’s article in Different Worlds. This demonstrates a kind of staying power that should have made The Stanford System something that gets talked about more frequently The Lords of Chaos was an Amateur Press Association1 edited by Nicolai Shapero out of Belmont, California. Shapero, who also appears in gaming history under the names “Niall Shapero” and “Niall Shapiro,” was a contributor to Lee Gold’s Alarums & Excursions and would go on to create the science fiction RPG Other Suns for Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1983. When I lived in Southern California, I chatted with Shapero at a couple of science fiction club meetings down there. I’ve sent him a message to see if he knows more too.

At its peak The Lords of Chaos had around 200 subscribers, published every two months then quarterly, then running to 13 issues through 1981. It’s a wonderful trove of information and counted Steve Marsh, Steve Perrin, and Lee Gold among its contributors. Dragon #50 called its writers “some of the best writers from other APAs.” It was, in short, not a mere vanity project. It was a legitimate node in the California gaming network, even if it was too short lived. I say too short lived because it’s also where the Wayne Shaw developed his alternate rules for Superhero 2044. Those rules would go on to inspire the creation of Supergame and Champions.

The piece Shapero coaxed out of Eynon was addressed, in Eynon’s words, to “the rarefied tastes of those who indulge in the game of Dungeons & Dragons.” It is a brief document that is only four typewritten pages, but it contains a description of what Eynon and his fellow Stanford players called the “Stanford System.” This was a seat of D&D house rules, possibly near-complete rewrite like Cal-Tech’s Warlock, that addressed what they saw as D&D’s fundamental design problems.

As you know, I’ve been documenting the California RPG Scene here on Geekerati for some time. I think that games Supergame, Wayne Shaw’s house rules for Superhero 2044, and the Arduin Grimoire, are important documents in gaming history. I love to discuss the remarkable density of innovation that came out of the Bay Area and Southern California in those early years. The Stanford System belongs in that conversation. If anything, it belongs near the top of it, even as it remains in the shadows of the past.

Barry Eynon? Who Is That?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I used to frequent Aero Hobbies as my go-to gaming store. Gary, the owner, was very generous with his time and connected me with a lot of other gamers in the community. Pretty soon, I was playing in 3rd Edition D&D groups and having a great time. Every time I visited the store, Gary would try to sell me on Runequest and he eventually won me over. I had a lot of chats with him, but it wasn’t until after he died that I found out that it was his call to Gary Gygax that facilitated the creation of the Thief Class in D&D. Now Gary didn’t create the Thief, it was the creation of one of the gamers at his store named Darrold Daniel Wagner, but it was Gary’s call that set the official publication ball in motion. Ever since then, I’ve had a desire to learn about the people behind the early ideas of the hobby.

In that spirit I’d like to spend a moment on the man who detailed what we have about the Stanford System, because he’s a person who has slipped almost entirely through the cracks of RPG history. Of course, so too have Jon Freeman and Jeffrey A. Johnson, who were both likely a part of the “Stanford Scene” and who created Temple of Apshai and other games only to be rarely discussed in modern gaming circles. It’s no wonder I keep reading new discoveries of long known facts in online discussions. We gamers do not share our history with each other near enough.

Have you ever noticed how often gamers assert their bona fides before they discuss their ideas? You probably have. You’ve read enough of my stuff and half of my entries are justifications for what I am writing. Well, Eynon makes sure to let the readers of Lords of Chaos know he is one of us/them. He points out that he is “a wargamer from way back.” Given the connection between wargames and roleplaying games, this was the default credentials for anyone designing games in 1977. He says he came to D&D about two years earlier through the Ryth Campaign, the Detroit-area campaign run by John Van De Graaf and Len Scensny that has its own minor legendary status among early D&D historians. He arrived in California for graduate study at Stanford in 1976, and by the time he wrote Phantasmagoria, he claims to have played under every major rules variant in circulation, from the Perrin System to Warlock, while collecting DMs for the Stanford unified campaign project.

I don’t know what he’s written since. I found a post on rec.games.board from the 1990s, but the Stanford System itself was never published. Unlike a lot of other Bay Area gamers, like Mike Pondsmith, Sandy Petersen, and George MacDonald, he doesn’t seem to have migrated over to video game design as a career. A huge number of computer role playing game designers came from the Bay Area scene. I guess it helps to be an early adopter of a hobby right in the heart of the computer revolution.

Why the Stanford System Exists

Thanks to the library holdings at UC Riverside, I have a copy of Phantasmagoria #1. I’ve created a recreated copy at the end of the post for research purposes. I’ll take it down if Barry asks. It’s a remarkable read and a great glimpse into house rule creation past and present. The opening invocation sets the tone immediately:

Fleeing from the hounds of Hell, pursued by the Lords of Chaos themselves, came I at last, as in a dream, upon the Word...

That’s the epigraph. The man knew how to open a fanzine. What follows is a clear-eyed, analytically rigorous critique of D&D’s underlying design logic, written by someone who had played enough variants to know what was structural and what was superficial.

Eynon’s core argument is deceptively simple. He argues that Gygax and Arneson wrote down rules for a game they were already playing, and the resulting system has some deep incoherences baked into it. We know now this this is only partly true, but what we know about the historical development of D&D only amplifies his comment regarding system incoherences from a certain perspective.

Unlike many critics, he’s careful not to be dismissive. Eynon acknowledges that D&D is fun and playable if you use common sense and aren’t afraid to call Lake Geneva for clarifications, but he thinks you can do better by starting over with slightly different assumptions. Remember, this is a 1977 zine and so pre-dates Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I love the old White Box rules, but they are easier to understand if you already know how to play D&D in some form.

He lists the problems he and his fellow Stanford DMs kept running into when they tried to unify their campaign:

No one ever gets tired. The game has no fatigue or endurance system.
Carrying treasure out of dungeons teaches you to throw spells and wield a broadsword. Gold-for-XP is modeling the wrong thing.
Getting better means you can survive being stabbed more times. Escalating hit points as an abstraction for skill doesn’t match intuition.
A fighter who has never touched a bow can suddenly shoot like William Tell at high level. Class-based uniform skill blocks ignore what you’ve actually done.
A mage goes up a level and a tome containing all his new spells is magically presented to him. Automatic spell acquisition without study or effort.

What I find striking about this list, and I’ve been looking at it for a while now, is that it’s essentially the same list of complaints that would drive independent game design for the next decade and continues to drive a lot of design discussion. Spend a day on X or Bluesky chatting about RPGs and you are likely to read one of these critiques even today. The endurance problem is something that Runequest and other games solve. The gold-for-XP problem is what the entire OSR has been arguing about since 2008 and is something no other role playing game has adopted. The hit point escalation problem is what the Arduin Grimoire addresses with its brutal damage tables. The uniform skill block problem is what the skill-based systems like Runequest, Champions, GURPS, eventually D&D 3rd edition’s skill system take a swing at. There’s a reason I say that D&D became GURPS with 3rd edition. The automatic spell acquisition problem is addressed by, among others, the magic guild system in Runequest and the Stanford System sounds a bit like Dragonbane’s.

Eynon and his Stanford colleagues were essentially identifying the exact fault lines along which D&D would fracture and reform over the next thirty years. In 1977. In a four-page fanzine.

The Stanford System: What It Actually Did

The group’s solution, informally called the “Stanford System,” had been in use in their campaign for more than six months by the time Eynon wrote Phantasmagoria. He notes it was maintained in a computer file for easy modification and expected to be available in print “toward the end of the summer.” It never was, as far as I have been able to determine. The document may be lost, but if it was actually kept in computer form it might still be around. Though the article was written in 1977, so Heaven only knows if it’s on an easily retrievable medium. If you have a copy, please contact me immediately.

Eynon gives us a sketch of the system’s salient features, and even the sketch is impressive:

1. An endurance system. Walking, fighting, and throwing spells all cost endurance points. Some can be recovered during an expedition by resting. This is the first published description of an endurance-based resource management system in a role-playing game, as far as anyone can tell. This was the claim that Tom Van Winkle made in his 2020 blog post on the Stanford System. I’d have to do some additional research but I find the claim credible. As always, I’d welcome pushback from anyone who knows otherwise. Crucially, hit points don’t escalate much. The damage you can take before dying stays fairly constant with level. Advancement instead increases how many endurance points you have in a given day. Endurance then, critically, determines how good you are at blocking blows in the first place. Better fighters don’t just absorb more punishment. They are better at avoiding it.

2. A split experience system. Fighters gain experience in specific weapon types from actually using them in combat. Mages progress individually in five categories of magic: Bewilder, Control Energy, Protection, Move & Reshape, and Detect & Enhance. There is also an overall category that determines magic resistance and total endurance. This is, functionally, a skill system, one of the earliest in role-playing games, predating the better-known BRP/Runequest approach by about a year, but coming after Traveller. It should be noted that character advancement in Traveller is very slow though and that skills don’t change much after your character survives character creation. If it survives.

3. Treasure doesn’t teach you to throw spells. The only way treasure affects ability is if it’s spent on training or better equipment. Mages have to study and pay for new spells from the Guild. The California scene was full of people rejecting XP-for-gold independently of one another; what’s notable here is the Guild requirement for spell acquisition, which is a specific and elegant solution to problem #5 above. It’s similar to the approach Tunnels & Trolls took and might have been influenced by Ken St. Andre’s design.

4. Damage stays roughly constant. As noted above, what scales with level is your endurance pool and your ability to avoid or block blows. This is the same intuition that drives Runequest’s hit location and armor system. The key idea here is that heroic characters survive because they’re skilled, not because they’re effectively made of more meat.

Correlated Characteristics: The Part That Makes Game Designers Sit Up

The most immediately distinctive feature of Phantasmagoria #1, and the part I think deserves the most attention, is a character creation section at the end called “Correlated Characteristics.”

The Stanford System used nine ability scores instead of D&D’s six. They took Dexterity and split it into Dexterity and Agility, a distinction that would reappear in many later games. They took Charisma and split it into Persuasiveness and Leadership. They added Size as a distinct characteristic, something that Runequest would also do.

The addition of Size is particularly interesting. Tom Van Winkle’s research suggests that Size as an explicit game mechanic may have originated at Stanford or at CalTech (the Warlock rules from 1975 also use Size, and the priority is genuinely unclear). What is clear is that Size appears in Runequest, where it directly modifies hit points, and in Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system. Steve Perrin, co-designer of Runequest, was deeply embedded in the Bay Area gaming community during this period. He was a co-founder of the SCA, his Perrin Conventions were circulating as D&D house rules, and he almost certainly knew what people were doing at Stanford. The pipeline from the Stanford System to Runequest may not be direct, but it’s not imaginary either because the people were likely hanging out at the various Bay Area gaming conventions. As I’ll discuss in a later post on Superhero games, the use of a Size characteristic makes a lot of stuff very easy to DM.

One thing that really caught my eye was the concept of correlated characteristics. Eynon and company weren’t just using nine characteristics. They were also generating them in a way that created statistical correlation between related attributes. The idea is intuitive. You’d expect someone with an 18 Strength to be more likely to have a high Constitution than someone with a 3 Strength. Generating each characteristic independently doesn’t reflect that.

Their solution is elegant. They created a table, which I’ve recreated below in a form that I hope makes it a bit easier to read than the original typewritten version, that groups characteristics into dice-rolling pools. For each pair of boxes connected by a + symbol, you only roll one die and place the result in both boxes. This creates positive correlation between linked attributes. For the one pair connected by an = symbol (Size and Agility, which are negatively correlated because the game assumes larger characters tend to be less agile), you roll one D6 and place the result in the top box, then 7 minus the result in the bottom box. This gives you an inverse roll of the prior result, making Size and Agility directly negatively correlated.

The result is a set of nine characteristics that feel like they belong to the same person rather than a random collision of numbers. It takes a little longer to generate, but it produces what Eynon calls “nicer (less incongruous) sets of characteristics.”

I am +3 against anyone who reads that and doesn’t immediately want to use it.

The Stanford System Enters the Wider Conversation

Here’s the thing that I think seals the case for taking the Stanford System seriously as a historical artifact and not merely an interesting curiosity. It didn’t stay inside the APA fanzine network.

As I mentioned earlier when I discussed my inspiration for this article, Jeffrey A. Johnson mentioned the Stanford System in February/March of 1981 in the pages of Different Worlds #11. Different Worlds wasn’t a small fanzine. It was a Chaosium publication, meaning it had the institutional backing of the company that had just published Runequest and was the center of the Bay Area game design world. These two articles have became one of the most influential theories of game design published in the early hobby. Most people only mention Blacow, even though the framework is called “the Fourfold Way” which is the name of Johnson’s article, and it’s still cited today as a precursor to GNS theory and modern discussions of player types. So the Stanford System is discussed in an article that is a cornerstone of the indierpg storygame movement of the early 2000s, even though no one knows it by name.

That’s remarkable to me.

For a document that was never formally published, that never became a commercial product, that exists today as four typewritten pages in the back of an APA fanzine, that is a remarkable lifespan.

I am not completely certain who Jeffrey A. Johnson was. There’s a reason I say the Stanford System “may” have been connected to Temple of Apshai. Sure, Jon Freeman and Jeffrey A. Johnson are both D&D players from the Bay Area who played games with people at Stanford, but Johnson’s a common enough name (it is after all my pre-married name and I get a ton of emails for various Christian Johnson). I can’t be sure that the Jeffrey A. Johnson who wrote to Different Worlds is the same one who worked at Epyx and SSI. It would be cool to think that the Stanford System influenced not only Temple of Apshai, but Pool of Radiance and all the Gold Box D&D Games too. That would mean it influenced the first Baldur’s Gate and thus the most recent game, Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s a lot of influence for a fogotten and rarely discussed manuscript. I’ve not been able to identify him to my satisfaction, but whoever he was, he wrote for a Chaosium publication and assumed his readers would recognize “the Stanford System” without explanation. That assumption is itself the evidence. The Stanford System wasn’t a secret known only to the people who built it. It was part of the shared vocabulary of the California gaming scene.

I want to be careful not to overclaim. Phantasmagoria #1 is a four-page sketch of a system that was never fully published, written by someone who has never been a major figure in the history of the hobby. The Stanford System may have influenced Runequest or Runequest may have independently arrived at similar conclusions. Game design is full of parallel invention, and the California scene in the late 1970s was a remarkably fertile environment where a lot of smart people were working on a lot of the same problems at the same time.

What I can say with confidence is this. In the Fall of 1977, Barry Eynon and a handful of Stanford Dungeonmasters had identified many game design elements that people continue to discuss as problems with D&D’s design. They proposed workable solutions to all of them, and implemented those solutions in an active campaign. The solutions they proposed (endurance-based resource management, skill-based experience, treasure spent on training, non-escalating hit points, correlated ability score generation) were genuinely novel, and several of them would be independently reinvented by major commercial game designers over the following decade.

The California scene keeps delivering these moments: the Warlock rules at CalTech which were published by a game store in Long Beach, the Perrin Conventions, the invention of the Thief class by gamers at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, the Arduin Grimoire, Supergame, Wayne Shaw’s house rules for Superhero 2044. All of these are significant parts of the history of roleplaying games and the California scene does not get talked about enough.

I want to take a moment to say how grateful I am that UC Riverside, where I’m completing my doctorate, has copies of many of these fanzines, because without institutions treating this material as worth preserving, it would be entirely gone.

Phantasmagoria #1 is a document that deserved better than near-oblivion. It still does.

I’ve put together a cleaned-up version of Phantasmagoria #1 as a PDF, which you can download at the link below. The text has been OCR-transcribed from the original scan and lightly corrected. The scan quality makes a few words genuinely ambiguous, but I have tried to stay as close to Eynon’s original language as possible. The Correlated Characteristics table has been recreated as a visualization rather than reproduced from the scan, both because the original is difficult to read and because I think a clean version makes the elegance of the system more legible.

Barry Eynon’s address and phone number, which appeared in the original colophon, have been redacted.

Phantasmagoria 1 Stanford 1977

13.9KB ∙ PDF file

Thanks to Tom Van Winkle, whose 2020 blog post “The Stanford System of Role-Playing Games (1976-77)“ is the most substantial prior research on this subject, and who deserves considerable credit for bringing it to attention. Thanks also to Glenn F. Blacow, whose “Aspects of Adventure Gaming” (Different Worlds #10, Oct/Nov 1980) set the stage for Jeffrey A. Johnson’s “The Fourfold Way of FRP” (Different Worlds #11, Feb/Mar 1981) . Johnson’s piece contains, as far as I can tell, the only contemporary mention of the Stanford System in a nationally distributed publication. If you have any information about Barry Eynon, the complete Stanford System document, or other materials from the Stanford gaming community in the late 1970s, I would very much like to hear from you.

APAs are fanzines assembled from contributions by multiple writers and distributed to subscribers

Researching the Science Fiction Geekshelf: Adventures in Time and Space

Christian Lindke — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:13:08 GMT

This is a greatly expanded version of an article that was originally posted at cinerati.blogspot.com.

There is a particular kind of book that does double duty. It entertains you on the surface and underneath, it makes an argument. Adventures in Time and Space, the 1946 anthology edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, is that kind of book. It includes thirty-five stories of rockets and aliens and temporal paradoxes and creatures that shouldn’t exist in a single 900+ page volume. All of the stories came from the pre-war pulps, in particular Astounding Science Fiction, and presented for the neophyte and casual fan easy access to stories that might be otherwise difficult to track down. Okay, it technically contains 33 stories and 2 essays, but who’s counting? Adventures in Time and Space is not merely a collection of good science fiction stories. It is possibly, as Don Sakers argued in Analog magazine, the most important Science Fiction anthology ever published. It is Healy and McComas’ “35 Theses.” Along with Crown Publishers’ 1948 A Treasury of Science Fiction, it is among the only science fiction hardcovers to be distributed by a large mainstream publisher. As such, it is a treatise arguing that science fiction is Literature, with a capital L, and that people who dismiss the genre on principle are wrong.

It is a book of which Lester del Rey wrote, in his 1953 review of the book, “If you have a friend whom you want to convert to science fiction, you can’t go wrong lending him a copy of this book.” While Lester del Rey has been the victim of much recent, and wrong minded, literary parricide1 regarding the role he and his wife played in the growth (or death as the critics assert) of Fantasy as a genre, he was one of the great Science Fiction critics. I find that today’s YouTube literary critics, of both the “curmudgeon” and “newest wave rulez” sides of literary culture wars, spend far too much time attacking the authors of the mid-20th Century Science Fiction and Fantasy scenes, and too little time actually reading them.

I love many of the authors of that era. They pushed Science Fiction and Fantasy in new directions, even before Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock pushed their New Wave writers. I adore this book as a cornerstone of my Science Fiction library and own the 1957 Modern Library edition. It is the sort of book that looks out at me from the shelf with quiet authority. I return to it regularly. I return not just to revisit a comfort read, but as a primary source document that informs me of what the state of Science Fiction was in its Golden Age. It is the Aristotle’s Rhetoric of pre-war Science Fiction. Like Artistotle’s Rhetoric, it is making an argument.

Arguments in Time and Space

Healy and McComas were not modest men, the my volume opens with the editors agreeing that critics have called the anthology “definitive,” and then agreeing with the critics because the praise really belongs to the editor who first published most of the stories, John W. Campbell, Jr. They write that “perhaps no one man ever had a greater influence over a literary form,” and then they make the case.

Healy and McComas argue that prior to Campbell’s arrival as editor of Astounding Stories in 1937, science fiction had badly deteriorated from the standards established by Wells and Verne. Sure, there were some editors who wanted genuine scientific speculation, but they often let those stories appear dressed in atrocious prose. My sense is that these scientifically accurate stories read like procedural or technical manuals. In Healy and McComas’ telling, most magazines offered neither genuine scientific speculation or good writing. To use their phrase, they stated that “magazines nominally presenting science fiction offered science was claptrap and the fiction was graceless and dull.” Campbell, they argue, changed all of that. He demanded that science fiction think rigorously, write seriously, and imagine daringly.

Twenty years before the New Wave would engage in an attempt to redefine the genre, in part by attacking the old as staid and disconnected from realityz, Healy and McComas were saying that Campbell did much of the same thing for his generation of readers. I read those words today and I don’t think Healy and McComas are overstating the case, nor do I think Ellison was overstating his. Both are right that the genre had stagnated. Of course, both were hyperbolic in their assertions as the eras that preceeded them still had much to offer.

Campbell’s shadow still looms over science fiction the way Lin Carter’s looms over fantasy and August Derleth’s looms over the Weird Tale. This is is to say that you cannot understand how the genre developed without understanding what these editors valued, what they demanded of their contributors, and what they refused to publish. The editor who shapes a genre’s output shapes the genre itself, sometimes more than any single writer does.

Campbell’s editorial philosophy was genuinely distinctive, and it’s worth articulating what it actually was. He wanted stories in which science was not a backdrop or a stage prop, but a character. The scientific element had to matter and be meaningful for the audience. It should be reflected in the mode of thinking that the protagonist applied to problems, and that the reader should be able to follow thos solutions step by step. Campbell wanted engineers and scientists who thought like engineers and scientists, not like square-jawed adventurers who happened to carry ray guns. And perhaps most distinctively, he wanted optimism. Not naive optimism, not the refusal to acknowledge danger, but the underlying conviction that human intelligence, applied rigorously and creatively, could solve the problems that human intelligence had created.

You can see his influence in Issac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot stories, which under Campbell’s hand read like a justification for scientific management (Foundation) or an entertaining logic puzzle transformed into narrative (the Robot stories). After Campbell no longer influence these Asimov stories, they went from feeling as if they were in distinct and different futures into one where the Robots were the ones performing the incredible scientific management and in doing so, they lost there humanity. Hari Seldon being a robot undermines the optimism of human achievment.

This optimism about human intelligence is the animating faith of Campbellian science fiction, and it explains more about the era’s themes than any single editorial directive could. That two of the most successful Science Fiction films (and books) of recent years (The Martian and Project Hail Mary) harken to that formula is a sign that readers want that kind of hope and that while the psychedelic cynicism of the New Wave has value, people also want to believe in something.

The Intellectual DNA: Nexialism and Psychohistory

I have to warn you about something I notice every time I dive into the Campbellian canon. For author after author, the themes rhyme. Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt might all have different “voices” as authors, but the arguments they are making in their stories are not their own. They are Campbellian to the core.

Read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories and A.E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of Space Beagle and Slan in a single sustained run, and something begins to emerge from the background noise. Asimov’s “psychohistory,” the fictional science of predicting the behavior of populations over vast spans of time through the application of rigorous mathematical modeling, sounds remarkably similar to van Vogt’s “nexialism,” the discipline of integrating knowledge across scientific fields to solve problems that specialists, siloed in their individual domains, cannot address. Both are collection-of-disciplines philosophies. Both posit a kind of master science. Both advance a way of thinking that transcends the limitations of narrow expertise by synthesizing it into something greater. Don’t get me started on Mentats in Dune World (Analog Magazine December 1963 - February 1964, edited by…John W. Campbell) and the rejection of “thinking machines” in favor of people who enter an altered state to compute faster. This is just like nexialism.

This is not coincidence. This is the Campbellian worldview expressing itself through multiple writers working under the same editorial influence. Campbell believed in the synthesizing intelligence, the rigorous generalist who could see connections others missed. He believed in the social sciences as genuine sciences, not merely as arts dressed up in the clothing of precision. And he was optimistic, in the deepest possible sense, about what disciplined human intelligence could achieve.

What I find remarkable is how far that theme extends. Some people argue that Frank Herbert’s Dune is a critique of the Campbellian hero. and in some ways it is, but even moreso it is a critique of religious attacks against reason and the failure of a Campbellian hero to stop religious fanaticism. What are Mentats but practitioners of nexialism at human cognitive limits? What are the Bene Gesserit but psychohistorians who have replaced equations with genetics and training and generations of careful breeding? Herbert understood Campbell’s vision well enough to write a tragedy about it, which is perhaps the most genuine form of engagement with an idea.

Adventures in Time and Space doesn’t include Dune, the publication of which was still two decades away, but the DNA is present throughout and you can see Campbell’s hand.

Some of My Favorite Stories

Since reading a single entry that reviews all thirty-five stories would be a considerable slog, and since I am also in the process of cutting out major chunks of an overly long dissertation chapter, let me tell you about some of the stories I return to most frequently.

Robert Heinlein’s “Requiem” and “The Roads Must Roll” represent two sides of the Heinlein that Campbell helped develop. “Requiem” is the emotional one. The story is about D.D. Harriman, the man who funded the first trip to the Moon in Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” Harriman never got to go on the journey himself, and finally arranges to make the trip even though it will almost certainly kill him. It is, at its core, a story about the difference between building a dream and living it, and it earns its ending in a way that a lesser writer would fumble. It’s a melancholy and powerful tale.

“The Roads Must Roll” is the engineer’s Heinlein and is the first Heinlein story I ever read. It takes a hard look at what it would take to maintain a future infrastructure that society had become dependent upon, and what happens when the people doing the maintaining decide to stop. The roads themselves are a bizarrely designed infrastructural feat and their stopping results in tremendous harm to life and economy. In the end, it is psychology that saves the day.

Both stories reward re-reading. Neither is quite what you expect from a reputation that often gets reduced to the politics.

Henry Kuttner, Henry Kuttner, and Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, There are three stories by Lewis Padgett in Adventures in Time and Space: “The Proud Robot,” “Time Locker” and “The Twonky.” Lewis Padgett is a pseudonym that Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore often used when they co-wrote stories and so a reader of Adventures in Time and Space might think that they co-wrote all three of these tales. It’s a likely enough assumption, as they collaborated so often that people often think even fully credited Kuttner works like The Dark World were a collaboration (I am one of those people by the way). However, in this case only one of those stories (“The Twonky”) was co-written. The two “Gallagher” tales, all of which are included in Robots Have No Tales, were solely the work of Kuttner..at least that’s what C.L. Moore wrote in her introduction to that anthology and the Internet Speculatative Fiction Database also credits only him.

I discussed earlier how each literary era attempts to kill the past in order to justify itself. Sometimes that tendency pushes aside things that should not be forgotten. In this case, I am talking about the fiction of C.L. Moore and Kuttner who are among the most underread writers in the modern science fiction reader’s diet. This is a genuine loss. Moore in particular, whose solo work includes the Northwest Smith stories and the Jirel of Joiry fantasy series, has a prose sensibility that is truly delightful to read. It is descriptive without being ornate, emotionally precise without being sentimental, capable of evoking a specific quality of dread or wonder depending on her narrative goals. “The Twonky” is a domestic horror story about a piece of furniture that turns out to be a machine from the future, designed to manage and regulate human behavior. It is, depending on your tolerance for paranoia, either hilarious or genuinely unsettling. I find it both.

John W. Campbell, Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” — John W. Campbell didn’t always publish his own stories, but when he did they could be straight up bangers. In this case, Campbell published “Who Goes There?” in Asounding under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym. While you may not know the story by name, it is probably the most famous story in the anthology, and with reason. It is the basis for both the 1951 film The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, and while both films are worth your time, neither quite captures what Campbell was doing on the page (though Carpenter’s comes close). The story is a study in paranoia and epistemology. How do you determine who is still human when the creature you’re dealing with can perfectly replicate any organism it consumes? The horror is not in the monster, it’s in the discovery that certainty itself has become impossible. In some ways, this is a Campbellian attack against relativism and in favor of objectivism.

Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” is one of those stories that appears on nearly every “best science fiction short stories” list ever compiled, and it certainly deserves the placement. The premise is elegant, and once again very Campbellian. Imagine a world with six suns, where night comes once every two thousand years. What happens to a civilization when darkness falls? Asimov was twenty-one when he wrote it, working with Campbell’s editorial guidance, and it shows what that collaboration could produce. The ending is still gut-punch effective after eighty-some years. It is an argument against lazy science that mixes with a dash of Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, and yes this is very much a Cosmic Horror tale, for a powerful ending.

A.E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” is possibly my single favorite story in the collection, and I will tell you why it matters beyond its intrinsic quality. “Black Destroyer” was the opening salvo of what would eventually become The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The creature at the center of this story, the Coerl, is a hypnotically intelligent predator that stows away on a starship and begins hunting the crew one by one. The story is the direct ancestor of at least two major science fiction franchises. Ridley Scott’s Alien takes parts of “Black Destroyer” adds a huge budget and a more rigorous commitment to dread to wonderful effect. The acid blood is in the story, but Scott subverts the scientific expert by his use of the replicant as traitor to the crew to wonderful effect. Alien is a New Wave, or even proto-Cyberpunk, response to “Black Destroyer.”

The Enterprise and her mission in Star Trek rhyme structurally with the Space Beagle and hers, up to and including invisible energy shields and encounters with god like aliens in other stories. The influence was direct enough that van Vogt pursued legal action and reached a settlement after the airing of the episode The Man Trap, something I mentioned in an earlier Geeklinks. Beyond the salt monster, which in van Vogt’s consumes potassium, Spock’s science officer almost screams to be compared to van Vogt’s Elliot Grosvenor whose Nexialism is akin to Spock’s Vulcan Logic.

This is not to say that Scott’s film, or Star Trek, are mere imitation. There are each masterpieces on their own terms, that go beyond van Vogt’s storytelling. I do think it is worth knowing where the template was cast.

For the tabletop gaming reader, I have to point out that the Coerl is also the direct influence behind the Displacer Beast in Dungeons & Dragons. The monster that appears in your fifth edition Monster Manual traces a lineage back through Gary Gygax’s Monster Manual (1977) to van Vogt’s story in 1939. This is one of those chains of influence that reminds you how much of gaming’s DNA was grown in soil that the pulps prepared.

The Atomic Era: Hope and Despair

Adventures in Time and Space arrived in 1946, the editors point out that this is one year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one year after the end of the Second World War, one year into the Atomic Age. The Science Fiction that Campbell had been publishing in Astounding was hopeful, but it also discussed the Atomic Age and Atomics. Campbell’s future posited nothing but optimism in the Atomic future, but the reality was much darker.

The anthology arrives at exactly the moment when that bright future had begun to become dread and fear, so it was brave to put it forth and demand that it receive literary recognition. That recognition was slow to come, the academy is as resistant to updating its reading lists as Kuhn’s depictions of scientists in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The old liteary guard always fights hard to keep from being displaced, but fight as they may they will always be incorporated. The key for us as readers is to make sure that we revisit the past enough to ensure that worthwhile things that had been pushed aside can be remembered.

A Note on the Modern Library Edition

I mentioned that I own the 1957 Modern Library edition, and I want to say something in its defense as a physical object. Modern Library editions of this era have a specific gravity to them, not just in the literal sense (they are substantial books, properly sewn and bound) but in the sense of cultural weight. The Modern Library imprint, by the mid-1950s, was the American literary canon in portable form. Having Adventures in Time and Space in that series was an argument made by the publisher’s catalog as much as by the editors’ introduction. It’s like owning a Library of America copy of the book and I think this volume deserves one. Certainly, they’ve published enough Science Fiction authors…and many that are in this volume.

If you can find a copy, and used book stores in cities with good science fiction communities sometimes surface them, it is worth having. Erik Mona and the Paizo Planet Stories line made a valiant effort to bring pulp-era science fiction and fantasy back to print in handsome editions before that line went on hiatus, and I remain melancholy about the books that didn’t get made in time. A Planet Stories edition of this anthology, with artwork from their stable, would have been magnificent. The Coerl alone deserves a proper illustration.

The Tradition That Came After

The Campbellian era ended, as all editorial eras do, but it didn’t disappear. It became the water that later science fiction swam in, sometimes consciously, sometimes without knowing it. When we talk about “hard SF,” we are talking about the tradition Campbell cultivated. When we celebrate science fiction for its capacity to think seriously about ideas, we are celebrating something he helped make possible. It has recently seen revival in authors like Andy Weir, but these authors are more celebratory of all kinds of people and not just the feisty engineer. The heroes of modern Campbellianesque fiction are far more humble than those of the Golden Age.

The stories in Adventures in Time and Space are not equally strong. Thirty-five stories is a large sample and some have aged better than others. The best of them, Heinlein’s, Moore and Kuttner’s, Campbell’s own “Who Goes There?”, Asimov’s “Nightfall,” van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer,” are as good as science fiction gets. They reward reading and re-reading. They reward thinking about.

Much like Carter’s Adult Fantasy series brought fantasy’s foundational texts into print for a new generation, Adventures in Time and Space deserves a place on your bookshelf as a working document. It is not just a historical artifact, but a live argument about what the genre is and what it can be.

The argument holds up. So too does Carter’s, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Yes, I know I like that word blame my friend Dennis for introducing it to me many years ago.

Elric of Melniboné: The Book That Taught Me What Fantasy Could Be

Christian Lindke — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:58:31 GMT

Before I begin my essay on Michael Moorcock’s first Elric novel, and how it has influenced how I view fantasy and the world, I’d like to announce Geekerati Media’s first giveaway. I am offering to any subscriber who lives in the United States (paid or unpaid) a copy of L. Sprague de Camp’s Warlocks and Warriors anthology. It was his fourth Sword & Sorcery anthology and it contains a number of fantastic stories like:

“Turutal” (Ray Capella)
“The Gods of Niom Parma” (Lin Carter)
“The Hills of the Dead“ (A Solomon Kane story featuring Vampires by Robert E. Howard)
“Thunder in the Dawn“ (Henry Kuttner)
“Thieves’ House“ (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser by Fritz Leiber)
“Black God’s Kiss“ (Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore)
“Chu-Bu and Sheemish“ (Lord Dunsany)
“The Master of the Crabs“ (Clark Ashton Smith)
“The Valley of the Spiders” (H. G. Wells)
“The Bells of Shoredan“ (Roger Zelazny)

All you need to do to have a chance to win the volume is fill out this brief survey (link now closed). While the survey is open to all subscribers, you might consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can do more of these with even bigger prizes. I’ve said that it’s limited to subscribers in the United States, but if you are willing to pay shipping I’m willing to ship anywhere. I will close the survey on April 15th, 2026 and announce the winner shortly after that.

Now…on with the Newsletter.

How I Discovered Michael Moorcock and Sword & Sorcery Fanatasy

I still remember the exact moment I first encountered Elric of Melniboné. It was the fall semester of 7th grade and I was in a bit of a competition with my friend Mark over who could find the most interesting books and games. It began when I brought a copy of the Dungeon Masters Guide (sic) to school, which he thought was amazing, and continued when he brought in a copy of Tunnels & Trolls and expanded my knowledge of role playing games exponentially in one day.

The exchanges continued to escalate to the point that they initiated what I now call the “Sweet Pickles War” of 7th Grade. That was a war that cost me a friend and I never should have initiated it, but for the six months or so that we were close friends I learned so much from Mark that I am ever grateful for. I do think we would have mended our friendship had I not moved from Reno to the Bay Area, but maybe some day I will find him on the Book of Faces or on some geek site and reconnect. I really wish I could because he was a great guy and I fondly remember our time as friends.

At one point during our pre-Sweet Pickles War conversations, Mark made a point of telling me that what he was reading was “way more badass” than anything I’d encountered and he showed me a copy of Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock. The cover was painted by Richard Clifton-Dey (who eventually painted covers for Blue Öyster Cult) and the weird winged creatures in the background of the painting, as well as the title, hinted at things I wanted to know more about. At that age, I felt like a genuine gauntlet thrown down and II rushed out to my local used paperback store to find every book I could that was written by Michael Moorcock so that I could keep up.

I was able to find most of the Elric saga (with the amazing covers) and a couple of Corum novels in my first haul. At the time I didn’t know what an antihero was, or what it meant to “deconstruct” a genre. I didn’t fully understand what the Greeks meant by Tragedy either. Sure, I’d read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which my true introduction to the wonders of the imagination, but I was clueless about literary tropes. By the time I finished collecting and reading the full Elric Saga, I understood both.

What I didn’t know then, and what took me years to fully appreciate, was that Moorcock was my entry point into the genre of literary fantasy. Sure, I’d read Edith Hamilton and Roger Lancelyn Green’s adaptations of mythologies. I was familiar with some tropes that fantasy built upon as echoes from the distant past, but I wasn’t familiar with the genre. Yes, I owned the Dungeon Masters Guide, but I hadn’t read anything in Appendix N. My gateway into fantasy was the fantasy of deconstruction and despair.

I came to Tolkien, Lewis, and the hopeful tradition only afterward, which means I experienced the tropes of fantasy in reverse order from most readers. And here’s the thing about that: when you’ve grown up on tragic, deconstructive fantasy, traditional high fantasy doesn’t feel like the baseline. It feels like the innovation. For me, the eucatastrophe, which was Tolkien’s own word for the sudden, joyful turn, hits harder than any other kind of ending. When you’ve been trained by Moorcock to expect what I now call “the 70s ending” any sign of hope and the triumph of good over evil feels fresh.

All of which is to say: I am not a neutral party here. Michael Moorcock is the benchmark by which I evaluate all fantasy, but I’ve been thinking about Elric of Melniboné again lately, and I want to make an argument that I think gets lost in most discussions of where Elric comes from and what his character really represents in the fantasy genre. In fact, I want to argue that he isn’t as much a deconstruction as people think, even as he is one of a particular sort. By the way, isn’t that Michael Whelan cover (above) super badass? You know you want to read that book. It is so much better than the graphic design stuff we see today.

People often talk about Moorcock as a critic of fantasy and many mistakenly think his critiques might apply to the writings of Robert E. Howard. They cite his essay “Epic Pooh” (which is available in an excellent Monkeybrain Books edition featured in the image above), his New Wave manifestos, his impatience with what he saw as reactionary fantasy, and they conclude that Elric is essentially a rebuke of Conan. After all, the sickly, introspective albino seems in many ways to be raised up specifically to knock the vital, uncomplicated barbarian off his pedestal. And there’s truth in the argument that Elric is a response to Conan, but thinking he is a critique misses something essential.

Moorcock was obviously, unmistakably, a massive Robert E. Howard fan. G.K. Chesterton is often misquoted as saying something similar to, “to make fun of a thing, you must love it,” when he really wrote (in his biography of Robert Browning), “A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.” Regardless of the authenticity of the quote, or the truth of the real one, I find myself agreeing with the manufactured quote. I cannot read Mark Twain’s deconstruction of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales without seeing the love emanating from each snide remark. The essay is a litany of the pedantry of the nerd, the deeply affectionate nerd. Sure, there’s a bit of parricide going on where Twain presents his work as more sincere and worthy of merit, but there is also a joyous appreciation that other fans of Hawkeye see immediately.

I am firmly of the opinion that you cannot write a worthwhile deconstruction of something you don’t love. A part of the problem with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is that it references the original Battlestar Galactica than it does Star Wars. It is deconstructing something other than what it intended. It subverts expectations, to be sure, but only if your expectation was that Starbuck and Apollo were going to pull of their casino heist and rescue. It abandons Finn as a character, in an inexcusable way, and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the tropes of the franchise.

Credit — Michael Moorcock Amra #15

In the case of Moorcock, and Elric, the love is there on the page, and the evidence is not merely in the text. It’s in the historical record. In May of 1961, Moorcock was writing letters about the nature of Heroic Fantasy to Amra, the Conan fan community fanzine, debating genre definitions alongside Fritz Leiber and other luminaries of the field. He was, in other words, an active participant in the Conan fan community at the precise moment he was introducing Elric to the world in the pages of Science Fantasy.

He wasn’t standing outside the Howard tradition lobbing critical grenades. He was inside it, sleeves rolled up, arguing about what the genre meant and where it should go. Later, in Wizardry and Wild Romance, he would describe Conan with unmistakable affection and insight, writing that Howard’s barbarian was “forever at odds both with the respectable world and the occult world; forever detecting plots to seduce him.” This is a description that applies with equal precision to Elric, which is entirely the point.

The evidence is also right there in the text of the very first Elric story Moorcock ever published. The character first appeared in “The Dreaming City,” in Science Fantasy magazine in 1961. Let’s compare the opening of Howard’s first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” to Moorcock’s introduction of Elric eleven years earlier in internal chronology but just a year later in publication:

Howard gives us:

“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars... Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

And Moorcock answers with:

“For ten thousand years did the Bright Empire of Melnibone flourish—ruling the World... Such a one was the cynical, laughing Elric, a man of bitter brooding and gusty humour, proud Prince of ruins, Lord of a lost and humbled people; last son of Melnibone’s sundered line of kings. Elric, the moody-eyed wanderer—a lonely man who fought a world, living by his wits and his runesword Stormbringer... reckless reaver and cynical slayer—torn by great griefs and with a knowledge locked in his skull which would turn lesser men into babbling idiots.”

Read those two passages back to back and you are not reading a rejection. You are reading a conversation. Not just any conversation, but an intensely respectful one, conducted between two writers across time. This is the perfect articulation of T.S. Eliot’s argument in The Sacred Wood. In that piece, Eliot argues:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; 45and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. — T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

Every artist is in dialogue with the past and Moorcock is in dialogue with Howard in a beautiful and appreciative way. Elric is the mirror universe projection of Conan and you can see it in the prose. The architecture is identical. Both open with a sweep of lost civilizations, of ages before history, of drowned empires and vanished glories. Both pivot with that emphatic “hither” energy, here is your man, now let me tell you what he is, and both pile on compound epithets in the same bardic, Homeric rhythm. “Thief, reaver, slayer” becomes “reckless reaver and cynical slayer.” “Gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth” becomes “bitter brooding and gusty humour.” Moorcock is not dismantling Howard’s template. He is playing it like an instrument, transposing it into a different key.

The differences in that transposition are where the philosophy lives, and they run deeper than Elric’s pallor and drug dependency (itself worthy of further exploration since he doesn’t have this dependency so long as he kills enough people with Stormbringer). To understand the differences and similarities of philosophy, it helps to look closely at what Howard was actually doing in The Phoenix on the Sword, which I’ve written about before in the context of Conan as a patron of the arts, and which repays attention here.

Conan in “The Phoenix on the Sword” is a barbarian who has come from outside civilization to conquer it, but Howard is careful to complicate what that means. What does it mean for Conan to “conquer” a civilization? For Howard, it means to reinsert vigor into it. The conspirators against Conan represent the corrupt products of civilization, the things that will cause it to rot and decay. Both Ascalante (the Machiavellian schemer who views everything as a tool) and Rinaldo (the poet and idealist who genuinely believes he is striking a blow for artistic culture against barbarism) represent forces that can destroy Aquilonia. Furthermore, what Ascalante says of Rinaldo tells us everything about how Howard views the civilized contempt for the arts versus the barbarian’s instinctive reverence for them. Ascalante describes Rinaldo as a “harebrained minstrel,” a blind idealist who “idealizes the king whom Conan killed to get the crown, remembering only that he occasionally patronized the arts, and forgetting the evils of his reign.” The irony Howard is turning here is that Rinaldo, the artist and champion of culture, is being manipulated by Ascalante, the cynical product of civilization who sees the poet as nothing but a useful puppet.

What of Conan, the barbarian who is supposedly the enemy of culture? He refuses to punish Rinaldo even as the poet’s songs are turning the people against him. “A great poet is greater than any king,” Conan tells Prospero. “His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I shall die and be forgotten, but Rinaldo’s songs will live for ever.” Conan, who is the “rough-footed barbarian from the north,” the destroyer of the previous king who “occasionally patronized the arts”, turns out to be the truest defender of artistic value in the story. He is eventually forced to kill Rinaldo when the poet attacks him, and of all the twenty conspirators, only Rinaldo actually wounds the king. The poet, Howard seems to be saying, is genuinely dangerous not because art is threatening, but because misguided idealism in service of a corrupt nostalgia is one of the most destructive forces in any society.

Moorcock understood all of this and when he built Melniboné, he built a civilization that takes the question Howard raised and answers it with horrifying literalism. As a kid who lived through “The Blitz” and for whom the horrors of Nazi Germany are lived experience and not mere history, Moorcock understands how horrible a society that focuses on aesthetics over ethics can be. What does a society that claims to value art, but with no concern for morality, actually do with its Arts? Moorcock’s answer to that is horrifying and the most famous example is the court musician of Melniboné. That musician plays an organ (double meaning on purpose I’m sure) built of human slaves. Each of these slaves is surgically altered to produce only a single note that is expressed when they experience pain. They have been assembled into a living instrument that plays “art” through suffering. It is the most concise possible image of what happens when a civilization keeps the aesthetic form of culture while gutting its humane content. Melniboné has patronized the arts, all right. It has made art from the screams of its slaves, and called that refinement.

Where Conan’s predecessor king “occasionally patronized the arts” in a way that Rinaldo nostalgically misremembers as golden, Elric’s ancestors built an empire where art is indistinguishable from cruelty. The Melnibonéans are not philistines, they are connoisseurs. They are connoisseurs who horrify us because they have divorced aesthetic appreciation entirely from moral consideration. This is what Moorcock, the lover of the Urbane over the Bucolic, is arguing is what happens to any civilization that prioritizes tradition and hierarchy over individual conscience. It is decadence in the precise, original sense. It is not mere excess, but a civilization eating itself from the inside out, mistaking cruelty for sophistication. Moorcock makes similar arguments, from a different perspective, in his Hawkmoon and Corum stories. Moorcock loves urban communities, but he sees where they can fail.

This brings us to the deeper structural parallel between the two stories that most readers miss. Both The Phoenix on the Sword and Elric of Melniboné are, at their core, stories about what happens when civilizations decay and what kind of individual can survive, or even catalyze or accellerate, that decay. In Howard’s story, the decadent civilization is the one Conan has conquered and is trying to govern. The forces of decay are internal corruption and a nostalgic idealism that misremembers a corrupt past as a golden age. Conan comes from outside, and his barbarian vitality, his genuine respect for the arts and for justice, is what the decaying civilization actually needs even as it rejects him. Howard’s point is not that barbarism has some qualities that are necessary for civilization to thrive. This is because certain qualities like directness, authentic passion, and the refusal to be manipulated by sophistication are what civilizations lose as they decay, and what they need to be renewed.

Moorcock inherits this entire framework and then does something interesting with it as he deconstructs Howard’s hero. Melniboné is already the decayed civilization, already past its ten thousand years of dominance, already being superseded by the Young Kingdoms. These are human nations that, for all their comparative rawness, carry the individual fire that Melniboné has extinguished in its long decline. Standing against the Young Kingdoms, is another merely human nation. Pan Tang, the dark mirror of Melniboné is trying to recreate the old empire’s power. Moorcock’s invention of Pan Tang is instructive because it has the all cruelty, the chaos worship, the ambition of Melniboné, but it lacks the ten-thousand-year depth of tradition. It is a civilization that mistakes the forms of decadence for the substance of power, a cargo cult of imperial evil. The Young Kingdoms that will eventually supersede both are not notably more virtuous in the conventional sense, but they are more alive, more driven by individual passion and ambition of the kind that actually generates history.

This is, when you look at it squarely, the same argument Howard was making. Both writers believe that individual vitality, what we might call the Conan-principle, is what civilizations run on, and that when they lose it they begin to die regardless of how impressive their institutions and traditions remain. The difference is that Howard frames this as the story of a barbarian bringing that fire into a civilization from outside, while Moorcock frames it as the story of the last man in a dying civilization who sees that fire in the eyes of others and tries and fails to save what cannot be saved.

All of this makes the great irony of Moorcock’s own life all the more delicious. Here is a man who spent decades championing the urban over the bucolic, who wrote “Epic Pooh” to argue against the reactionary nostalgia for rural innocence. Moorcock built an entire literary multiverse on the thesis that the city, chaotic, corrupt, vital, generative, was where human meaning was made. And then, in the 1990s, he moved to Bastrop, Texas. He moved to this small town of around six or seven thousand people, about an hour outside Austin, to live in a Victorian house built by a Confederate governor with his then new bride. As an older man, he sits on his front porch in the evening with a cool drink and the scent of magnolias, watching hawks hunt his bird feeders and listening to owls in the oaks and pecans. He is, by any measure, living the bucolic life he spent his literary career arguing against.

He’s a Hobbit who likes to visit London, Paris, and Austin and then come home to his garden and his cats. He would probably argue, and this is the most Moorcock thing about it, that he moved there to have front row seats for what he called “the decline and fall of the Roman republic.” He would say that he chose a small Texas town as an act of political curiosity rather than pastoral retreat. Maybe, but the hawks don’t care about his reasons. The magnolias smell the same regardless of the ideological justification. There is something almost Elric-like about it: the man who argued most passionately for the vitality of the urban, undone in the end by an American wife’s health and a Victorian house he fell in love with immediately, finding himself in precisely the kind of settled, rooted, quietly beautiful life that his fiction consistently identifies as the thing that dies first when civilization needs saving.

The Eternal Champion, it turns out, eventually wants a porch, but of course we already knew that. Elric, like all the champions, seeks Tanelorn, that place outside of the eternal struggle between Law and Chaos. Tanelorn is Moorcock’s version of The Lost Horizon and like that book and film, it is and imagined place that is beautiful but unattainable.

None of this diminishes what Elric of Melniboné accomplishes, or the real depth of Moorcock’s philosophy. I find myself just as conflicted as he is. I love what the city has to offer. Los Angeles is one of my favorite places on Earth and I adore Chicago and Montreal. Yet here I am in Idaho, looking at wooded mountains and planning Spring Break trips to a Hobbit House in Eastern Washington.

Moorcock’s writing is vital. The Law/Chaos axis that Moorcock builds his multiverse around gave Dungeons & Dragons its moral alignment system, shaping how generations of gamers think about ethical categories. Stormbringer itself, the soul-drinking black blade that keeps Elric alive while destroying everyone he loves, remains one of the most effective metaphors in sword-and-sorcery. It represents power that extracts its true price only after you’ve become dependent on it. This is the central tension of Elric of Melniboné (the first novel in the series) and Elric as the reformer who is more ethical than the system he was born to administer, still carries real weight. His cousin Yrkoon, who schemes to take his throne, would actually make a perfectly serviceable ruler of the Bright Empire by every metric the Bright Empire respects. Elric knows this. It’s one of the things that makes him so fascinating and so miserable.

The novel isn’t without rough edges. The prose is efficient rather than beautiful. Moorcock was writing fast, for magazines, and it shows. The female characters exist almost entirely in relation to Elric’s doom rather than as people in their own right, a limitation Moorcock shared with Howard somewhat ironically given his later criticism of that tendency in Conan. Another time I might go into the similarities in the names of Elric’s and Conan’s wives as The Hour of the Dragon and Stormbringer share many parallels. As a kid the moment where Elric and Yrkoon bellow the names of their swords at each other (“Stormbringer!” “Mournblade!”) hit me as epic, but now I find it walks the knife’s edge between operatic and ridiculous. I land on operatic, but I understand those who don’t.

Underneath all of it is a conversation that Howard started and Moorcock continued: about what civilizations lose when they die, about what kind of individual passion can renew them or at least witness their end with dignity, about whether the artist who sings against power is a fool or a hero or both. Conan answers the question one way, by surviving and eventually thriving. Elric, at the end of this first novel, answers it with something more surprising: a fragile, hard-won equilibrium. The answer at the end of the final novel is a bit more depressing, but somehow beautiful.

At the end of the first book, Elric has defeated Yrkoon, the cousin who embodies everything Melniboné values and Elric rejects. He then, in the most un-Melnibonéan act imaginable, shows mercy. Elric doesn’t kill Yrkoon. He doesn’t torture him. He exercises the individual conscience that his civilization has spent ten thousand years breeding out of its rulers.

The parallel to The Phoenix on the Sword is sharper than it might first appear. Yrkoon is, in a sense, a single character who combines the two antagonists Howard split apart. Like Rinaldo, he has a sincere ideological conviction: he genuinely believes that Elric’s compassion and philosophical bent make him unfit to rule, that he himself represents the true Melnibonéan tradition, that he is the legitimate heir of a greatness Elric is squandering. Like Ascalante, he is a calculating opportunist who will say and do whatever the moment requires. When Yrkoon loses Mournblade and falls to his knees, only a fool reads his submission as sincere. Conan knew what it cost to stay his hand against Rinaldo, and was wounded for his mercy almost immediately, the poet attacking the moment Conan hesitated. Elric stays his hand against a man who is simultaneously more cynical than Rinaldo and more fanatical than Ascalante, and the reader who has followed Howard’s logic knows exactly what that mercy will eventually cost.

But Elric doesn’t know it yet. In this moment he believes he has found balance between who he is and what he was born to be. He can imagine a future for himself that looks something like Rackhir the Red Archer’s. Rackhir is a former Priest of Chaos who is now an independent wanderer who has stepped outside the machinery of Law and Chaos alike. Rackhir seeks Tanelorn, the perfect city that exists outside the wars of Law and Chaos, the place where the Eternal Champion might finally rest.

He is wrong, of course. The rest of the saga will dismantle that hope methodically and without mercy. But Moorcock earns the tragedy precisely because he lets Elric believe, here at the end of the beginning, that equilibrium is possible. The reader who comes to this novel first gets to share that hope before the later books take it away. In that sense, Elric of Melniboné is the one moment in the entire saga where the ending feels almost like Peter Jackson’s version of Tolkien’s saga, where the losses have been real but the protagonist walks away believing the worst can be avoided. Tolkien knew better, as readers of the Scourging of the Shire know well.

This is why I tend to agree with Tolkien’s answer. There is a grace beyond the circles of the world that redeems the losses, but I appreciate it more deeply because of the years I’ve spent reading Moorcock. I’ll tell you something else, knowing the tragic version first made the hopeful version feel less like consolation and more like genuine possibility. That’s not nothing. That might, in fact, be everything.

For that I thank Michael Moorcock more than Tolkien. He showed me the darkness that allowed me to better see the light. That is what great deconstructive fiction does and Elric of Melniboné is great deconstructive fiction.

My Favorite Roleplaying Games of the Aughts: A Revisit

Christian Lindke — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:24:40 GMT

This posti is a greatly expanded version of an article I originally posted way back in January 12, 2010.

Back in January of 2010, I posted a list of my ten favorite roleplaying games of the “Aughts.” It was, as far too many of my older lists were, an exercise in confident assertions delivered without any real justification. These are kind of the literary equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded and then insisting you aimed. When I wrote the post, I promised future posts explaining why each game was so remarkable. I did not write those posts, though I have written about many of these games in my recommended games here. I am a little ashamed of myself for not writing those posts, but I still have yet to finish my Megaforce review so it looks like I still suffer from “I’m going to write about” syndrome. Having said that, I believe that sixteen years feels like sufficient penance and consider this revisit as finally paying the debt I owe.

I still stand by the list substantially a decade later and feel even more comfortable using the term “aughts” after hearing my daughters talk about the 90s as the 1900s. Yes, there are things I’d reconsider, a couple of omissions I’ve made peace with, and at least one entry where I’ve become considerably more complicated in my feelings. But the core conviction that the Aughts were a genuinely remarkable decade for tabletop RPGs has only strengthened with time. In many ways it was the last decade where individual games boldly pronounced that they were for just one style of play and if you wanted to play another style of game, you could play a different game. Where modern games try to appeal to every one of Robin Laws’ gamer types, games in the aughts felt free to focus on just one style of gamer. Today’s games try a little too hard to reach a middle ground, something I partially blame 4th Edition D&D for…even as it makes the list.

Let me tell you why each of these games earned its spot.

My Favorite Games from the Aughts

1. Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (and 3.5)

I’ll confess something that will surprise no one who knows me: I was skeptical of 3rd Edition when it dropped in 2000. I had a collection of AD&D 2nd Edition books that represented years of investment, both financial and emotional, and I had the instinctive conservatism of someone who’d learned to navigate one system and wasn’t eager to start over. I was, in the technical sense, wrong, but the game is still one that I have conflicted feelings about.

What Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, and Skip Williams accomplished with 3rd Edition was a genuine unification of the game’s often contradictory mechanical legacy into something coherent. The d20 system gave every resolution a common chassis. All you had to do to resolve any action in 3.x was roll a d20, add a modifier, meet or beat a target number. This sounds like an obvious mechanic until you remember that its predecessors had different subsystems for almost everything. The attack matrix, grappling, THAC0, secondary skills (for the AD&D fans) were all handled differently from one another.

The feat system deserves particular credit. It was the mechanism that allowed player characters to feel genuinely differentiated without the baroque class-and-kit scaffolding of 2nd Edition. A Fighter who took Cleave played differently from a Fighter who stacked Combat Expertise. That’s not nothing. It’s actually quite a lot.

3.5, released in 2003, tightened what needed tightening and broke a few things that had been working fine, which is the natural law of revised editions. But together, the two versions represent the moment the RPG hobby re-entered mainstream awareness after a bruising decade of contraction and moral panic, and they deserve enormous credit for that. The problem with the system, as I see it now, is that it borrowed too much from GURPS and HERO. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have suprised me how many mechanics (like Hardness and the skill system) would reflect HERO mechanics. After all, Monte Cook was a lead designer on the system and he worked on HERO for almost a decade. My thoughts on this are more articulated in my 2024 article on how D&D got GURPSified.

2. Savage Worlds

If 3rd Edition was the game that consolidated and professionalized a hodge-podge system, then Savage Worlds was the game that asked what you’d get if you optimized for fun per hour at the table rather than for simulation fidelity or strategic depth. Shane Lacy Hensley’s 2003 masterwork adapted the complex step-die pool system of Deadlands and filtered it through the simplified mechanics of the Great Rail Wars miniature game and found the perfect balance of “role” and “roll” play.

The answer, it turns out, is an “inspiration system” based on “Bennies” that feels like like it was invented by someone who actually plays games with other humans. I used the term inspiration there on purpose as D&D 5e’s inspiration system shares a lot with Savage Worlds’ Bennies. Then there’s the Wild Die mechanic. This mechanic has players roll a trait die and a d6 simultaneously and take the better result in order to show how their heroic characters are slightly better than the average person, they are “Wild Cards.” It doesn’t matter whether your attribute is d4 (the worst) or d12 (the best), you roll an additional d6 and take the best result. This is the kind of elegant solution to the asymmetry problem of demonstrating the heroic nature of PCs without too much power creep that seems obvious only in retrospect. It provides just enough cushion against catastrophic failure to keep the narrative moving without insulating characters from genuine consequence.

“Fast, Furious, and Fun” is the game’s own tagline, and this one is simply accurate. Savage Worlds is the game I reach for when I want to run something at a convention, when I want to introduce someone to the hobby, when I want to have Super Heroes fight Cthulhu, or when I want to run a pulp adventure involving dinosaurs in an unusual environment without spending four sessions on character creation. It is, in the best possible sense, a game that knows exactly what it is.

3. Burning Wheel

Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel is a game that took me a while to vibe with. It had an odd writing style that did things like call bad die rolls “traitors” and other snarky bits. Yet it has become a game I’d recommend to anyone who has decided they don’t like roleplaying games because they’ve never found one that takes human beings seriously. It marks a high point in storygame design and a lot of modern gamers who are using D&D for their more narrative games should actually be playing Burning Wheel. It does what they want much better than D&D.

The Beliefs system is a central component of the game’s design. Each character has Beliefs which are player-authored statements that describe how your character views the world, what they think about another character in the setting, or what moral or philosophical principle they’d die defending. Belief binds your character to the world and shapes how you respond to challenges. The GM’s job is not so much to construct a plot that players play out but to find ways to put character Beliefs under pressure, ensuring that the action of the game makes ignoring your convictions costly. What the game calls the “give and take” is its core rhythm. This rhythm is a deliberative processs where the GM presents challenges, the players act on their Beliefs, circumstances change, and new Beliefs are written to reflect who the characters are becoming. This tension results in emergent narratives in a highly structured story focused environment.

The skill advancement system is where the game’s intellectual demands become most visible. In a system that echoes Runequest’s skill use to improve system, Burning Wheel skills advance by accumulating a required number of logged tests, but not just any tests. You can’t Morrowind your way to improvements here. The game distinguishes between routine tests, difficult tests, and challenging tests, and advancement requires a specific combination of the latter two. This means advancement is not simply a reward for playing; it’s a reward for taking risks you might fail. The tension between short-term success and long-term advancement is one of the game’s most genuinely interesting recurring decisions. Do you muster extra dice and pass safely, or do you hold back and log a challenging test you need? As with Runequest, practice exists as a separate subsystem for acquiring tests outside of active play, but it costs significant in-fiction time, which the GM is encouraged to make expensive.

The dice mechanics are based on pools of d6s counting successes against a static obstacle that ranges from 1 to 10. This pool is represented by three factors. First, the name of the ability/skill being used, then the “Shade” of the die, and finally the exponent. The number needed for success on each die differs on the Shade of dice rolled. The default shade is Black and requires a 4 or more to be successful. The other shades are Grey (3 or better) and White (2 or better). The Exponent is the number of dice rolled in a challenge. Thus the Exponent (from 1 to 10) represents the amount of experience the character has with that ability, the Shade represents the heroic potential of that character. I won’t get into too much more detail here, but I will say that Luke Crane managed to mimic a step-die system using only six-sided dice with the Shade system. Every roll begins with a declared intent and a declared task, and a failed roll doesn’t mean nothing happens; it means the GM controls the outcome, which is frequently more interesting than success. The system is dialog in action and it is one of the most influential storygames ever invented. You should give it a try if that genre is your bag.

4. Trail of Cthulhu

It should be no surprise that one of the most insightful game designers would find an innovative, yet in retrospect obvious, solution to a game design problem, but when I first read the GUMSHOE rules I was deeply impressed with what Robin D. Laws had created. Kenneth Hite adaptated that system in Trail of Cthulhu in 2008 and this adapation resulted resulted in a fantastic investigative role playing game. Investigative role playing stories and adventures are extremely difficult for game masters to run in most “quantified” game systems and Laws identified and solved the central design failure of how to handle them.

That failure is pretty simple. In most RPG systems, you can fail to find a clue. This sounds like tension. It is not tension; it is stasis. A mystery that cannot be solved because the detective failed a Spot Hidden roll at a critical moment is not a mystery, it’s a brick wall with atmosphere. GUMSHOE inverts the assumption. Investigative abilities, when used in the right context, automatically succeed at finding core clues. The drama lives not in whether you find the evidence but in what you do with it.

I’ve long used something similar in logic to this mechanic as a Game Master. My pre-GUMSHOE fix was to have the mystery be whatever the players decided it was. That can lead down some wonderful paths, and I still use that tool often, but sometimes the players want to solve an existing puzzle and GUMSHOE let’s them do that.

Hite’s took this chassis and drenched it in Lovecraft. His focus was less on the the Lovecraft of creature-feature shocks, but the Lovecraft of cosmic indifference and the fragility of the rationalist project. The Stability and Sanity split, distinguishing between moment-to-moment psychological resilience and the slow erosion of your character’s capacity to maintain a coherent worldview, they take inspiration from Sandy Petersen’s Lovecraftian horror rules from Call of Cthulhu and add some interesting depth. The Pulp mode and Purist mode give you the choice between Indiana Jones and actual dread. Hite’s game assumes you’ve read your Lovecraft, and if you haven’t then Ken has written some great companion volumes that will guide you through them.

5. Hero System 5th Edition

I want to be careful here, because loving the Hero System is the kind of thing that gets you baffled looks from a lot of modern gamers. It is a system in which character creation can, without exaggeration, take longer than some short novels. It is a system that hands you a construction toolkit rather than a finished product and argues that this is a better way to present a role playting game. It is one of the most STEM-coded mainstream RPGs ever designed, and I say that as someone who finds the intersection of game design and analytical reasoning genuinely delightful. Like GURPS, and the “war game” Car Wars, the character creation system provides a beautiful kind of puzzle solving joy for those who embrace it. It is a wonderful solitary game.

It is also, once you’ve mastered an understanding of the rules, among the most “precise” RPGs I have ever played. The Powers system allows you to model essentially any fantastical ability through a modular construction language of base effects, advantages, and limitations. You can easily create powers or spells that allow for flight powered by solar energy, telepathy based on sugar consumption, or a force field that only protects against magic. If you want to run a game where the mechanical distinction between Iron Man and Spider-Man (or even the “biological vs. technological” Spider-Man) is easily distinguishable at the character-sheet level, Hero is your only honest answer.

5th Edition, released in 2004, was the culmination of two decades of iterative refinement. The sheer conceptual ambition of a system designed to run superhero campaigns, high fantasy, space opera, and covert action with a shared mechanical core remains impressive. That it largely succeeds is remarkable. My personal favorite version of the Hero System is the one used for 4th Edition Champions that was published in the 1990s, but the one I admire the most is the 5th edition. Steven Long, who wrote a lot of great 4th edition era products that stretched the older version of the rules, has a truly deep understanding of the underlying mathematics of the Hero system and he refined them even more with this edition.

I’ll just give you one quick example before I move on to the next game. Making a character in the Hero System is like building a computer from scratch. In building your own computer, you need to know a bit about von Neumann architecture and the manufactured parts that each unit requires. You don’t need to know it’s called von Neumann Architecture (though I do recommend reading John G. Kemeny’s Man and the Computer in which one of the inventors of the BASIC programming language shares the details of von Neumann’s lecture at Los Alamos about binary thinking machines.

In building a Hero System character, you have to understand the foundations of how the mechanics of the system work at the unit level. You need to understand what buying 5 points of Strength means and we can get a bit of a start by looking at the character sheet.

Those five points get you:

1d6 of physical damage at a range of 0 at a cost of 1 endurance when used
Double the lifting capacity of the prior 5 points that also costs 1 End to use
1 point of “Non-Resistant” Physical Defense
1 point of Recovery
2.5 points of Stun
1 “Skill Point” on Strength Based Checks

I know that there are a lot of terms in there that you may not understand. For example, “non-resistant” means defense that doesn’t work against “killing” attacks. At first glance, it looks like the five points you spend on Strength get you more than 5 points of value…and they kind of do. Without getting too detailed, I will focus solely on the “1d6 of physical damage at a range of 0 at a cost of 1 endurance when used.” The most fundamental mathematical concept in Hero is that 1d6 of Damage at a range greater than 0 costs 5 points and 1 endurance and that 5 points of Defense (at 0 endurance) costs 5 points. This is “Dune Math” or “Wargaming Math.” The underlying assumption is that defenses are cheaper than the “average” damage output. In this case 3.5 damage for 5 points and 5 points of defense for the same cost.

Defenses and attacks have “types” like physical, mental, energy, etc. that all follow this pattern. Notice that the 1d6 provided by Strength is at a range of 0, when a normal spend of 5 points adds 5 inches (10 meters) to the range of a power. Most of us cannot use our full Strength at range, though we can throw things and so I should have included that above since that lets you use “some” of your Strength at range, so Strength is (in part) a purchase of 1d6 of damage (5 points) at No Range which adds a -1/2 modifier to the cost we would pay. That -1/2 is added to the denominator when calculating how much a power costs. A power normally costs (Cost/1), or just the cost in points. If you add a limitation like No Range, this is added to the denominator. In this case, the new cost would be (Cost x 1)/1.5, or 3.3333 rounded down to 3. Advantages increase the x 1 in the numerator. So that part of Strength makes up approximately 3 points of the value.

The game prepackages a lot of combined powers, for example the Armor power is the Force Field power with 0 Endurance Cost, and sometimes they end up being a cost savings as it is with Strength. The point is that the game has costs for Damage, Defense, Movement, Range, etc. baked in and that those are the building blocks you need to think about when designing abilities. The more you understand what the constituent parts are, the more creative you can be with the system. Yes, it provides those pre-packaged bundles, but it provides a lot more. For me…too much more, which is why I prefer 4th edition. I may prefer the 4th edition of Champions, but I recognize that Steven Long’s design here is one of the most complex and balanced games ever made. That I prefer the slightly fuzzier, but still very quantified, earlier game is no insult.

6. Dragon Warriors

Dragon Warriors (currently available as a Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG from Serpent King Games) is the anomaly on this list, and I mean that as a term of endearment. The game was originally published in the United Kingdom between 1985 and 1986 as a series of inexpensive paperback books. The rules were designed by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson and aimed at readers who might be encountering roleplaying for the first time through the fantasy novel section of their local bookshop. Dragon Warriors was out of print for two decades before Magnum Opus Press brought it back in 2008 in a beautiful single-volume hardcover. Its inclusion on a “best games of the Aughts” list is primarily due to the fact that this is when the game became more widely available outside the United Kingdom and because the game had several significant edits in the new edition.

The system is elegant in the way that things designed for accessibility tend to be: attributes, a roll-under mechanic for most tasks, and a combat system that is genuinely tense without being complicated. What distinguishes Dragon Warriors from its contemporaries is its setting. “Legend” is a mythologized dark-ages Europe that draws on folklore rather than Tolkien, on the strange and threatening supernatural of the medieval imagination rather than the taxonomy of orcs and elves. The monsters feel like they belong to a world where people are genuinely afraid of the dark, which is exactly the atmosphere the game intends.

In my opinion Dragon Warriors is one of the best Sword & Sorcery game systems ever designed. The authors (Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson) have moved on to using GURPS for their adventures in the Land of Legend, but I think this is a mistake. While there are different subsystems for magic and melee combat, a reflection of the era the game was originally created, the game’s combat system is solid and the magic system is tied to Legend much more that GURPS sould be natively. The game is heavily class driven and each class feels different and has a distinct role in the world and I am a huge fan of the combat rules.

In this case, you roll to hit and then roll a penetration die for your weapon to see if it gets through the armor. After that, the weapon does a fixed amount of damage (modified by your Strength). I adore the armor bypass rule because it allows weapons like Crossbows and Bows to do the same amount of damage while also representing the armor bypassing tendencies of the Crossbow. The Bow rolls d6 to bypass armor and the Crossbow rolls a d10. The armor factor, aka armor bypass number, is an elegant solution to the “does armor make you harder to hit or harder to hurt” question. Here, it makes you harder to hurt but it isn’t mere damage reduction. I’ve written about the rpg damage algorithm in an older post, so I’ll share that rather than go down that rabbit hole, but this (and the way Palladium RPG handles it) is a wonderful way to address that question.

7. Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

I’ve said this many times on this Substack and elsewhere. I love 4th Edition D&D. I’ve loved it for as long as I’ve played it. My all time favorite editions of D&D are B/X and 2nd Edition AD&D, but I have had so much fun with the 4th Edition system. I’ve used it to play a Star Wars adventure and even used it to run a Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney game. It’s a flexible and fun system. I know this puts me in a minority so small that we could probably hold our annual convention in a moderately sized broom closet, but that doesn’t change my love of the game.

I’m not new in my defense of 4e either. I’ve been defending the game since before it launched a wrote a small defence in February of 2008. I’ve written a couple of posts on Zones of Control in D&D and how 4th Edition wasn’t an outlier on being miniatures dependent in play. An my most thorough defense of 4e was my discussion in a 2024 post titled How Not to Present/Market Your RPG: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.

I’m not going to stop liking it and writing about it just because it remains unpopular. I think it is a great game and very much a D&D game. In many ways its returned reliance on class over feats and streamlined skill rules made it a return to older playstyles where 3.x had become GURPS/Hero and abandoned the player focused problem solving for skill rolls over skilled roles.

Here is my basic argument in its compressed form. 4th Edition is a better game than its reputation suggests, and its reputation is largely a product of two catastrophic own-goals that had nothing to do with the underlying mechanics.

The first was presentation. Robert J. Schwalb, one of the game’s own designers, put it plainly in 2011 when he wrote that the edition’s layout “abandoned nearly everything familiar about the game’s look.” This visual discontinuity shaped players’ perception of the mechanics before they’d rolled a single die. The class abilities were presented in tightly formatted Magic: The Gathering-style power boxes, stripped of the ecological and contextual prose that had been accumulating in D&D rulebooks for thirty years. As Rob shows though, if you format the rules to look like older editions you begin to see that Encounter Powers are just those old 3/day abilities of old.

4th Edition uses a power system that was heavily influenced by the Tome of Battle and late 3.x supplements. Those were 4e’s rules being playtested and my group loved them at the time. The game only looked alien because it was dressed up in alien clothing accessible to MMORPG and Magic players. Schwalb’s reformatted Cleric, which he shared publicly, and which is available at the link above, is genuinely striking: presented in a more traditional layout, the same mechanics read like D&D again.

I’ve been arguing since 2014, in my piece on how Monster Manuals have presented creatures from OD&D to the present that the gutting of monster fluff in the core 4e books, which reversed thirty years of steadily expanding ecological and sociological detail, was the single largest driver of the “this doesn’t feel like D&D” response. Nothing signals “we care about worldbuilding” more reliably than at least two paragraphs on what a creature eats and where it sleeps, and 4th Edition simply didn’t bother. 4e provided pictures and stat blocks and assumed you would do everything else. It wasn’t until the excellent Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale that 4e correected this problem and added depth to the base Nentir Vale setting.

The second own-goal was the marketing campaign, which I can only describe as an act of aggressive institutional self-sabotage. The launch videos openly mocked THAC0, gleefully dunked on 3rd Edition’s grappling rules, and radiated the specific energy of someone who wants you to know they’ve moved on from their previous relationship. This is not how you persuade the people who loved those previous editions to give your new one a fair hearing. It is, however, a reliable method for triggering an edition war.

Which is a genuine shame, because the underlying game doesn’t deserve any of it. The Defender/Striker/Leader/Controller role framework is honest and functional — it makes explicit what every edition had implicitly assumed about party composition and stops pretending otherwise. The at-will/encounter/daily power structure gives every character meaningful decisions on every turn, including the Fighter, who in earlier editions was largely waiting for the casters to finish their homework. The argument that 4th Edition was “more miniatures-dependent” than its predecessors is one I addressed at length in my Zones of Control piece. Anyone who makes that claim has, I submit charitably, not carefully read the flanking and attack of opportunity rules in 3rd Edition and has probably missed the disengagement attacks of Basic D&D.

One of my backburner game projects is a hybrid that blends 4th Edition’s power structure with Moldvay/Cook Basic D&D. With it, I’m trying to use the formatting and power level (much lower) of B/X D&D as a foundation to which I add some of the best ideas from 4th edition. I’m not the first to work on games based on 4e’s mechanics. Shadow of the Demon Lord by Robert Schwalb pulls a ton from 4e and completely removes the 3.x influenced skill system in a way that makes it a pure Old School Game. 13th Age from Pelgrane Press is a succesful attempt to create a verson of 4e that doesn’t use any miniatures. Draw Steel from MCDM games is straight up 4e with some tweaks to streamline play and I’m a big fan. The starter adventure The Delian Tomb is a bargain, but it is also A LOT of material and probably should have been released as a physical product.

4th Edition is the great counterfactual of the Aughts. What the decade might have looked like if Wizards had formatted it differently, marketed it without contempt, and kept the OGL… that’s a timeline I’d like to visit.

8. Spirit of the Century

Spirit of the Century is Evil Hat’s love letter to pulp adventure. A love letter that applies Julius Schwartz tinted lenses to the two-fisted, globe-trotting, villain-punching genre fiction of the 1920s and 30s. When I say, “Julius Schwartz tinted lenses,” I am referring to his famous quote about how putting an ape on the cover of a comic inceases sales. As you can see from the cover of Spirit of the Century, they have taken this very much to heart and if you look at the cover of Weird Tales below you’ll see that Schwartz’s axiom also applied to the pulps. Spirit of the Century it is written with a warmth and enthusiasm that is frankly infectious.

Spirit of the Century was one of the first games put the FATE system in front of a broad audience. FATE is an acronym for Fudge Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment and is based on the FUDGE role playing game system by Steffan O’Sullivan. When FATE used a relatively silly acronym they were merely following a longstanding tradition in the role playing game hobby. Other acronymic games include “The Other Roleplaying Game” (TORG), Generic Universal Role Playing Game System (GURPS), and Freeform Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine (FUDGE).

Just as FATE was a simplification and popularization of the FUDGE engine, so too was FUDGE a response to GURPS. O’Sullivan thought that GURPS was didn’t scale well on the smaller level, so he began working on the Simple Laid-back Universal Game (SLUG) and eventually designed FUDGE. It’s a very solid system, but there is room to add various storytelling elements and that is what the folks at Evil Hat Games did.

Spirit of the Century, like all FATE games, runs on Fudge dice. Thes are six-sided die that are marked with +, +, blank, blank, -, - instead of with the regular numbers you and I are used to. Characters in the game have a number of skills that influence die rolls in the right circumstances and they also have Aspects. These Aspects are short descriptive phrases attached to characters, scenes, and situations that can be invoked for bonuses or compelled for narrative complications.

The Aspect system is, philosophically, a direct challenge to the assumption that characters are defined by their numbers. A character in Spirit of the Century is defined by statements like “Man of a Thousand Faces” or “The War Changed Me.” These phrases are simultaneously mechanical resources and narrative commitments. Players can spend a Fate Point to invoke their aspect, which makes them perform better in a particular situation. Similarly GMs can compel your Aspects, for which they have to give you one or more Fate Points in return. When they do this, they’re not merely imposing a penalty to your action. They are also extending an invitation to make your character interesting. The Fate Point economy that flows from compels and invocations is the most elegant I’ve seen for keeping the table engaged in collaborative storytelling rather than competitive resource management. You can see echoes of this system in Monte Cook’s Cypher System.

FATE 1st Edition

984KB ∙ PDF file

Spirit of the Century, and the FATE system, make the table feel like a writers’ room. That’s a specific kind of magic, and it’s harder to achieve than it looks. As with Burning Wheel, this is a game system that is better at accomodating the style of play that a lot of YouTube games are advocating. It isn’t that you cannot use D&D for storygames, but the system isn’t designed for it while games like FATE are.

9. My Life with Master

Paul Czege’s My Life with Master is the smallest game on this list. It’s a thirty-six page pamphlet that is filled with more discussion of tone and storytelling than it is with mechanics. It is also the recommendation here most likely to provoke the response “wait, is this even a game?” from someone encountering it for the first time.

It is a game. It is a game about being a minion of a Gothic horror villain. Players take on the role of a Renfield, a hunchbacked servant, or some other desperate creature who has exchanged autonomy for belonging. The game takes this foundation to force the characters to go through a narrative in which they go through the slow, painful accumulation of enough Self-Loathing and Love to finally defy their Master and, perhaps, find something resembling freedom. This isn’t a long term campaign game and it isn’t one designed to be played however you want. This game has a purpose.

While it does favor a particular style of play, I believe that one of the great successes of My Life with Master as a game is that its theme and its mechanics are perfectly integrated.

The mechanics of My Life with Master are simple, deceptively simple. At their most basic, the player and the game master roll handfuls of dice, add the totals, with the highest total winning the contest. Winning a contest also allows the winner to describe the victory as they wish, within the limits of the possibilities of the scene and the overarching narrative. This is a very reductive version of the system and I recommend buying the game to get the full version of the system.

That said, I want to highlight that the factors which influence the success or failure of any given action are directly related to the theme of the game. How fear-inspiring a Master has significant influence on how actions are resolved. So too is how superstitious a community is contrasted with the level of reason in that community. Is the town filled with fearful peasants or elites educated in Alienism during their days attending an Austrian University? This provides a perfect mechanical environment for simulating a romantic/gothic setting. This is especially the case given that the amount a minion is loved or can love is balanced against the amount a minion experiences self-loathing or how weary a minion is from all the horrific acts he or she has perpetrated. These are the factors that matter in the game and not how high a minion’s dexterity score is.

Most of the decisions which shape the environment of play are crafted as a shared experience by all who are playing. Together, the players and game master create the town. Even the design of the Master is collaborative as the rules recommend that everyone contribute to that design. Given the “you win the conflict, you control the narrative” aspect of the rules, this is a game where everyone tells stories at some point. Over time every player will tell several stories, where each minion is the protagonist and where the Master is the universal antagonist they all work for. One of the key innovations of My Life with Master is the way it emphasizes the protagonistic nature of all the player’s characters.

My Life with Master is not for everyone. It is for people who want to sit around a table and tell a story that has something to say about cowardice, complicity, and the possibility of moral redemption. Those people know who they are.

10. Scion: Hero, Demigod, God

Scion is the game on this list that most visibly didn’t survive the gap between its ambitions and its execution. I am deeply in love with the setting and the theme of this game. In part because one of the best role playing game I ever played in was one where our DM had us play as the reawakened Gods of Norse Mythology fighting in modern day Los Angeles because Ragnarok had arrived. Roger Frederick, the DM in question, combined the fake Ragnarok from the Thor Eternals Saga (Thor Annual #7 and Thor #283-291) with Highlander and created a wonderful experience for every one of his players. Roger died in 2017 from a bacterial infection. It hit hard and fast. He had previously survived being run over by a bus in the Portland, Oregon area a decade earlier. He had sued the bus company for damages, but his attorney recommended he settle for a relative pittance of what he deserved because he was one of those weird adults who collected dolls (action figures). Fuck, I wanted this to be about how cool, yet frustrating, I found a game and now I’m just pissed off at the bigotry that geeks and gamers faced in the mid-2000s and earlier.

Anyway, the concept of Scion is irresistible. In the game, you play the mortal children of gods from the world’s mythologies : Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Japanese, Aztec, and more. During play you discover your divine heritage and ascend through tiers of power from Hero to Demigod to God. White Wolf’s Storyteller system provides the chassis, the same dice-pool-of-d10s-counting-successes engine that ran the World of Darkness games. The setting draws on genuine comparative mythology with evident enthusiasm and at least some scholarly literacy.

I’ve always found the World of Darkness Storyteller system a little fiddlier than it ought to be. It’s supposed to be narrative, but you end up doing a lot of power gaming in some settings. The mechanical problems underpinning the system are very real. Chief among them is that scales poorly as characters acquire divine Knacks and Boons as the characters advance. As with other Storyteller games with power creep, some powers are so dramatically more effective than others that the game can feel unequal across the table in ways that the designers clearly didn’t anticipate. The game is better at inspiring a campaign than sustaining one through its full three-tier arc.

But I keep it on this list because the idea of Scion opened a door that hasn’t closed and because the setting material itself is amazingly rich. The premise is inspiring enough it generates compelling play even when the mechanics creak. Who doesn’t want to play a game where the children of gods walk among us and grow into their full divine inheritance? It is the game of the decade that most clearly illustrates the gap between conceptual ambition and mechanical craft, which is itself a useful thing for a game designer to study. Sure, I might use a different system to play the premise (likely Savage Worlds, Hero, or DC Heroes), but I want to play this game setting.

11. Fireborn

Fireborn might be the most underplayed game on this list. Fantasy Flight Games released it in 2004 and it vanished with almost no cultural footprint, which is a shame bordering on an injustice.

The premise is elegant and genuinely unusual. In the game you play Scions. These are ancient dragons who have reincarnated into human bodies in near-future London, who possess only fragments of their draconic memories and precious little of their original power. The game runs on two interlocked time tracks simultaneously. The base setting is modern London, where Scions navigate monster hunting, political machinations, and the creeping return of magic to a world that has spent centuries convincing itself the impossible doesn’t exist. The second track is the mythic age, accessed through a mechanic called flashbacks. These are collectively remembered dramatic events from the Scions’ draconic past, played out in real time at the table. What happens in the flashbacks directly unlocks abilities in the modern timeline. Past and present are not separate stories; they are the same story told across two eras simultaneously. What’s cool about this is that you can slow play the modern game while having the flashbacks provide adventure after adventure as the players slowly hunt down who their main enemies are.

The resolution system, called Dynamic d6, is built around four elemental Aspects (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water). Each of these Aspects governs a domain of action. Fire drives aggressive physical action and combat. Water governs defense, stamina, and reflexes. Air covers reasoning, awareness, and social manipulation. Earth handles willpower, concentration, and resistance to magic. Characters roll a pool of standard d6s equal to their relevant Aspect score, with fours, fives, and sixes counting as successes against a threshold. The interesting wrinkle is the stance change mechanic: before rolling, a character can physically move dice between Aspect pools, borrowing Water dice to bolster a Fire attack, for instance, at the cost of their defensive capacity until their aspects reset at the start of their next turn. It makes every roll a small strategic decision about resource commitment, and it creates a genuinely dynamic rhythm in combat that the name promises.

Karma is the game’s magical resource and it also ties both timelines together. It fuels the supernatural powers and legacies Scions unlock through flashbacks, and the growing ability to access those draconic capabilities in the modern age is the mechanical representation of your character slowly remembering who and what they used to be. The game enforces group play by having the Scions bound together into broods. These are groups whose souls have been intertwined across all of their lifetimes. Their lives and stories are connected and this gives the party structure both narrative weight and mechanical purpose.

The dual timeline structure demands a GM willing to run interleaved narratives without losing the thread of either, which is a steep ask. But the potential payoff is a kind of emotional resonance that most RPGs never reach. This is a game that is a temporary last-gasp of the meta-plot era where game systems had a storyline in mind and where campaigns had endings. D&D was designed for emergent play and never-ending campaigns, but the metaplot games of the 1990s changed that emphasis to one where players would be able to tell a story and then move onto a different game. The contemporary Scion’s dawning recognition of who they were, made mechanically legible through flashback scenes, is the kind of design that people remember years later.

That almost no one played it long enough to find out is one of the Aughts’ quiet tragedies. Given that Reign of Fire came out around the same time and also failed to catch on, maybe the early 2000s just hated the thought of Dragons in London. But c’mon man! Mad Max with Dragons! Mad Max with freakin’ Dragons! Who doesn’t want to see that?! Especially when you add Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, and Gerard Butler to the mix. Fireborn has a slightly different premise, but it’s just as cool. The biggest challenge GMs will face is how to pull off the pay off of the setting. There is very little, though some, adventure support and for meta-plot games, having an example of how to structure the big pay off really matters.

The decade was, in retrospect, defined by a productive argument about what roleplaying games are for. 3rd Edition said they’re for heroic adventure with granular rules. Burning Wheel said they’re for exploring character under pressure. FATE said they’re for collaborative storytelling. 4th Edition said they’re for tactical engagement. My Life with Master said they’re for examining uncomfortable human experiences in a safe fictional frame.

None of them were wrong. The Aughts gave us the full spectrum, and we are richer for the argument.

This piece is an expanded revisitation of a post originally published at Cinerati on January 12, 2010. If you were there, hello. If you weren’t welcome to the conversation.

Revisiting Old Gaming History Questions: Who was Gigi D'arn?

Christian Lindke — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:51:43 GMT

Gaming History is Important and Fun to Learn

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about the history of role playing games and I’ve learned a lot about those who write about the history of role playing games. I’d like to share two of the most important things I’ve learned over the years. The first is that many of the early role playing game creators, especially outside of TSR, had a sense of humor about their creations and they would often include things that make finding the real history of there era a little more difficult for future generations. A close second is that many modern historians are “discovering” information that was openly known to those who read older gaming magazines. For example, a lot of the debate of how important Tony Bath or David Arneson were to the creation of D&D, as opposed to Gary Gygax, were openly discussed in Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Wargamer magazine and Chaosium’s Different Worlds.

I’ll be doing a series that includes issue by issue reviews of those magazines as soon as I finish final edits on my dissertation. All the chapters have been written and submitted for an initial pass, and I’ve gotten them back with revision notes and that will be taking up a bit of my time. Let’s just say that the magazines are a vast trove of information and that reading them dispels a lot of misconceptions some gamers have about the history of the hobby. Living history and real time testimony mean a lot. Of course, you can only trust the information as much as you trust the person giving it, but Living Histories are a great tool in general.

I have a lot of respect for people like Jon Peterson and Shannon Appelcline when it comes to their attempts to cut through the fog of the past and give us a clear picture of the early days of the hobby. I don’t always agree with their evaluations, but I find them to be sincere in their efforts to write an honest history of the hobby. Appelcline’s book on Traveller is a godsend that has given me a new “white whale” gaming product to find, one that I don’t think exists in any commerical form.

One of the reasons I respect them so much is that I once applied my own analytical tools to answer a question I always wanted an answer for. That question? Who is Gigi D’arn? I wrote an article back in 2012 for my old blog and I’m going to share that with you here, as well as some of the comments I received and my thoughts on the process.

Who is Gigi D’Arn? (Reposted and Unedited 2012 Article)

Way back in the days of role playing yore -- 1979 to be specific -- the gaming hobby was introduced to its first official gossip columnist. That columnist was Gigi D’Arn, and she wrote her first gossip column “A Letter from Gigi” in the second issue of The Chaosium’s Different Worlds gaming magazine. Though her first article was published in 1979, her real identity has never been revealed. I find this bit of gaming history to be one of the most interesting mysteries in the hobby.

Just who is/was Gigi D’arn?

From my initial searching of the internet, it appears that the consensus seems to fall in line with the description at RPG Geek. That being that Gigi was a fabrication of Different Worlds editor Tadashi Ehara and was probably a compilation of comments by Chaosium staff. Even Allen Varney -- a long time gamer and pretty informed participant in the “Western” gaming community of the 70s and 80s -- seems to agree with this hypothesis. After taking some time to research the question, I don’t agree with the consensus opinion. I would like to offer the hypothesis that Gigi was a real gamer who was introduced to the gaming hobby in Southern California and who was a part of the “Alarums & Excursions“ crowd.

Before I begin to present the little evidence I have in favor of my hypothesis, let me say that the Gigi D’arn articles -- along with the Larry DiTillio “Sword of Hollywood” articles -- are some of my favorite reading and are part of what made Different Worlds such a good gaming magazine. Regardless of who Gigi was or wasn’t, she was a very entertaining writer. I would venture to say that she was the Shelly Mazzanoble of her day. Shelly, with her “Confessions of” columns on the Wizards website are the closest thing I have found to Gigi’s writing. The column’s not for everyone, it is a gossip column after all, but I enjoy it in a “Real Housewives meets D&D” kind of way. I’ve also been a fan of the pseudonym itself. Using a pseudonym that was a combination of both Gary Gygax and David Arneson’s names seems to me the perfect identity for a gossip columnist.

Now for the evidence that Gigi was a real person -- though I do agree that some of the rumors might have been compiled from Chaosium staffers.

1) In the first column in Issue #2, Gigi mentioned that she lives in the Los Angeles area. -- Chaosium is a Bay Area company, and while this bit of information might seem a bit of “misdirection” later statements and supporting evidence will highlight how this is more likely true than misdirection.

2) This information is repeated in issue #5 as “Another local news is that LEE GOLD is working on a feudal Japan supplement to C&S.” It should be noted that this piece of information follows discussion of Ken St. Andre and Flying Buffalo. Given that the Arizona and SoCal gaming communities were fairly tied together back then, this isn’t surprising.

3) In issue 16, Tadashi addresses the issue face on. In issue 14, Tadashi included a survey that contained the question “Who do you think is Gigi?” They received several responses which were published in issue 16, including. “A committee composed of the DW staff” and “Gary Gygax in drag.” Tadashi wrote the following in the editorial:

These are the ones Gigi laughed at when I showed them to her. You see, she is a real person. She lives in southern California and writes occasional feature articles (Rose Bowl Parade, Miss Culver City Contest, “Save the Fruit Fly Movement!”, Rhubarb Festival, etc.) for a local newspaper/advertiser. She is an ardent fan of the entire gaming hobby, not just role playing. And she jealously guards her real identity. — Tadashi Ehara

Seems to me that this hints pretty strongly that it’s a real person. Though I have to admit that Lexis/Nexis searches for “Save the Fruit Fly Movement!” yielded no information, nor did following up a Rose Chung/Greg Stafford/Scott Bizar reference in issue #2.

4) Issue #31 contains an interview with Gigi. This interview is one of three “My Life and Role-Playing” interviews featured in the issue. The others are Dave Hargrave and Gerald D. Seypura, both of whom are real people. The “My Life” interviews were a semi-regular feature of DW, especially in the early issues. In the interview, Gigi provides some very interesting information. First, she claims to have attended CSLA, UCLA, and Michigan. She mentions that her first husband was a member of the SCA and that she was introduced to D&D by SCA members Barry Detweiler and Connie James (she admits that these are pseudonyms). My next point will return to Barry and Connie. She also writs extensively about her work history, her marriage, and how she met Tadashi. This interview in no way seems fictional. It lacks all of the flair of an authors “exaggerated” biography. It is quite mundane, but does include the statement “At cons you can recognize me by my glasses.” Which I found interesting as that issue included this picture:

Image from Different Worlds 31 copyright Tadashi Ehara 1983

Given Gigi’s intimate knowledge of the workings of Flying Buffalo, implying friendship/familiarity with the staff, and the “Glasses” reference in the letter, I couldn’t help but wonder if the woman on the right is the mysterious Gigi. I still do wonder that very question.

5) Remember Barry and Connie above? In his interview with Lee Gold, a southern California gaming community giant, James Maliszewski asked Lee how she became involved in the role playing game hobby. Her answer?

Our friends, Owen & Hilda Hannifen, came down from San Francisco to visit us, with a copy of the Original D&D rules. My husband and I were fascinated, and they lent us a photocopy of the rules, on seeing us write a check to TSR to order our own copy, so we wouldn’t have to wait till the rules arrived (in a brown box) from TSR.

There is no mention that Owen and Hilda were members of the SCA, but given how central Lee Gold was to the Southern California gaming community, and given that Lee and Barry Gold were members of the SCA, it doesn’t take much of a leap to speculate that Barry and Connie are either Owen and Hilda, Lee and Barry, or a combination thereof.

6) In 2004, Gigi wrote a letter to Tadashi for his Different Worlds publications website. In that letter, she mentions moving to Colorado, she mentions her “latest beau,” and she mentions that Mike Stackpole looks more fit than the last time she and Tadashi saw him. Remember that photo above?

None of this proves that Gigi is/was a real person, or that Gigi is still around for that matter. What it does do though, is make it reasonable to hypothesize that Gigi was in fact an actual individual who was friends with Tadashi and who wrote the column. Finding out if Gigi is a real person is a bit like being a blind man examining an elephant. The evidence is scarce and inconclusive, but it is the evidence we have.

I believe that we should create theories from the evidence we have, and so I believe that Gigi is a real person who now lives in Colorado.

From Christian Lindke’s Different Worlds Collection

The Fun of Learning I Was Wrong

I got some great comments on the old blog post, including replies from Allen Varney, Michael Stackpole, Deb Wykle (aka Debora Kerr, the woman in glasses), Tadashi Ehara, Greg Stafford, and a couple of other people. The results were eye opening and a ton of fun to read. Shannon Appelcline was kind enough to cite me in his discussion of Gigi as he was writing Designers & Dragons, and the article is a citation on Wikipedia for Different Worlds magazine.

Here are the comments that were shared with me:

Allen Varney said...
Mike Stackpole says the woman in the photo is Pat Mueller, though I’m not sure I buy that. On Twitter (@MikeStackpole), Mike says, “I ran into Tadashi in 2004. [...] I’m 99% sure Gigi was Tadashi. I thought I remembered confirmation of same from the horse’s mouth, but I could be in error.”

It was pretty cool getting a response from Allen Varney. He’s one of my favorite designers from the era and it suggested I was completely wrong.

Michael Stackpole said...
To follow up on Allen’s comment, even if that isn’t Pat, it would have been Deb Wykle. She came into the industry well after Gigi was in it and Different Worlds had already retired.

I do recall seeing Tadashi again in the 2004 timeframe, which would have been the source of the remark. I’d shed a fair amount of weight and some hair in the interim.

The conversation I dimly recall now about Gigi was post convention, probably a DundraCon, early to mid 80s. (It might have even been at the convention where that picture was taken.) I came away with the sense that Tadashi wrote the Gigi column, and never had the sense that there was much of a mystery to it.

Let’s just say that getting a reply from Michael Stackpole was a big deal to me and that it shows how much the older blogosphere really was a place where communication happened and how social media could be truly social. It’s something I think Substack has, in part, brought back to the web and I am grateful for it.

Debora K said...
This is such a fun conspiracy that I was going to keep quiet, but I see Mike has already identified me. That is indeed me, Deb Wykle (married now to another former Flying Buffalo employee Bill Kerr). How anyone could label me “sexy friend” in light of those godawful huge ‘80s glasses and that perm . . . well, at least I was thinner then, lol.

That sense of community hit even harder when Debora Kerr responded that it was her in the picture.

Tadashi Ehara said...
For the record, for each DW issue, Gigi (not her real name) would write me a letter. (That’s why every one of her columns begins with “Dear Tadashi.”) The Chaosium staff would then proceed to embellish it for final publication. After publication each of her original letters were unceremoniously burnt to a crisp as she did not want any physical evidence of her lying around.

Tadashi responded as well, and in a way that suggested that Stackpole was right that he was Gigi.

Greg Stafford said...
Just for the record
I do not recall the exact statement that Gigi made, but concerning “Rose Chun, Scott Bizar, Greg Stafford”:
Rose is the mother of two sisters who were the wives of Scott and I. I always thought it ironic that we were brothers in law, what with Scott’s NY-style “publish everything and one will hit” style and my CA-style “make it as excellent as possible before publishing”

Greg Stafford added a nice bit of personal history to the mystery and revealed a connection between him and Scott Bizar.

(Update: Additional Comment Added)

piper909 (Kevin Hendryx) said...
I mailed Gigi -- must have been an address to contact her at -- a number of reports and sometimes copies of documents (for verification) and suitably juicy stories during the time I worked at TSR Hobbies (1980-81) and Metagaming (1981-82). Most of them ended up in her column, sometimes attributed to me as the source, sometimes not. I fell out of the habit when I left Coleco and the game industry after 1983 and I no longer seem to have any copies of DW magazine but I remember Gigi’s column fondly and I *hope* she is a real person. I thought she was cute as a bug, judging from her cartoon image! Sic transit gloria mundi.

I had one more comment on the piece from Kevin Hendryx, who was an early employee at TSR and Metagaming. He worked as an editor on a number of key early products and designed The Fury of the Norsemen microgame for Metagaming concepts. There are a lot of great microgames from that era and Norsemen is a ton of fun. I’ll definitely add that game to the review pile for future months. It should be noted that Kevin, contrary to Michael Stackpole’s assertion, believed that Gigi was a real person. In my correspondence with him this week, he hoped that she had been found.

Final Reflection

I’m kind of sad that Gigi wasn’t a real person. I still think it was a genius column and that the gossip tone and nature of the article gave it the freedom to be wrong without the need to apologize later. The columns are a ton of fun to read and I’ll certainly do a post focused entirely on them in the future. Tadashi is/was a great editor and I’ve reached out to him to see if we can schedule an interview.

Instead of being too sad though and ss much as evidence suggests that Gigi was a product of Tadashi’s creativity, I’m going to choose to believe that I might just run into Gigi at a convention some day. Besides, in the infinity of possible universes, there has to be one where she is real.

Weekly Geeklinks

Christian Lindke — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:29:48 GMT

I wasn’t able to track down an really interesting geek related topic for this week’s oddity, so I thought I’d share one of my wife’s Nicnup cartoons. It captures her sense of humor perfectly.

As an aside, it looks like I will be doing giveaways here of Sword & Sorcery novels and video games I have the codes for. Look for one next Friday!

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

Waterworld is a film that has grown on me over time. I initially rejected the film as a self-indulgent Mad Max clone, but I’ve since grown to appreciate it as a fun film. An EXPENSIVE, but fun film. I think a part of my softening on the film is that Kevin Costner is a very likable actor who has made a number of films I enjoy, and the second is that I’ve come to be very critical of film critics who focus on the finances of a film when rejecting it. As I read the old negative reviews of Heaven’s Gate or John Carter, I am struck by how much the critics are parroting the “studio line.” It’s almost as if they are trying to give the studio cover for a massive write off. Both of those films have aesthetic merit, even as both cost far too much to make. Waterworld isn’t the masterpiece that Heaven’s Gate is (and I think it is one of the best Westerns ever made), nor is it as entertaining as John Carter (once it finally arrives on Mars), but it is as fun as the stunt show it inspired and that has had legs. In one of his latest articles, reviews a film in the Waterworld tradition called Storm Rider. I’m thankful he did, because otherwise I wouldn’t even know it existed and I’m game for this kind of film, even if it’s terrible.

Storm Rider: Legend of Hammerhead Review - WastewaterWorld

Do audiences today know that Waterworld was an actual movie? One that passed its 30th anniversary last year without any major comments or thinkpieces on it, at least that I saw? And yet somehow, despite failing to launch any sort of cinematic franchise, it inspired a theme park stunt show that continues to run at multiple parks, three decades on…

2 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

Molly O’blivion’s Musings

is collaborating with on a series of articles on Horror in Star Trek: The Original Series. In this first entry, they discuss the episodes “The Man Trap” and “Miri.” I’m a big fan of “The Man Trap,” but it’s one of those episodes that puts the lie to the frequent (possibly spurious) Roddenberry quote that Star Trek was supposed to be Wagon Train in the Stars. Most of the time, Star Trek is Horatio Hornblower in the Stars, but in “The Man Trap” it’s pretty much “let’s borrow A.E. van Vogt’s story Black Destroyer and add a sexual dynamic to it.” That sexual dynamic changes a lot, but when I read Voyage of the Space Beagle (years after I’d seen “The Man Trap”) the intersection of the particular kinds of encounters they faced and the highly logical Science Officer with mental powers (weak psionics for Spock and the “Nexialism” of Elliot Grosvenor in the Space Beagle, I wondered why van Vogt wasn’t receiving royalties. He did eventually receive a $50,000 settlement from the Alien production, which also borrowed ideas from Black Destroyer. Of course, there are enough differences in “The Man Trap” to make it interesting, but the connection is pretty obvious once you see it.

Hellish Views - Harry Evans

Horror in Star Trek: The Original Series - Part 1

I began watching Star Trek: The Original Series around the age of eleven. Mostly I watched them on a little portable DVD player with a screen the size of a paperback book. The only thing that stayed …

2 months ago · 37 likes · 36 comments · Hellish Views - Harry Evans and Molly O'Blivion

One of my first geek chats was with Richard Iorio of , where we discussed his most recent edition of the Colonial Gothic Role Playing Game and how he is planning to release a set of rules specifically aimed at D&D 5e players. His d20 Rulebook won’t replace his core game, but will allow those who want to play in a Gothic Horror version of the American Founding era who prefer to use familiar mechanics to do so. He’s working on a lot of projects right now and has been kind enough to update us on some of his projects in his latest newsletter. It’s brief, but it includes one big announcement. He’s writing up a complete meta-plot for his Colonial Gothic game, which means that there is a kind of “adventure path” that can be used for campaign play. Great news indeed.

The Substack for Rogue Games

Where we were, where we stand, and where we are going

One of the things I’ve been doing in my spare time is creating three documents. These are…

2 months ago · 1 like · Rogue Games

I cite more than a couple of times in my dissertation when I discuss political polarization and how different moral frameworks inform our decision making processes. The model is still evolving, but it’s built on robust research and Dr. Haidt is an important scholar in the field of psychology. Lately, he’s focused a lot of attention to our over use of digital media and how it affects human interactions. There is some very important discussion regarding the topic, and some troubling findings, but I have been surprised of late at how much catastrophizing there is in some of the articles he’s sharing on social media.

Take this piece by as an example. As a parent of teenage twins who grew up in the digital era, and who sees real time the affect social media and other digital distractions have on my daughters and their friends, I found the use of a catastrophic frame in this piece alarming. I’m not as skeptical of the findings as is in his writings and research, though I too have memories of musical and ludic Satanic Panics, but I do worry about how using a catastrophic frame will engage the emotions of parents and children. Catastrophic frames are designed to activate fear and that fear might lead to either avoidance behaviors or anger based attack behaviors, neither of which seem to me to be a productive deliberative response. Given that one of the reasons that Haidt is very worried about young people to day is that we tend to teach young people to catastrophize, it seems odd to me that he would use such a frame to encourage serious engagement with an important issue.

After Babel

30 Facts About Childhood Today that Will Terrify You

This post was originally published by Ted Gioia on his substack The Honest Broker. Ted is a writer, musician, and culture critic. I first became interested in Ted after reading his fascinating 2024 post about how technology is changing many forms of culture in the same direction because of business models that monetize distraction and addiction. I think this recent post will be of great interest to readers of After Babel. We thank Ted for allowing us to share it…

2 months ago · 574 likes · 87 comments · Ted Gioia

I often discuss how Michael Moorcock was my introduction to Fantasy fiction as a literary genre, but I don’t mention often enough how seeing the covers Michael Whelan did for his Elric novels led me to read the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. As I mentioned in my most recent live chat, Michael Whelan is a giant in SF and Fantasy illustration and his beautiful paintings inspired me to read a wide array of stories. In his most recent post, he discusses whether Barsoom (Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars) is a Fantasy or Science Fiction setting. I loved reading his thoughts on the topic and agree with the statement he makes early “that all ‘SF’ is fantasy, really.” To me it’s a subgenre, but Whelan has other thoughts as well.

The Art of Michael Whelan

Barsoom: Fantasy or Science Fiction?

A fan on Mastodon recently posed the question: “Are the Barsoom novels [by Edgar Rice Burroughs] science fiction or are they really to all intents and purposes fantasy…

2 months ago · 78 likes · 12 comments · Michael Whelan

That reminds me, I wrote some of my thoughts about Planetary Romance (the particular sub-genre that John Carter’s stories fall into) in the past. Check out that article and let me know what you think.

I am of about 23 different minds when it comes to the upcoming Rebellion edition of Tunnels & Trolls and I am very thankful that took the time to interview Filip Hartelius of Rebellion Unplugged about what they are aiming for with the game. The interview did little to assuage my concerns with the game. I’ve played the quickstart rules and “for me” they don’t feel like T&T at all. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, I don’t think it is, but it does lack the gonzo whimsy of Ken St. Andre’s creation. The new version is whimsical, to be sure, but it lacks the underground/UK comic edge of St. Andre’s game, which is surprising given that Rebellion publishes 2000 A.D.

You will be able to back Tunnels and Trolls: A New Age on Kickstarter soon and you can download the quickstart rules right now. My sense is that the design team is trying to recruit people who play games like Daggerheart and 5e, but St. Andre’s original strategy wasn’t to peel players away from existing games. He wanted to provide something for those who didn’t understand, or didn’t want to play D&D. He was engaging in a “Blue Ocean” strategy, while Rebellion seems to be following trends and entering a shark infested “Red Ocean.”

Thaumavoria

Tunnels and Trolls returns

Links: Back Tunnels and Trolls: A New Age: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebellionunplugged/tunnels-and-trolls-a-new-age…

2 months ago · 9 likes

Speaking of whimsy, has some thoughts on William Shatner’s upcoming Heavy Metal album. I’ve long been a Shatner fan and this will be a must buy for me.

William Shatner's Heavy Metal Album

William Shatner announced he is working on a heavy metal album. The 94-year old actor described the appeal of the metal music genre in this quote from a recent Blabbermouth article…

2 months ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · Matt Thompson

We are currently living in a golden age or storytelling roleplaying games. These are games where the mechanics focus more on narrative “yes, and” or “no, but” resolution systems and less on tactical combat or granular skill resolution. The modern exemplars of this genre are Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel, Daggerheart, and Blades in the Dark. There are many other great games in the genre": Supercrew which is one of my personal favorites, and games like Lacuna, 3:16, and Sorcerer that were part of Ron Edwards’ “The Forge” indie game movement in the early 2000s. Many of the modern games (especially Apocalypse World) owe a lot to the Ron Edwards’ movement, with Apocalypse World owing a particular debt to Inspectres. While Edwards was only one of the designers in that circle, he was a key interlocutor who pushed the other participants to broaden how they think about role playing games as games and as art.

While The Forge storygames movement isn’t as well known today as it should be, even lesser known is the storygaming movement of the early 1990s. When White Wolf Publishing released their first Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook, they brought in an entirely new cohort of players into gaming fandom. Their mechanics, especially their “automatically successful” thresholds and their “storyteller” advice changed the hobby forever, but they were not alone. While they were pushing certain boundaries and making roleplaying a little “cooler” than it had been before, there was a design team in Southern California creating their own story focused system…one that is far too underappreciated. I’m referring to the folks at Better Games, who were vital in the development of modern storytelling rpgs. They don’t often get as much credit as they deserve, but their games remain innovative and vital today decades after they were created. They were truly decades ahead of their time. Characters in Better Games Free-Style Role-Play games have no numerical statistics, instead they have a number of narrative descriptors that describe how their characters function.

It’s an innovation that works in a number of settings ranging from Fantasy to Horror, but my favorite example of it was in Better Games two comic book inspired games Good Guys Finish Last and Villains Finish First that were published by Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer magazine when Better Games owned the rights to that title.

Good Guys Finish Last has been rereleased by postworld games with a much improved layout updated by jim pinto (sic) and I highly recommend checking it out. While I could go on and on about how important Better Games was to the storytelling game scene, I will share jim pinto’s introduction instead. Given that jim has gone on to design a number of excellent games in the storytelling game space, his praise speaks volumes about the direct influence Better Games had on the genre.

To give you another example of what characters in Free-Style systems look like, though you are free to look at the link to my blog post above, here is a glimpse at a character sheet in Good Guys Finish Last. You’ll notice that all of the abilities are named and the only number listed is the modifier. I wish jim had opted for the actual wound chart for each character, rather than listing numbers, as that shows which keywords add to which damage type and help give the game even greater narrative focus.

A Trick of the Tail was the first album featuring Phil Collins as the lead singer of the band. Peter Gabriel decided to leave the band during The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Tour and the band was unable to find a replacement who could match Gabriel’s unique voice. Collins had frequently sung backup for the band, but the shift to lead singer was something he did only reluctantly. It was his studio performance of “Squonk” on A Trick of the Tail that convinced his bandmates that he could slide into the role.

A Trick of the Tail is still very much Genesis in full Progressive Rock mode, but you can hear the beginnings of elements that would form the foundation of their later pop transformation in Squonk. Once Steve Hackett left the band in 1978, the remaining trio began to incorporate more mainstream songs like “Follow You, Follow Me” though they retained their progressive foundation (listen to the sophisticated percussion on this “pure pop” tune). The real transition for the band came after Duke, which was a mix of progressive and pop that is my favorite Genesis album. Since I’ve shared that one numerous times though, I’ll share the lovely “Follow You, Follow Me” that presages the kinds of songs Collins would play in his solo career.

Prince is undeniably one of the greatest musicians in Rock history. His musical compositions incorporate progressive, pop, jazz, blues, and so many other musical inspirations. His compositional vocabulary was as vast as his talent. He was a prolific creator who wrote hit after hit, and many that were made hits by other artists. He was, unlike many pop stars, a true singer-songwriter and he was a helluva guitarist as well. I’ve always loved Raspberry Berey because it combines transforms his sexually charged music into a beautiful love song.

When people finally achieve success in an entertainment related field, people often describe them as being an “overnight success.” This description is more often than not completely unfounded. For most artists, there are years of sweat and toil…the miserable paying of dues…that precede that “sudden success.” When I think of the struggles of the musical artist, I often think of this performance by the band Graduate on the kids game show Runaround. While it’s a paying gig, that’s giving the band much needed exposure, Roland Orzabel sings “Ever Met a Day” with a kind of rage I’ve rarely seen and the kids in the audience have clearly never heard teh song before and the shots of the crowd show them to be baffled and clueless to what they are hearing. Meanwhile, their Roland’s bandmate fully commits to his flute solo. I imagine if any interviewer ever asked Roland during a Tears for Fears interview, “Have you ever paid your dues?” I think his response would be, “Have I paid my dues? Have I paid my dues?! Have you ever met a day where you had to perform infront of 8 year olds who wondered who the hell you were?!”

Camille Saint-Saëns dedicated his Symphony no. 3 to Liszt and you can hear the inspiration throughout the composition. Saint-Saëns isn’t discussed as much as many other Romantic composers and I think a part of that is due to his longevity. He was born in 1835 and died in 1921. He lived long enough to become the focus of artistic paricide of the emerging generation of impressionist and expressionist musicians. The irony of this is that he was as much a modernist in his own time as those younger musicians who called him reactionary were in theirs.

There are very few films I consider to be perfect films, but About Time (2013) is one of those films. Not only is it one of the best romantic films, but it is THE best Time Travel film ever made. I called it a romantic film, and not a romantic comedy, because it is more than a romance. Yes, the romance between the characters played by Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams is compelling, charming, and funny, but that romance is only one of the kinds of love that this film is about. You see, this film is about love…in all its forms. It is also about how to embrace life fully, that most romantic of causes.

There are so many great scenes in the film, but if you want to experience the boulloin cube version of it, there is no better scene than the Best Man Speeches Scene where the main character experiences speeches by all of the people he asked to be his Best Man through the use of time travel, an ability he inherited from his father.

Christian Talks Game Books as RPGs and Recent Half-Price-Books Finds

Christian Lindke — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:08:52 GMT

Another week and another live chat. I wasn’t able to run the live chat on Sunday, so I rambled on about recent finds at Half-Price-Books as well as my hopes of running a series of articles that transform the loose rules contained in gamebooks into complete role playing games. While many of the classic gamebook series have stood the test of time and remain in publication (I’m looking at you Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf), there are a number of interesting and innovative gamebooks that have faded from the market and memory. As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t have a regular gaming group when I was in middle school and early high school, so a lot of my “role playing” was done on computer or using gamebooks.

To this day, I own a lot of the gamebooks I played as a child and I am constantly surprised by the unique mechanics or ideas that many of these books contain. Back in 2024 (ironically on March 11 of 2024 and thus exactly 2 years before last night’s live video), I wrote an article examining whether the rules in the Gary Gygax and Flint Dille book Sagard The Barbarian: #1 The Ice Dragon were complete enough to form the foundation of a role playing game. I had hoped to do a full series on game book mechanics that attempts to make complete role playing games based on their rules, and I think it’s time that I followed up on that idea. I’ll be including the full text of that older article below, so that we’ll have a frame of reference for when I design a full role playing game based on the rules in this book next week.

Before I get to that though, I do want to say that what I am writing here is not a description of the video above. That live video has some interesting moments…I think…and it was great to see stop by. It made it less lonely and his questions helped inspire me for some future articles, articles that will require a bit more reading. So please check out the video and please forgive the awkwardness. I am also in the process of scheduling some interviews/formal discussions that I hope to share with all of you in the future.

And now…on to Sagard.

Barbarians at the Gates

Back in May of 2023 J.Q. Graziano wrote a post about Flint Dille and Gary Gygax’s Sagard the Barbarian series of fantasy gamebooks. I came across the article today when J.Q. shared the item on his Facebook page and since I’d missed the article the first time around, I hopped right on over and read it. It’s a fairly good review of the book and series and highlights an often overlooked Gamebook series. It’s a shame that the series is overlooked because not only do they feature excellent Richard Corben covers, they were written by Gary Gygax and Flint Dille.

I interviewed Dille and David Marconi regarding their Agent 13 character back in 2013 and during that conversation there were a couple of asides that mentioned Dille’s relationship with Gygax, including a mention of the Sagard books series.

It seems natural that Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, would dive into the adventure gamebook craze and he did so in 1985 with the Sagard the Barbarian series of gamebooks. Players of Dungeons & Dragons might notice where the books are set because this series of four interactive novels took place in Gary Gygax’s signature World of Greyhawk campaign setting.

Sagard’s adventures in The Ice Dragon begin in a mountain range called The Rakers which make up the border of Ratik and the Theocracy of the Pale. Because Sagard’s adventures are set in the World of Greyhawk, there’s a ton of published setting material a GM can use, even if they chose to use the gamebook mechanics instead of D&D.

Gygax co-wrote the Sagard series with Flint Dille. Dille’s other works have included the Transformers and GI Joe TV series, as well The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay video game. Gygax met Dille while he was in Hollywood working on the Dungeons & Dragons animated series, and his relationship with Dille led to Gygax asking Dille’s sister Lorraine Williams to help save a floundering TSR in 1984. The Williams saga is its own story, one which has left Lorraine’s name an epithet in some gaming circles. That story is ably covered by Ben Riggs in his book Slaying the Dragon.

Needless to say, by the end of 1985, the same year that The Ice Dragon was published, Gygax sold his stock in TSR to Williams and ended his relationship with the company.

All of this leaves one to wonder what Gygax thought of Dille and whether the Williams affair is one of the reasons why the Sagard saga is limited to the four existing volumes. Based on the interview I had with Dille, I think their relationship remained strong as Dille describes the years he got to hang out with Gygax as some of the best years of his life.

The Ice Dragon is an engaging gamebook, but is its game system sufficient to support game play outside of the game book environment?

Let’s have a look at the rules.

Game Mechanics

With the exception of rules for keeping track of “trophies” that Sagard collects during his adventures,The Ice Dragon rules set is entirely limited to combat mechanics. By itself, this doesn’t automatically mean that the rules won’t be able to be expanded into a complete rpg, combat is a central part of most rpgs, but it does mean that there will be some work for the game master who tries to adapt the system. If the combat system is robust enough, than one could extrapolate from those rules to create mechanics for other actions as well. Games like Dragon Age use the same mechanics for combat resolution and task resolution, so it can be done.

The Ice Dragon‘s combat mechanics are relatively simple. Characters and opponents are rated for Hit Points which determine how much damage an individual can take before being defeated. These are a common mechanic in D&D descended rpgs. Characters and opponents are also rated by level which represents their skill in combat. Their effectiveness in combat is determined by rolling a 4-sided die and comparing the result to the character’s statistic block. An example of a character’s statistic block looks something like the following:

This stat block tells us that Sagard is level 2, has twenty hit points, and how much damage he does depending on the roll he makes on a 4-sided die. For example, if Sagard rolled a 3 on the die he would do 1 point of damage. Given that each number has an equal chance of occurring, this gives Sagard an Average Damage per Round of:

DPR = (.25)(0) + (.25)(1) + (.25)(1) + (.25)(2) = 1

A level two character like Sagard delivers 1 point of damage per round to his opponents, so it would take Sagard approximately 20 rounds to defeat someone as tough as himself. Thankfully, most monsters don’t have the same number of hit points as Sagard or game play would be quite time consuming. The high threshold of hit points were potentially necessary in order to enable a reader to get Sagard through the book’s narrative alive, but they might be excessive for a table top rpg.

The full chart for combat effectiveness can be seen in the table below:

Looking at this table, I can see one quick discrepancy. Level 0 characters have the same average DPR as Level 2 characters, and are more effective than Level 1 characters on average, but only succeed 25% of the time. I understand that the mechanics are attempting to represent Level 0 characters as “unpredictable” and capable of “getting lucky” but the results don’t seem quite satisfying. I might change the “damage” on a 4 for Level 0 characters to 2. That keeps the average the same as Level 1 characters over time, but makes them less consistent.

These mechanics are easy to understand and present a fairly limited combat system. The system doesn’t compare the combat abilities of combatants, like Fighting Fantasy, nor does it offer the possibility of maneuvers like Fighting Fantasy does with its “luck” mechanic.

This system could be used as a basis for a skill system. Players could receive level ratings in skills. For example, Sagard might have a Level 2 skill in Stealth. This would allow him to roll 1 or 2 “skill success points,” on a roll of 2 or better, demonstrating how stealthy the character was. These points could be compared to an opponent’s Perception skill. If the opponent generates more skill success points than Sagard, then Sagard fails to hide.

Hmm...I actually like that. In this case, a Sagard stat block might look like the following:

SAGARD
Combat (Level 2: 1/0, 2/1, 3/1, 4/2)
Stealth (Level 2:1/0, 2/1, 3/1, 4/2)
Perception (Level 1: 1/0, 2/0, 3/1, 4/1)

[20][19][18]...[3][2][1]

The Ice Dragon, unlike the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, does provide a simple system for character advancement. As a character wins and loses combats he acquires and loses “experience marks.” When Sagard has acquired enough experience marks, he acquires the abilities of the next level. One could easily expand the experience mark system to the skills system by giving 1 mark per successful use of the skill, or even failures if the attempted use was creative enough.

As you can see, the system in The Ice Dragon taken by itself doesn’t provide a full game system, but that it can fairly easily be expanded to create one. Were I to use the “Sagard System” as the basis for a game though, one of the first things I would change is the use of the 4-sided die for resolution determination. There isn’t enough variety in it and when comparing the different levels it allows for a Level 0 individual to be as good as a Level 2 character on average.

I do like the idea of a flat distribution, rather than a curved distribution like in Powered by the Apocalypse games, because it allows for either a consistent static bonus (say +1 to +4) or an advantage/disadvantage system to be used without disrupting the mechanics too much.

What do you say? Do you want to develop a single page RPG using the “Sagard System”? If so, what die should we use as our foundation?

Thanks again to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Available for iOS and Android

Christian Lindke writes about games, film, and whatever else demands attention at Geekerati Media.

Must Own Wargames #1: Men of Iron, Richard Berg's Medieval Masterpiece

Christian Lindke — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:50:09 GMT

A Sad Reminder Prompts a Review

I often say that birthdays are the best time to be on Facebook. If you are feeling a bit down, the influx of hundreds of people wishing you a happy birthday can be a wonderful tonic for the duldrums. The same is often true of other people’s birthdays. Sending wishes to someone you care about and seeing others share their own positive messages gives a wonderful sense of community. There is one situation that muddies this process though and that’s when someone you are friends with on Facebook has passed away. Then the birthday notice you get from Facebook is a reminder of a a friend that is no longer with you. That can be heartbreaking and I feel a little heartbroken today.

I’ve been playing table top games of all kinds for over three decades and during that time I’ve befriended many game designers, some in person and some online. On of my favorite game designers was Richard Berg. He designed many excellent wargames during the heyday of SPI and was a knowledgeable critic whose reviews could skew on the “mean” side. He had strong opinions and he did not hesitate to share them. I got to see these two factors on display frequently after I befriended him on Facebook. Every time I would post about a superhero game I liked, he would remind me that I was being childish in my enjoyment of “fascists in pajamas.” He never missed a chance to use that phrase and if he was still with us, I’m sure he would have written that as a comment to yesterday’s post about modeling Shape Change in super hero role playing games. I was shocked, and a bit hurt, the first time he wrote it, but as time passed I realized he wasn’t judging me for my love of the genre, he was just sharing his very strong opinion in very stark terms. Once I got used to his rhetorical style, I began looking forward to these posts.

I was reminded of his crankiness earlier this morning when Facebook did its thing. You see today would have been Richard Berg's 83rd birthday. He was born March 10, 1943, and died July 26, 2019, and the wargaming hobby has not yet fully reckoned with the size of the hole he left. The Facebook reminder proded me into looking at my drafts to see if I had any Berg articles on backburner and I had a couple, so this seems like the perfect occasion to finally share a review of one of my favorite Berg designs, Men of Iron. It’s been languishing in my drafts for too long and it’s time for it to see the light. As is usual for my articles, this will be more than a capsule review. This will be a full analytical review because Berg deserves more than a quick review. After all, if he can spend the time to design The Campaign for North Africa, a game that can take more than 100 days to play, I can write a decent review of one of his more accessible games.

My Wargame Review Philosophy

As you might guess, coming from someone who has an entire series of reviews on “Strange Licenced Role Playing Games,” the way I think about wargames might be a little different than some other reviewers. I come at wargames appreciating that they all have to take what Richard Berg called the “Candide Approach” to design (Moves Magazine #26 page 27, 1976). Essentially, every wargame has to:

Allow the ‘player-gamer’ to have a few hours of relaxing fun.
Provide the historian with insight into the particular subject.
Allow the ‘assassin,’ the killer-gamer, to vent his spleen on his opponent by revealing The Master Plan which will not only destroy his opposite number, but History as well.

I understand this tension, and that few if any games actually discover the Goldilocks balance, so I ask one question of every wargame I pick up. I don’t ask “is it historically accurate?” or even “is it fun?” Those things matter, but they’re part of a more fundamental question "How does it meet Berg’s Candide Principle?” While I’d known about Berg’s principle for many years, I only came to fully appreciate it after I read John Hill’s design notes for Squad Leader. In those notes, Hill provides one of the most honest pieces of the challenges of game design I’ve ever seen committed to print. Hill wrote that throughout the design of Squad Leader, high emphasis was placed on playability, and that to capture the fluidity and unpredictable nature of infantry combat while retaining that playability, he centered the design around “abstraction.” This is a technique where the designer is not as interested in what actually happened as in the effect of that event. Once you center your thinking on effect, Hill argued, the possible outcomes on the infantry battlefield turn out to be quite limited, no matter how chaotic the inputs. If you focus on the effect of the event, you can appease the gamer, the historian, and the killer gamer.

So that’s the lens I bring to every wargame I sit down with: not “did this recreate the event?” but “did this recreate the effects that made the event historically significant?” Does playing a game, even one with a model that is incomplete, abstracted, and by necessity wrong in many ways, give me a better understanding of why things happened the way they did?

Men of Iron and the Why Question?

In his opening paragraph to the Men of Iron rule book Berg telsl us that he designed this game, the first in a series of games, to provide an answer to why the 14th Century “saw a revival in the supremacy of foot troops, using defensive tactics and missile weapons, against the massive power of charging, heavily armored cavalry.” He wanted to make this historical argument in a way that was accessible, fast playing, and fun. He was aiming for a Candide moment and he succeeded wonderfully.

Richard Berg’s Men of Iron, was originally published as a stand alone game that he hoped would be the first in a series of games from GMT Games. His hopes were rewarded and the game is now available in a Tri-Pack second printing that includes two of the game’s sequels: Infidel and Blood & Roses. Today’s review focuses on the base game and its Battle Book which covers Falkirk (July 22, 1298) through Najera (April 3, 1367) as well as the battle of Agincourt (October 25, 1415, “St. Crispin’s Day”) that was published as an expansion in C3i magazine. This is because each of the games makes an argument for why certain troops were more effective in different eras and each era of warfare deserves its own article. I’ll get to Infidel and Blood & Roses, as well as Arquebus which I think you can guess what that’s arguing, another time.

As I mentioned above, the subject is the re-emergence of infantry in medieval European warfare, because prior to Falkirk heavy mounted knights were effectively the weapon system that ended arguments on the battlefield. William Wallace’s use of pikes at Stirling Bridge and the Flemish invention and use of the Goedendag at Courtrai in 1302, when Flemish foot soldiers sent the elite French chivalry home in pieces, demonstrated that the long conversation of destruction that was military strategy was taking a new turn. Men of Iron puts that transition at center stage, and the design choices Berg makes reflect that historical argument at every level.

What the System Gets Right

Berg’s great achievement in Men of Iron is that he took Hill’s abstraction principle seriously and applied it to a different dilemma, that of medieval command and control. This was an era where unit to unit communication was difficult which increased the Clausewitzian friction within battles. Hill’s Squad Leader modeled the unpredictable nerve and skill of individual squads at a very microscopic level. The leaders Hill examines are in command of only a few troops. In Men of Iron, Berg modeled much larger combat affairs and needed mechanics that demonstrated the near-impossibility of getting a medieval “battle” (what units are called in Men of Iron) to do what you wanted it to do, when you wanted it to do it, in the right order. While you always have to worry about morale in combat, in the medieval period you have to wonder if the other units can even receive your orders at all. Knights can not easily hear your orders across the battlefield. Schiltrons did not move quickly and no one had a radio.

The activation system is the heart of Berg’s design. There are no turns in the conventional sense in Men of Iron. The player who gets to act first is determined by the scenario and the game begins with a Free Activation where the player can command one Battle to take actions. Because this is a free action the Battle can move and fight without any activation roll being required. After that Free Action, you pick a new Battle and must roll against that Battle’s leader’s Activation Rating in order to keep the momentum going. Some leaders are better than others and there is a cumulative penalty that climbs with each successive successful Continuation roll. Even if you are on a hot streak, your momentum eventually burns itself out. At any point during your Continuations (but not during your Free Activation), your opponent may attempt to “Seize the Initiative” by making a roll with their own units and the acting player is not able to reseize the initiative until the other player has acted. This mechanic is changed in the second edition where each player posesses a number Seizure Counters determined by the scenario that limits the number of times they can sieze the initiative. Given how chaotic things could be in the first edition, this was an excellent rules change that decreased time required to play a scenario. In Men of Iron, the tension isn’t just tactical it’s built into the procedures.

This is a perfect application of Hill’s abstraction principle. Berg is not modeling what happened in the command tent at Bannockburn. He is modeling the effect of medieval command limitations, the stutter-step rhythm of a battle where momentum could shift not because of tactics but because the wrong lord got his feelings hurt and refused to advance on schedule or the French Nobility drank too much wine before Agincourt. The mechanism is artificial. The effect is historically honest.

The Battle Book as Design Argument

What makes Men of Iron worth studying rather than just playing is the Battle Book, where Berg’s design philosophy becomes explicit. Each battle (as opposed to Battle) is provided as supporting evidence for the main thesis of Men of Iron that changes in weapons and tactics made heavily armored cavalry less effective in this era.

Falkirk is a wonderful example of this principle. Berg’s design note states flatly that the Scots pike formation “was basically immobile (until it broke and ran)” and that in the historical version, “it is almost impossible for the English to lose.” Edward I had analyzed why Surrey lost at Stirling Bridge and he shifted to a more flexible army of footman to combat Wallace’s pikemen. The immobility of the pikes makes this a great solo scenarion and Berge offers the non-historical variant where the Scots can actually maneuver for those who want a competitive two-player game. That’s a designer making a choice Hill would recognize immediately. In Falkirk, the effect being modeled is Edward I adapting to the new realities of the battlefield, and the scenario is structured to generate that effect rather than to pretend the battle was closer than it was. The historical Falkirk is practically a proof-of-concept demonstration. Wallace’s schiltrons are formidable against cavalry, but they were also immovable and this ultimately doomed them because they were not fighting mounted troops. The game doesn’t soften that.

Bannockburn shows the same principle working in reverse. Berg’s historical note for the English army is a small masterpiece of design thinking in miniature. The English foot spent the night in a marshy bog and arrived straggling and disordered, so the rule is that all English pike start the game Disordered. Because he’s making an argument about a real event, he doesn’t have you “roll to see if your pike is disordered.” He doesn’t provide a card that represents exhaustion. Instead, all of the English foot begin Disordered (which is essentially wounded in the system). Starting with that vulnerability provides Edward II with a major challenge. The effect of a brutal Scottish summer night on an army that had been marching hard is folded entirely into counter state. You never model the night. You feel its consequences in the morning, and this time against an army lead by Robert that has learned that in foot battles it’s good to have some Axemen to do the dirty work.

Other scenarios model different effects and innovations with Cortrai having sepcial rules for Goedendags.

Starting Points

If you’re new to the system, start with Falkirk. It’s a very straight forward scenario that is designed for ease of play as a solo experience. The best way to learn a game is to play it and Falkirk lets you play it before you try to talk one of your friends into coming over to play Bannockburn. Besides, if you play Falkirk solo as the Scots you’ll build up enough resentment at having been crushed by the English that you’ll play with all your cunning and skill when your friend plays the English at Bannockburn. On second thought, if you want your friend to play again, you might want to play the English instead and let your friend win.

Bannockburn is the scenario I keep coming back to, because the English need to solve a problem that historically proved insoluble, and watching the game generate reasons why is very interesting. The combination of disordered pike, an activation system that punishes overreach, and terrain that neutralizes the cavalry produces emergent narrative that no amount of scripted rules could replicate.

Berg’s Legacy

Richard Berg died July 26, 2019, and the wargaming hobby is genuinely poorer for it. He was, by any measure, one of the most prolific and historically serious designers the medium produced, and Men of Iron is among his most accessible work. He has a couple of games that are more accessible, but this one has a very good balance. I know that it can be intimidating to those not familiar with “map and chit” wargaming, but it is relatively accessible given the complexity of many games in this hobby. Compared to Great Battles of History or SPQR, this is practically a gateway game on a par with Candyland.

Hill wrote that the results of a mistake in infantry combat were immediate, a group of bodies lying motionless in the street. The medieval battlefield was not so different. Berg understood that the designer’s job was not to put those bodies on the table one by one, but to build a system where the conditions that produced them could emerge through play.

The system’s core argument is that medieval warfare was fundamentally about the interaction between troop types, and that the emergence of disciplined infantry changed the calculus of that interaction in ways that reshaped European military and eventually political culture. Berg was able to masterfully use the design to communicate this argument through the mechanisms it used to emulate battle rather than in spite of them. You don’t just read about why Agincourt mattered. Instead, you can watch a French army attempt to move towards English longbows only to pay the price and you understand their effect in this battle.

That’s abstraction working the way Hill said it should and a game that achieves the rare Goldilocks effect.

Happy birthday, Richard Berg and Rest in Peace knowing that you have a wonderful legacy.

The Men of Iron Tri-Pack is available from GMT Games. If medieval warfare is even adjacent to your interests, it belongs on your shelf and more importantly on your table.

Christian Lindke writes about games, film, and whatever else demands attention at Geekerati Media.

Superhero RPG Design Decisions: A Discussion of Teen Titans' Changeling

Christian Lindke — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:08:48 GMT

Before I get into the article proper, I wanted to ask a quick survey question. I have a number of extra codes for some Steam RPGs (Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous), as well as a number of duplicate paperback collections and review copies of books, and I was wondering if I should do a once a month “opt in” raffle where I put up a survey where those who are interested can sign up to be included.

What do you think?

The Challenge of Emulating Super Powers

Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis know that I consider Different Worlds magazine to be one of the great publications of what James Maliszewski calls the Golden Age of D&D. The magazine ran from 1979 to 1987. It was initially published by Chaosium, then by Sleuth Publications, and finally by Different Worlds Publications. Two of those companies are still around today, and one is going very strong.

I was particularly impressed with Different Worlds Issue 23 and wrote the first in what I want to be a series of deep dive articles into that magazine. That issue was a “Special Superhero Issue” that contained articles by the designers of Champions, Villains & Vigilantes, Supergame, Superworld, and Superhero 2044 (which I really need to finish my Retroclone of soon). That’s right, the designers of all the major superhero rpgs of the time had an article in that issue. Add to this a cover illustrated by Bill Willingham and stats for the X-men in three different game systems (V&V, Champions, and Superworld) by the game designers, and you have a truly special magazine issue. I would argue that it is the single best issue of a gaming magazine published to date.

The success of this issue led Tadashi Ehara, the magazine’s editor, do make the Special Superhero issue a somewhat regular feature, and a year later with issue 30 in September of 1983 the magazine had a special “New Teen Titans” issue. This issue provides statistics for the New Teen Titans, Nightwing and crew, though he was still Robin at the time of publication, for Champions, Villains & Vigilantes, and Superworld. I’ll be doing a full issue breakdown later as a part of my series on older gaming magazines, but I wanted to go into a little deeper dive into these three game systems.

Each of these three systems is very different in how they handle super powers, combat, and skill resolution, but that are all workable systems. In fact, I am a big fan of all three of these game systems. In this particular case we get a unique glimpse into how and why the designers made the choices they did because the statistical representation of the characters in Issues 23 and 30 are done by the system designers themselves. This reveals interesting things about the mechanics and game design philosophies. This is especially true for the character of Changeling. As a shape shifter, his powers are a significant challenge to emulate.

How do you design a character who can become any animal? It’s a difficult design question, but one that comes up from time to time in the comics. The biggest problem associated with shape changing powers is that if they include things like the ability to turn into animals, they effectively require multiple sets of powers to model different animals. You need to have flight or super strength as possibilities, but not every animal has both of those. The design question is complex enouth that it eventually led Champions to adopt the “Multiform” power in Champions III, a solution that I’ve never been fond of because it requires the player to design a new character sheet for each animal and increases the “homework” necessary for play.

Issue 30 of Different Worlds was printed before Champions III was published so the Champions version of Changeling created by Steve Peterson is represented as a relatively normal heroic character in his base statistics, with all of his shapechanging powers put into in a single large (200 point) multipower. Each of the abilities are represented “multi” slots, which allow the player to mix and match the levels so that the total amount used at a time is never more than 200 points. So the player might turn into a bird by using 40 points of Shrinking, 50 points of Flight, and a number of Enhanced Senses. So long as the total is 200 points or less, then the character is good to go. The solution requires familiarity with the system, but it’s very flexible.

While I have always liked the use of a multipower in order to simulate this kind of ability, I would use one of two options not presented by Steve Peterson here. First would be the each “animal” is a different “ultra” slot in a multipower. Ultra slots require that you use all of the points in a slot at their full value, but can contain multiple powers within them. Thus a Gorilla would be one slot and a Monkey another. The other way would be to have several multipowers. One for offensive abilities, a second for defensive, a third for movement, and a fourth for “variable senses and options.” Any of these can work, but as you can see any version also requires a lot of work by the player to get what they want. The goal of any of these choices would be to minimize the amount of time the player has to spend “thinking” about their choices during a game session. Of course, Peterson’s solution above allows the player to turn into any animal and that’s pretty darn cool

Steve Perrin’s Superworld decision was to just give Changeling all of the powers: heightened strength, shrinking, growth, armor, movement, etc., but to give each a conditional use modifier of “only in certain shapes.” This is followed by a list of shapes that Changeling can assume: man, bear, cat, bird, canine, snake, elephant, octopus, and so on. Any animal that he has listed, he can become. And the GM and player can discuss which powers are appropriate to the form. This is a pretty good solution, but it also requires bookkeeping with regard to building and then maximizing each form. In some ways, this is the Multiform solution and it requires the player to have several character sheets. It’s effective, but no elegant.

Jack Herman in his Villains & Vigilantes adaptation highlights the “rulings over rules” nature of the V&V system. In this game, there is not shapechange power that quite captures Changeling’s ability. So Herman creates a “Body Power” for Changeling called Transformation that covers most of what Changeling might want to do.

TRANSFORMATION (Shapeshifter/Creatures): PR for each change equals the square root of the number of Basic Hits possessed by the new form assumed. Any shape having over 20 Basic Hits cannot be maintained for more than 11 turns. Smaller shapes have no time limit. Only creature/animal shapes may be assumed, including intelligent non-human species, but he must be familiar with the creature to copy its shape.

That’s it. Leaving the player and GM to design each and every animal the player can turn in to. Other than having to design a lot of animal stats, this is a pretty nice adaptation. It is also one that Herman had to invent as the power isn’t in the rulebook. That’s the nature of V&V though. House rules rule the day.

When the DC Heroes RPG eventually came out, they represented Changeling in the following way, using a single power in a way that is similar to V&V but is a bit more elegant and flexible.

Changeling’s bas statistics that are at the high end of normal human ability, except for his Body stat which is beyond the normal human range and makes him as hard to damage with normal weapons as a brick wall. His shape change power is represented by… well... the Shape Change power which changes a bit between the 2nd (my favorite) and 3rd editions of the game:

The main difference between the editions is to add clarification of the time limit for the power and to make it easier to understand which animals the character can turn into. The mechanics of the power fall nicely between the formality of Champions and the DIY nature of Villains & Vigilantes. One difference from both of those prior systems is that the rank in the power acts as both a determinant of which animals the person can transform into as well as the number of bonus points the character can add to make the animals “super” versions. DC Heroes is an exceedingly elegant system that is easy to understand and run. It also happens to have a pretty good list of animals in the main rulebooks. For example, Gar could turn into any of the following animals and his Elephant could be damned strong (Max 14 STR).

As you can tell, I am a big fan of the DC Heroes solution. It is similar to Mark Herman’s, but has been subjected to mechanical balance. It is a very expensive power to have at high levels, but low levels are inexpensive enough for a starting character to purchase it at character creation. It limits abilities to existing animals, but the power can be modified to include “imaginary” creatures. Like all of the previous options though, it does require a player to have a number of character sheets at the ready to represent Changeling in multiple forms.

I think it is interesting how the different games each approached the design challenge that a shape changing character brings. I don’t know that any has a perfect solution. I like DC Heroes’ solution, but only because their underlying AP rules structure means that each numerical value has a very specific meaning that is easy to understand and intuitive once you understand the game system. In the coming weeks, I’ll look at how some more modern systems address this problem and provide full statistics for early era Changeling in those games as well.

What are your thoughts? Which system do you prefer for this complex power?

Weekly Geeklist and Live Chat on Some Books I Love

Christian Lindke — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:25:19 GMT

Before I get into this week’s Weekly Geeklist I thought I’d point out that I’m trying something a little different with this particular feature of the newsletter. For the past two weeks, I’ve launched unscheduled live chats on Substack. The first one, last week, was just me futzing around to see how uncomfortable it was to talk to a camera without any (or at least minimal) interaction from an interlocutor. The live videos are completely unscripted, though I did think up a topic that I wanted to focus on before I hit the button to go live.

It was an interesting experience and both launches saw a couple of people join in to watch me ramble. I’m not sure how many stayed, because there wasn’t a lot of action in the chat, but I think it was worth doing. In part because it’s a great way for me to share some random thoughts and touch base on what I’ve got lined up in the future. Which, in this case, includes reviews of the movie Megaforce as well as the new documentary (still making the film festival circuit rounds) Making Megaforce.

I do want to take a moment to thank everyone who tuned into my live video! Yes, I’m looking at you . Since I’ll be doing these from time to time, if you’re interested in participating in a chat make sure you join me for my next live video in the app. You can join in while I’m live or we can schedule a live chat. I’m happy either way.

Available for iOS and Android

It was tough to decide what to highlight as this week’s Geeklist Oddity. I’ve been wanting to share my thoughts on the Idaho Horseshoeing School and/or The Hoof GP for some time. I don’t know how they first showed up in my YouTube feed, but they did and they’ve become a little bit of an obsession with our household. I really like how they show how important regular care of animals is for rural communities. The Horseshoeing School videos, in particular, highlight how even minor neglect can lead to some pretty significant issues. Before living in Idaho, I never thought that people might have the same semi-neglectful attitude that we commonly see with Easter “Bunny” gifts or Dalmatian Christmas pets, but with horses. I thought everyone knew that horses were a significant investment of time and money. Similarly, the Hoof GP shows how there are fake videos with “crises” that are far more dramatic than what hoof-trimmers typically encounter.

I think my favorite Idaho Horseshoeing School videos are the ones where the instructor makes his own horseshoes. Since finding the school (which is in Eastern Idaho on the far side of Craters of the Moon from me), I’ve watched some other farriers and they usually start with manufactured shoes and then fit them to the horse. This is good as far as it goes, but when Riley Mickelsen goes to make his shoes he starts with a piece of iron and gets to work. It’s amazingly soothing to watch. He’s skilled at the blacksmithing involved and makes some customized shoes, often to treat some orthopedic benefit to the horse. The combination of sound and visuals is one of my favorite ways to relax. On another note, that shows how amazingly connected our world is today, Riley is working on his Master’s Degree in Equine Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Speaking of Edinburgh, okay of Scotland anyway, Graeme Parker is the “Hoof GP” and is probably the worlds most famous cattle hoof trimmer. His videos about hoof trimming are, like the farrier videos, soothing and meditative, but Graeme’s shows are about more than cow health. He also talks about his own struggles with bipolar disorder. The show is the bovine equivalent of Dr. Pimple Popper, but with added discussion about mental health and animal health and it’s got some beautiful shots of Scotland to boot.

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

Back when I started the Weekly Geeklist (then Weekly Geekly), I made sure to include articles and reviews by . There were three main reasons for his inclusion and I’ll list them in order of importance. The first was that he’s a damn good film reviewer who knows his Bresson and his Corman and finds things to appreciate in both; he’s a true geek reviewer with a real love of pop culture and cinema. Second, he’s a friend and I care about him and his success. The film review circuit is a rough gig and he’s navigated those stormy seas for quite some time. Sometimes with pretty darn good success, but he’s been pushed aside at other times. Lastly, he was my editor when he worked for Village Media and ran their The Robot’s Voice website for a good amount of time.

As society became less edgy, and more sensitive, he changed the title to The Robot’s Voice from its original title Topless Robot. He did so in part because the WWE, and other properties, didn’t want to promote their products on a publication with that name. I’ll admit that I winced a little at the website’s original title as a freelancer because I was working for a non-profit at the time and the title would not have been one my bosses liked. I find it particularly odd that the WWE, who famously featured a match where Goldust (the son of “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes) would have his wife become the property of Brian Pillman if he lost, was upset that something was too edgy for kids. You read that right…oh, and Goldust lost. There’s a reason I didn’t watch the “Attitude Era.” It wasn’t just the WWE though, and such stipulations make sense for Disney and other pop culture properties and so Luke proposed the change. It was the right move, but the Voice soon folded and the site died with it.

Luke was one of the first wave of Geek critics. He wasn’t hte only one, but he was the first to cover Comic-Con in a serious way and man did he go all in. His coverage was more than just the lazy Hall H coverage you tend to see, to this day, and he got all kinds of interviews and covered a lot of what was happening all around the Con. He never wandered into the Mysterious Galaxy panels, but he was almost everywhere else.

He recently wrote a post apologizing for “ruining” film criticism, but I think he’s being unfair to himself with that framing. He was never a rage baiter, nor was he a mere shill, like so many of the modern “Geek” critics seem to be. He was someone who took the material seriously and who worked for some of the biggest names in the Geekosphere and the Hollywood Journosphere (Nikki Finke was a big deal). You can read Luke’s origin story below, and you should. I don’t always agree with him on a host of things, but I always love him and I’m always grateful to him for providing me freedom as a freelancer.

Sorry I Ruined Film Criticism

Like probably many film critics, part of my origin is just wanting to be heard, and not dismissed…

2 months ago · 13 likes · 8 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

In addition to Luke’s time as a film reviewer, he was also a regular reviewer of fast food. I don’t know what prompted him to become the Jonathan Gold of fast food chains, but Luke tried of lot of sketchy food so thta you and I didn’t have to. Well, he’s got a new article about McDonald’s Big Arch sandwich and it’s perfectly timed with all of the viral hype. Unlike McDonald’s CEO, Luke ate the whole thing and he’s got some thoughts on the quality of the burger.

LYT's Fast Food Review: McDonald's Big Arch

Well, it’s rare for me these days to get a new fast food item on day one, since of late it really feels like the chains have been going in for artificial scarcity. Remember the Taco Bell Baja Blast pies? My local Taco Bell said they got 25 TOTAL, and sold them immediately. Popeye’s, nearby, ran out of their Five Nights at Freddy’s cupcake pudd…

2 months ago · 2 likes · Luke Y. Thompson

I don’t do a lot of “blegging” on my Substack. It’s just not in my personality. I’m not one of those reviewers/commentators who puts my good stuff behind a paywall or spams you with requests for subscriptions. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to all my subscribers and I’m coming up with a way to thank them for their contributions to my gas bill, but I’m primarily here for the community and the commentary and to build community.

Today marks my first real exception to the blegging phenomenon, but because I am so proud of my daughters I couldn’t refrain from asking for others to help them. Both Nora (Mystery) and Clio (History)…yep, those are the names behind the nicknames and you get bonus points if you know why Nora’s nickname is Mystery…are one small step away from their Eagle Badges and we just need a little help to get them over the line. Clio is building shelves for a no-kill Cat Shelter and Adoption Center and Nora is building a Chicken Coop for the Idaho Humane Society because in Idaho the Humane Society gets abandoned Chickens (especially after Easter).

These projects are a little pricey, the kits and materials for the Coop and shelves as well as the paint and supplies add up, so I’d really appreciate it if you would consider donating to their Eagle Projects. Any money that we don’t spend directly on the Eagle Projects will be donated to the shelters.

And now for our regularly scheduled Internetowebosphere sharing. As always, has been banging out interesting articles on his Critical Hit Parader Substack and this most recent one includes a discussion of a role playing game based on a “cassette play list” mechanic. Tales from the Tape Deck adventures come in cassette tape cases and each features a “mix tape” of music for you to use as you play the themed adventures. There are multiple genres being planned and it looks absolutely fantastic. Oh, and Matt provides what, for me at least, was a relatively deep cut Kool & the Gang song.

Kool & the Gang plus Tales from the Tape Deck

Tales from the Tape Deck is a “tabletop role-playing game that fits in a cassette tape case.” Jointly created by Ahmed Suffety and Yamil Camacho, the game features music-related theming and mechanics. Here is a description from the Tales from the Tape Deck…

2 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Matt Thompson

If you’ve ever wondered how role playing games evolved from wargaming, there is no better YouTube channel for you to follow than Yogscast’s Games Night. They run themed miniature skirmish adventures that echo the old Tony Bath Hyborian campaigns, except where Tony focused on creating battles inspired by Conan the Barbarian, the folks at Games Night run the gamut of pop culture. One of my favorite examples of what they are doing is their “Predator vs Every Arnold Schwarzenegger” episode where they used the Don’t Look Back horror movie miniature skirmish rules to tell an interesting story. Wargaming has always been a hobby of role playing, but you really see it in skirmish scenarios like this.

has been on a roll lately with her Horror Moments series as she turns her critical eye to the underlying horror of Classic Disney productions. Her recent article on hypnotism and Sleeping Beauty is particularly good as it highlights some of the real horror of that tale, horror that is minimized by more recent live action productions. Maleficent can’t directly attack Aurora and so she manipulates her into a form of self-harm. While Rebekah focuses on other horrific elements in the film, I cannot help but think of the way that social media is used to manipulate people in ways that cause them grief or lead to depression and worse. Maleficent’s evil is in manipulation of the innocent. She wants to kill a child because she wasn’t invited to a birthday. There are also underpinnings of Gothic notions of sexuality, both in the Germanic sense and the literary sense, that add to the horror. Rebekah is a wonderful and imaginative writer and I love reading her thoughts. The fact that she included discussion of The Somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is just icing on the cake.

Dr King's Curiosities

The Horror of Hypnotism in Sleeping Beauty

2 months ago · 46 likes · 22 comments · Rebekah King

is one of my favorite political scientists and he’s got an interesting discussion of the importance of March 4th in American History and how the early American Political Calendar was very messy. I don’t want to reveal too much, but Glassman gives proper credit to “The Gouv” so it’s worth a read just for that.

Matt’s Five Points

Once upon a time, today was important

Today is March 4th. Once upon a time, March 4th held a very significant place in American politics. At noon on March 4th in odd-numbered years, the existing Congress expired and the new one began, as did the terms of all the representatives and the seats of about 1/3 of the Senators…

2 months ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · Matt Glassman

is an economist and journalist who earned his PHD at Columbia University and taught courses on health economics at the University of Virginia and other courses at George Mason University and The George Washington University all while doing other work like working at the Federal Reserve Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank. The life of an academic is not an easy one and side hustles are a part of the gig. He recently wrote a very informative post on the slightly disturbing history of the founders of the discipline of Statistics. Early statistics were very much tied to the eugenics movement and the people who invented tools that have helped the world advance in a variety of ways, including creating the perfect flavor profile for Guinness, have a less than noble past. It’s one of those important essays that touches on morality and science and how it is important to constantly be skeptical of scientific reporting, even as you know that deferring to greater knowledge can be a good thing.

Bastiat's Window

The Briar and the Rose (Redux)

Paid subscriptions ($50/year or $5/month) really help, but free subscribers are great, too…

2 months ago · 16 likes · 23 comments · Robert F. Graboyes

I’ll be writing a full review of this game soon, but I wanted to recommend that you try to find a copy of Games Workshop’s 1985 Judge Dredd Role Playing Game. It’s an interesting attempt to adapt a long standing comic book title to game mechanics. In this case, mechanics that are similar to those of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. That similarity is likely due to the fact that Judge Dredd was Games Workshop’s second in house designed role playing game, but there are some significant differences.

The game is clearly trying to balance approachability with complexity. On the approachability side, the game has only one physical attribute (Strength) which is a combination of physical aptitude and toughness (it’s also how many HP you have) and seven skills that range from Initiative and Combat Skill to Technical Skill and Psionic Skill. Strength is rated 1 to 4 (1 to 3 for Judges and normal humans) while the others are pure percentiles that tell you what percentage chance your character has to perform an action.

While the core mechanics are simple. You state the action you want to take, look at the appropriate skill on your sheet, and roll percentile dice and if the result is equal to or less then the action is successful. On the complexity here are a lot of little fiddly bits that add depth to the basic skills. For example, when our Combat Skill hits 40% (and every 10 points thereafter) you can select one “Special Ability.” These range from the ability to shoot faster or use a “knockout blow” on an opponent. These special abilities are similar to feats in later role playing games and there are enough of them to add variety to the players’ Judges. As I said though, I’ll be giving a full review very soon but it is a game I recommend tracking down.

As I was reading through the Judge Dredd game in preparation of writing about it (yes, I have played it but it’s been a while), I began thinking about a potential soundtrack for game play. Matt Thompson’s articles on music and role playing games probably helped push me in this direction too. I immediately thought music perfect for a Cyberpunk setting would be ideal for a Judge Dredd game and so I went to YouTube and scoured for some hard core 90s Industrial music because when I was young, this is what I thought the music of the future would sound like.

No song captured that better than Skinny Puppy’s song Worlock. The combination of samples from film and television with pounding drums, hard edged guitar sounds, and angry vocals always seemed to me the essence of Cyberpunk. The cyber was captured in the combination of digital and electric sounds and the punk was captured by the anger and when I think of that combination, I think of Skinny Puppy.

I also tend to think of 90s era Ministry. Their combination of Industrial rhythms and speed metal guitar riffs was hypnotic and the political anger they channeled was palpable. It was everywhere in their sound. Sure, early on in their careers Ministry produced music that was an almost parody of Depeche Mode. Yes, I’m talking about Every Day is Like Halloween and the With Sympathy album. By and large With Sympathy is a proficient album (and was popular enough with the alternative crowd that its cover inspired the cover of the Vampire: The Masquerade role playing game.

That early music was soft and “commercial” (if you consider Depeche Mode commercial), but it was soon replaced with pure industrial with the album Twitch (which is a very “Skinny Puppy-esque” album) and then the anger driven Metal-Industrial of Ministry’s later albums. The songs were undeniably angry and often political. Songs like Stigmata hit hard and hold up against the test of time.

Sadly, there most recent foray into political commentary returns to their Every Day is Like Halloween days in a way that turns the whole thing puerile. The song is a critique of authoritarian cults of personality, a great topic for a song, but the song itself comes across as saccharin and soft. I think they were attempting a kind of irony here, but it ends up falling flat and making their commentary feel less serious. Yes, humor can be the most biting tool against authoritarianism, but making light of things can also make your critique seem trite and that’s the case here. I was actually surprised that one of the hardest hitting political bands could put together something so cotton candy and insipid.

Thankfully, there was already a banger song about the damage that cults of personality cause and it came out in 1988 on Living Colour’s debut album Vivid. The song strongly demonstrate guitarist Vernon Reid’s talents as the hard and hypnotic melody transforms into a blazing guitar solo near the end of the song. Corey Glover’s vocals resonate with sincerity and urgency and the whole package combines into one of the great rock songs of the late 1980s and it help set the stage for the later radio expansion of Grunge and Alternative Metal. This isn’t to say that they influenced the bands, most of whom were already making music, rather that Living Colour demonstrated to radio station managers that there was a market for the sound. Given their inclusion in the inaugural Lollapalooza lineup, their alternative cred is undeniable and the chaos of the guitar solo perfectly channels the rage appropriate for a Cyberpunk song.

It never ceases to amaze me that one of the most experimental post-punk bands (Joy Division) transformed into a New Wave Dance Electronica band (New Order) so seamlessly. That is, until I listen to their album Substance. When you hear songs like Ceremony, the Joy Division connection is clear, especially as you listen to the chord structure and phrasings of Ceremony just before listening to Blue Monday. As catchy and danceable as the night club grooves of New Order are, the sorrow and pain that drove Joy Division is still there. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that this was the first glimpse of what “Cyberpunk” music was and would be in the future. It was music that sounded commercial, and yet had subversive elements within it. More recent performances by New Order also highlight stage shows that evoke futurism and our digital world. These are elements I missed when I first read Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk Role Playing Game as a kid, but that are right there in the descriptions of the music. Rockerboys combine the excesses of corporatism with subversive messaging. I think that’s what Ministry was trying with their recent song, but I still feel their result was more Birdemic 2 than Birdemic, the product is there but the sincerity is completely lacking.

Speaking of sincerity and Cyberpunk…for me the musician who best combines those traits is Gary Numan. I’ve recommended his song Are Friends Electric? before and it’s one of my favorite songs about the difficulties of human connection, but Numan’s catalog is much deeper than that song. It ranges from the commercially successful Cars (which he didn’t appreciate until Trent Reznor told him how awesome it was) to far more obscure songs, but one thing remains constant and that is the sincerity. Gary Numan is Gary Numan and he does not pander in his creations.

Sincerity, subversiveness, and sadness are some of the core elements to Cyberpunk songs to me and there is almost no song that channels Cyberpunk era rage than Kesha’s All That Matters (The Beautiful Life). Like New Order, her song appears to be an anthem for the dance club crowd. In this case about dancing and living “the beautiful life,” but underneath it all is that repeating phrase “All that Matters is…” and it’s a phrase that echoes Nietzche’’s Last Man. This isn’t an anthem, it’s a dirge for a dying society. Like the bacchanal in the second Matrix film, this is a song that shows the banality of the current state of the world. It is one of the saddest and catchiest songs I’ve ever heard and I could totally see Kesha opening for Johnny Silverhand.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m “pretentiously anti-pretense.” I’ve watched a ton of films in my life and have watched the entirety of many lists of “films you are supposed to like.” When my wife was getting her MFA in Film Production at USC, I sat in on all of her film criticism classes and further expanded my film knowledge listening to lectures by Drew Casper and others. It was a great time, but it also convinced me that I was not a big fan of most of French New Wave. Jules et Jim is one of my least favorite films, as is Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. I find the first overly indulgent and the second seems somehow incomplete. It’s engaging with challenging material, but in a way that is almost dreamlike and never really connected with me. Too many of the scenes are disconnected from one another narratively and there feel like there are gaps, gaps I want filled.

Bresson’s film Lancelot du Lac maintains that dreamlike quality, and has some pretty big gaps narratively, but the result is much more solid in my mind. This is in part because I am more familiar with the underlying material and the conflict’s underlying the characters, but it’s also because Bresson has grown as a film maker.

The film opens at a point of crisis during the Grail Quest period of the “Matter of Britain” (the King Arthur Saga) when most of Arthur’s knights have either failed to find the Holy Grail or have died in the process. One of the reasons so many have died is that Mordred sowed the seeds of discord and distrust and the knights battled and betrayed each other during their quests. In Bresson’s film, Percival (Perceval) has completely disappeared and Lancelot has returned having glimpsed the Holy Grail but been denied the ability to bring it home due to his affair with Guinevere. He has returned to break things off with her and return to the quest. Events, and his continuing feelings for Guinevere, conspire against him as he must defend Guinevere against Mordred’s claims of her infidelity. The claims are true, but the revealing of them will destroy the King and the Kingdom.

His chief ally in Bresson’s film is Gawain. This is ironic for a number of reasons. Not only was Gawain a frequent opponent of Lancelot’s in the tales about the politics of the Arthurian Court, he is also a legacy figure from Welsh legends where he is depicted as one of the greatest of knights. In the Vulgate, and other French and post-French Arthurian tales, he is either diminished in importance or a villain. Bresson has decided to embrace the noble version of Gawain and Humbert Balsan is excellent in the role. He is the single most beautiful person, physically and morally, in the film and is extremely compelling as the one knight truly focused on keeping the Kingdom together. Luc Simon is strong as Lancelot and compellingly balances his passion with his duty. Vladimir Antolek-Oresek is a good Arthur, but he plays a relatively minor role in the film. His dialogue is mostly stage setting and stake establishment. The scenes with Laura Duke Condominas (Guinevere) and Luc Simon are very strong, but they don’t paint Guinevere in a very flattering light.

The cinematography is both beautiful and frustrating. The shot selection in some scenes is absolutely fantastic and you can see how this film clearly influenced John Boorman when he made Excalibur because there are shots in Boorman’s film that are clearly lifted straight from Lancelot du Lac. I think that many of these beautiful shots are a bit underexposed, giving them a bit of a muddy quality but that could also be intentional given the tragic direction this film takes. Camelot is a shadow of itself and that shadow might be reflected in the amount of light Bresson allowed the film to capture. The fight sequences are interesting and you can see how Monty Python and the Holy Grail lifted moments from Bresson’s film, especially the fight with the Black Knight. That’s right, Bresson influenced both Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail with this one picture. The fights are bloody and brutal. Not as bloody as later films would become, but I think they might have been shocking at the time because the blood isn’t the “bright” blood so often used.

All of this suggests that the film is a great film, and it is, but it also has its limitations. The jousts are not well done, in large part because the stunts would have been too difficult to do with the cast and crew at hand. Most of the action in the jousts is inferred rather than shown and I think this is the right choice given the limitations, but having seen A Knight’s Tale it seems a bit of a misstep but a very forgivable one. The real weakness of the film is in the dialogue. There are no natural conversations in the film. Every line spoken feels like a plot point being revealed rather than a natural moment. As with the jousts though, I find myself forgiving this too because of the dreamlike nature of the film. If I am watching a story being told to me, which I was when I watched this, then does it really matter if the dialogue is too on point? My sense is no, it doesn’t. Sure, it would be more naturalistic for the dialogue to feel like conversation, but it’s not necessary in the land of myth.

Like René Clément’s Purple Noon, Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac pushes me outside my knee jerk rejection of French New Wave and into an appreciation for its contributions to the art of film. Lancelot du Lac is a sad film ith slight imperfections, but it is one I highly recommend.

Are You Looking for a Great Roleplaying Game that isn't Dungeons & Dragons?

Christian Lindke — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:36:20 GMT

Has Hasbro Alienated the Fanbase?

Way back in 2023, when Hasbro should have been celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, Linda Codega of Gizmondo unleashed a firestorm when she published a leaked version of WotC’s intended replacement Open Gaming License. Social media was quick to respond and there was a great deal of conversation about how Hasbro might be changing the Open Gaming License (OGL) and thus changing the entire landscape of 3rd Party products for the World’s Most Popular Role-Playing Game.

Hasbro’s plans demonstrated that they had not learned the real lesson of 4th Edition’s release. The release of that edition, and the new “Gaming System License,” demonstrated how the fanbase responds to attempts to limit independent creators making products for Dungeons & Dragons. That attempt to move away from an open license to a closed one had wide ranging consequences, one of which was that a lot of D&D players decided to move on. Hasbro eventually reversed course and left the old OGL in place and released a Creative Commons version of the 5th edition for game designers to use, but the damage was done and many people were looking for a new game to play.

A lot of this damage could have been healed with the release of the 6th (2024) edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but that edition has received lukewarm support. In part because they refuse to admit it is a new edition, even though it completely reworks some classes (the Monk) and includes several significant game play changes. While it’s not as different from 5th Edition as 3rd Edition was to earlier versions of the game, it is almost as different as 2nd Edition was to AD&D (if you include all the proficiency rules from various supplements). Also in part to the fact that the presentation of the new edition has been more “slice of life”/cozy fantasy and less Sword & Sorcery/Epic Fantasy in tone. The fact is that D&D players and groups include all those styles of play, but that the marketing and design focus on the former at the expense of the latter with a dash of nostalgia that some view as pandering.

If you are one of the people who feels put off by the current direction of D&D, I’ve got five potential alternatives for you to consider. Heck, even if you aren’t (and since I run a 6th edition game that includes me), I still recommend these games. One of the things that seems different about the gaming community today from when I started playing is that players seem to specialize more and focus on a single game when there are tons of games to play in a variety of genre. In this article, I’ll be sticking to the Fantasy genre, but in the coming weeks I’ll add some other genre to the mix. There is a vast catalog of role-playing games I think every gamer should try out, but given that D&D is a “Fantasy: role-playing game, I’ll limit my suggestions to that milieu.

1) Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play

The first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play was published in 1986 by Games Workshop as an alternative to Dungeon & Dragons. The game was set in the “Old World” setting that was developed over time for the Warhammer Fantasy Battle miniatures wargame. This setting was a fantasy version of Europe during the Middle Ages, but one filled with anachronisms and biting social commentary. The Old World is one of the first “grimdark” settings in role-playing games, it is a place where danger (whether demon or disease) lurked in the shadows.

The mechanics of the first edition are a combination of an easy to understand percentile based system with some subsystems like damage based on the Warhammer wargame. It was part of a wave in gaming to get adventure out of the dungeon and into the city and the adventures written for it are top notch. The gameplay is straightforward, works well with narrative game play, but is one where players should think twice before having their characters jump into combat. Life in the Old World can be nasty, brutish, short, and diseased for those who don’t tread carefully. That first edition is still available in digital form.

The latest edition by Cubicle 7 adds elements of modern game design to the mix and in doing so manages to keep the rich narrative elements of the original game while allowing for characters to be slightly more heroic. The combat system is slightly less lethal and has fewer “dead” turns where neither the characters or their opposition get closer to victory. The older version of the game could be frustrating as there could be several combat rounds filled with “I miss, Dave misses, Christina misses, and all the Orks (sic) miss.”

Under the older system, combat could go from stalemate to “total-party-kill” in the blink of an eye with a combination of “hurry up and wait” and “wait, wait, there has to be something I can do to save my character.” The new system gets rid of the swingyness between failure and death and in doing so creates a balanced experience with dynamic and entertaining combat better suited to the modern gamer. It takes a while to learn, it’s pretty unique in how it’s executed, but once you get the hang of it play goes quickly.

As for the other elements of game play, Warhammer Fantasy has always been a game well suited to narrative game play. So much so that the 3rd edition, the edition prior to this latest entry, used the system that eventually became the foundation for the Star Wars narrative rpg by Fantasy Flight Games. The current edition isn’t as storyteller based as that narrative dice system, but it comes from a long line of games that provide both engaging combat and engaging non-combat mechanics and opportunities.

2) Pathfinder for Savage Worlds

If you’ve been around gaming long enough, you know that no list of alternatives to D&D would be complete without including Pathfinder. When Hasbro fumbled their roll out of 4th Edition D&D by wanting to force publishers to use a narrow “Gaming System License,” the Pathfinder role-playing game by Paizo Inc. was published to fill the gaming space Hasbro was abandoning. Pathfinder was in many ways a revision of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 rules set, many fans call it D&D 3.75, and by offering players an opportunity to continue playing a game 90% similar to the one they loved, they jumped at the opportunity.

The Pathfinder role-playing game now exists in three forms: Pathfinder 1st Edition, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and Pathfinder for Savage Worlds. All of the editions are worth checking out, but my personal recommendation is Pathfinder for Savage Worlds. This version of the game takes Pathfinder’s Golarion game-setting (a world with both grimdark and traditional fantasy elements) and mixes it with one of my favorite role-playing games, Savage Worlds.

This particular mix is a mix made in heaven. The core Pathfinder role-playing game mechanics, like D&D 3.x, can get bogged down in minutiae that detract from game play. Combat in Pathfinder 2nd Edition provides a multitude of options in combat, but it offers so many that it often leads to analysis paralysis among less experienced players. This is true of the 3rd edition of D&D, and really true for Pathfinder 1st edition, so if you have experience with those systems this might not be as big an obstacle to you as it might be fore someone who’s only experience in role-playing is 5th edition D&D which streamlined a lot of mechanics and options.

Savage Worlds offers an array of options, it’s combat system is based on a miniatures skirmish game called The Great Rail Wars after all, but those options are resolved quickly and dynamically. What I love about Savage Worlds as a role-playing game is how well it achieves its goal of being “Fast! Furious! Fun!” It’s easy to teach, easy to play, and flexible. In the Pathfinder for Savage Worlds Core Rulebook the game designers combined Savage Worlds and Pathfinder mechanics (and setting) to create something truly special.

3) Old School Essentials

If you hang out with me long enough, you’re sure to hear me discuss how much I love the old Moldvay/Cook Basic and Marsh Expert version of the D&D role-playing game. You really should go and buy those books right now. There are many other people who share my love for those rules and some of them have put together a marvelous set of rules based on the old Moldvay/Cook books. That game is Old School Essentials.

What the crew at Necrotic Gnome have done with Old School Essentials is brilliant. Not only have they written a rules set that is 100% compatible with the older Moldvay/Cook/Marsh rules, they have added a ton of options that allow you to use those rules to play modern style games. They’ve added classes and archetypes based on options in newer versions of the game that fit perfectly with the streamlined version of D&D that Tom Moldvay, Dave Cook, and Steven R. Marsh designed in the early 80s. This is D&D at its easiest to play.

One caveat though, combat with low level characters in Old School Essentials is far more lethal than combat in 5th edition D&D. It’s a game that reminds you that fighting isn’t always the best solution and that Charisma is not a dump stat (I’ll have a post on Charisma in the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh and OSE later this month). Old School Essentials captures a style of rules from a bygone age, a style that prioritized different things than many modern games but a style worth playing. Characters don’t have a skill for everything, because not everything was supposed to be decided by the roll of a die. It’s a refreshing way to play the game.

4) 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

I know, I know. I hear you.

“4th edition sucks!”

“Isn’t the whole reason you are writing this because Hasbro is making the same mistake they made with 4th edition? Doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t play 4th edition?”

Yes, they might be making the same mistake as they made with 4th edition if the rumors are true. If so, they are attacking third party designers and players in ways that look remarkably like the strategy they used for 4e which was a marketing failure from top to bottom.

The thing is, 4th edition D&D is a really good game. It revolutionized D&D and many of the innovations it made to the underlying mechanics of D&D combat were what made 5th edition work so well. Do you like “death saves?” Those are from 4th edition. Do you like how clear Conditions make the effects of combat and how easy it is to understand how those keywords work in play? Those are from 4th edition. So much of 5th edition is 4th edition repackaged with better “layout” in the publication. Robert Schwalb, designer of the next game on the list, argued that layout was one of the reasons that people thought 4th edition didn’t look/feel like D&D. He was right and 5th edition proved him so.

There is plenty of 4th edition stuff available, though I personally recommend sticking with the Essentials rules sets Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms. Pick up the Neverwinter Campaign Setting and Lost Crown of Neverwinter and you’ve got the perfect gaming experience to capture the feel of Critical Role or the upcoming D&D movie.

5) Shadow of the Demon Lord

Are you looking for an easy to play fantasy role-playing game that has a strong setting and a lot of options? Look no further than Robert J Schwalb’s excellent Shadow of the Demon Lord. Schwalb’s sensibilities run grimdark. I think he internalized all the fears of the Satanic Panic and decided to channel those fears into creating a rich and detailed game setting.

Unlike with Warhammer Fantasy’s earlier editions, his grimdark sensibilities didn’t lead him to design a game where character’s lives are nasty, brutish, short, and mutated. Instead, he designed a game where the characters feel heroic, even as they fight foes in what is otherwise a hopeless world. Shadow of the Demon Lord is like the Diablo video game series. Everything seems bleak, hopeless, and dominated by the forces of Satan, but that’s the state of the world before the player characters show up.

If one were to play solely in Schwalb’s setting, and I’m avoiding a number of spoilers here, the world would be nihilistic regardless of player actions and success, but there is no need to play in his setting. The mechanics work as the basis for any tone of fantasy adventure without ever having to change them. The mechanics can be used for any style of play ranging from kid friendly play (Rob’s currently in the process of making a game that does exactly this with his Demon Lord rules) to the grimmest of grimdark. The setting is up to you. Schwalb offers a metric ton of adventures and expansions for those who want to foray into the shadows he imagines, but there’s a ton of material for those who want to fight in brighter places too.

6) Honorable Mentions

The five above are among my favorite games, but there are many more games I’ve enjoyed over the years and I’ll mention some of them here. There is no ranking here, just the fact that writing in some depth about five games takes time and I don’t have unlimited time. Consider every game above, and every game on the short list of honorable mentions, as a #1 on a favorites list. Heck, even the honorable mention list is incomplete for fantasy games I think are great.

Symbaroum
Tiny Dungeon Second Edition (BUY THIS!!!)
Fantasy AGE
The Fantasy Trip
Tunnels and Trolls (So Much Fun!)
Runequest 2nd Edition (Glorantha is one of the richest settings ever designed)
Runequest Roleplaying in Glorantha (Have your friendly local game store order you the Runequest Starter Box. It’s AMAZING!)

As I wrote above, there are dozens more games that I could add to the list. The world is filled with wonderful fantasy role-playing games in a variety of styles. Don’t feel trapped by D&D. Go out and explore the options and play a wide variety of games. Variety is the spice of life and gaming is best when it’s spicy.

What are some games you would add to the list?

Poul Anderson and the Weekly Geeklinks

Christian Lindke — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:42:53 GMT

This Weekly Geekly is LATE. This is in part due to the fact that I spent a lot of November through January holed up in a cave writing on my dissertation, drafting R code and creating visuals in PowerBI to illuminate some data in effective ways. It’s also because, like a lot of you, I spent a lot of time with my family over the winter break. I do have some pretty cool stuff coming down the pipeline though.

A review of the Jurassic Park Role Playing Game…yes, there was one.
Reviews of Megaforce and Staying Alive, as well as the new Robin Hood series on MGM+, articles going episode by episode through the older Robin of Sherwood Series and the Richard Greene series that resulted in the 1960 Hammer Films release Sword of Sherwood Forest.
A review of the Japanese martial arts film Ghost Killer.
Several Sword & Sorcery reviews.
Articles about Conan in role playing games starting with a review of the most recent Conan game from Monolith…oh, and their Batman RPG too.

I’ll be publishing all of that and more in the coming weeks/months, as well as revitalizing the Weekly Geekly Rundown. As much as I like that you all are willing to read my opinions about things, and share your own, I really love sharing the great work that other people are doing across a variety of media.

So…here goes.

Poul Anderson was born on November 25th, 1926 and I intended to write my weekly oddity as an acknowledgement of his wonderful writing. Some fantasy fans lament that the genre has become too predictable and thematically repetitive and this has always been a risk in the genre. Today, people discuss how a lot is too derivative of Tolkien, romance literature, or another one of the major foundations of the modern market, but there was a time when people lamented the state of Sword & Sorcery fantasy as being too formulaic. One of those people was Poul Anderson.

Way back in 1978, just as the Sword & Sorcery genre was building up steam in what would be a short lived golden era, Poul Anderson wrote a famous essay providing advice for would be authors of heroic fantasy. The essay was entitled “On Thud and Blunder“ and that title became a descriptor for an entire sub-genre of mediocre and derivative heroic fantasy stories.

In written form, “Thud and Blunder” tales would include the John Norman Gor novels (though those have are also critiqued on other grounds), the Lin Carter Thongor tales, and the vast majority of Conan pastiches. In film, almost every heroic fantasy ever made, with an increasing number of modern exceptions, falls into the “Thud and Blunder” camp. Kull, the Conan movies, Krull, The Sword and the Sorcerer and countless other films fall into this category. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE this category of films. I’m always down to watch Ator the Fighting Eagle or the Deathstalker series (oh…I’ll be reviewing the most recent entry in that series next week), but I understand that these are Thud and Blunder dialed to 11.

The early 2000s saw the release of films like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies (among others) that managed to avoid the syndrome and shifted audience expectations of what a fantasy film could be. As much as I will defend the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons film by comparing it to older fantasy films and fantasy expectations, in a post Lord of the Rings movie world (and post Hellboy II for that matter) it pales in comparison. I still enjoy the low budget fantasy attempts, but I now know that filmic fantasy isn’t limited to them. Heck, with the wonderful independent television pilot Midnight Chronicles that Fantasy Flight Games released in 2009, I saw how good fantasy could be created on a budget. It came out two years before Game of Thrones, so it didn’t yet have the potential audience it deserved but it was a worthy attempt. All that said, the most recent Conan and Red Sonja films demonstrated that filmic Thud and Blunder were alive and well. It seems that too often writers of many Conan stories (no matter the medium) use the old Frazetta covers as inspiration rather than Howard’s work.

As an aside, Anderson mentions DeCamp as a fantasy author who managed to avoid writing tales of “Thud and Blunder.” Those who are only familiar with DeCamp’s Conan pastiches might find such an assertion baffling, as DeCamp’s tales of Howard’s barbarian are particularly bad, but those readers would be well served to read further into the library of DeCamp’s work. Sprague was quite a wordsmith and when he wasn’t busy unfairly damaging the writing reputations of talented pulp era writers, he was writing wonderfully fun and imaginative fiction. One might attribute the degrading of past authors by a talented author of one generation as a necessary “canonicide” by which one generation of writers asserts its talent and authority, were it not from the genuine pleasure that DeCamp seems to derive from reading the fiction of Howard and Lovecraft.

Adding to bewilderment in this regard is DeCamp’s contemporary Lin Carter. Carter also enjoyed and promoted the virtues of heroic fantasy, and compiled wonderful collections of older fantasy writings. Carter’s own attempts, like the aforementioned Thongor series, are nigh unbearable to read. Yet Carter’s passionate, and articulate, introductions to his collections demonstrate that he could be a capable writer.

Maybe there is something about the heroic fantasy pastiche that brings out the worst writer in all of us, kind of like buddy heist movies can bring out the worst in screenwriters.

Back to “On Thud and Blunder” though...

The key tenant of advice that Anderson, who was a skilled author of heroic fantasy, gives to prospective authors is the need for verisimilitude in the presentation. Certainly fantasy tales will violate many of the laws of nature, but they should seem to take place in living and breathing worlds. Anderson provides several ideas for areas where authors might look to increase the realism of their world and the quality of their fiction. He recommends that authors think about the physical aspects of the environment (what lighting would really be like for example), the real politics, the role of religion, the realistic use of weaponry, and/or the lives of the common classes when they approach a fantasy tale.

When one thinks about it, the best fantasy stories are those that do just that. What draws me to George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy? His portrayal of political relationships. What draws me to Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga? The living nature of the metaphysics and religion of the tales. Elric’s actions have consequences and the religion of his people is a “living” thing -- quite literally. Tolkien was a wonderful practitioner of mythopoesis. Even when Tolkien’s tales lacked “action,” they contained deep realism.

Anderson’s brief essay should be required reading for any fantasy author, and for most Dungeon Masters as well. Think about how much better your role playing game sessions would be if they took place in a living world. I often think that James Maleziewski’s rejection of the “narrative” module model of rpgs, is that he wants to have room for a deep verisimilitude that is often included in “geographically” based adventures and lacking in “narrative” ones.

My only criticism of the Anderson piece are his uses of Society for Creative Anachronism activities as proxy for any kind of historical representation. These events have themselves become as divergent from the reality they seek to recreate as anything else. When one, as Anderson does, begins discussing chainmail constructed of hanger wire as analogous to real chainmail it is easy to see how the comparisons can begin to fail. Add to that modern metallurgy, which creates lighter and stronger metals, and the errors only begin to compound. SCA comparisons aren’t useless, but they shouldn’t be viewed as “accurate simulations” any more than an episode of “Deadliest Warrior” or a wikipedia article. Members of the SCA aren’t typically Andre Marek who attempt to live their entire life as if they were in the middle ages. Speaking of Andre Marek, the Timeline film is a perfect example of how you can take a book which isn’t “Thud and Blunder” and transform it into a “Thud and Blunder” tale in another medium.

Image from Black Gate Online Magazine and John O’Neill

I’d like to re-assert though that if you want to write fantasy, or if you are looking for game master advice, Anderson’s “On Thud and Blunder” is must reading. The link goes to the SFWA where you can read the essay for free and print it out, but the essay is also included in the Andrew Ouffut edited anthology Swords Against Darkness III. Since the anthology includes a Ryre story by Ramsey Campbell (yes, horror author Ramsey Campbell wrote Sword & Sorcery too and you should track down DMR Books’ Far Away & Never), a Simon of Gitta story by Richard L. Tierney (his full stories are avaiable in Sorcery Against Caesar from Pickman Press), as well as stories by Tanith Lee and David Drake, I’d recommend tracking down the anthology if you can.

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

My friend recently wrote about a funeral he attended in Los Angeles, and it was a wonderfully moving piece that highlights the important role funerals play in our lives and in our communities. I’ve been to more funerals than I wish I had attended, but I can say that there affect on the grieving experience has been much more positive than the non-funerary experiences I’ve had. My dad gave me half of my mom’s ashes, for which I am deeply grateful, but the lack of a funeral made the grieving period last longer and feel more uncertain than it would have otherwise. There’s no blame to share in this regard, funerals are expensive and she wanted to be cremated, but I do wish we had been able to meet with more friends to share our grief and share stories.

“Hey, man, are you registered to vote in L.A. County?” The young man carrying familiar petitions looks eager and sincere, but…

Show up for the Funeral

3 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

Darran Hight’s Nerdstalgia Notebook

My buddy has been writing up a storm and sharing nostalgic article after nostalgic article. You should really check out his if you are interested in chatting about Gen-X popular culture from a pure joy perspective. He recently wrote a piece discussing the Marvel CBS-verse made for television Dr. Strange movie which prompted me to pull out my DVD and watch it. Like most of the MCBS-verse, it makes some changes, but there is some real weirdness in the film and it’s very entertaining. I might just have to do a MCBS-verse marathon at some point. The Daredevil/Hulk movie was very cool.

Nerdstalgia Notebook

Dr. Strange, Made for TV Movie

If you are a fan of Marvel’s Doctor Strange, you might be surprised to learn that the character had his first live-action adaptation in 1978, long before Benedict Cumberbatch donned the Cloak of Levitation. The Doctor Strange Television Movie was a pilot for a potential series that aired on CBS but failed to attract enough viewers to continue. However, …

3 months ago · 1 like · DaЯRaN HighT

I mentioned that I’ll be reviewing the latest Deathstalker movie soon. My take is a little different than Darran’s, but I recommend checking out his thoughts on the movie. Maybe, if I can talk a couple of readers into it, we can do a Geekchat just discussing this franchise and how this entry measures up to past films.

Nerdstalgia Notebook

Deathstalker (2025)

Every once in a while, a movie crawls out of the pop-culture graveyard, dusts itself off, and reminds us why the weird stuff is worth keeping around. Using old 80s Sword - Sorcery - and Sandals effects, Deathstalker (2025) is that movie…

5 months ago · 3 likes · DaЯRaN HighT

has three recommendations for real movies that includes two films that aren’t on most “supposed to watch” lists and all three are very much worth your time. The reviews are to the point and get at why the films are must see experiences without falling on the staid plot synopsis that dominates so many reviews and recommendations. No. I’m not telling you what the movies are. I want you to read Jose’s recommendations.

CUT TO BLACK

Cinema For People Who Are Sick Of Watching The Same Shit

The streamers keep shoving the same looking content at us. Same framing. Same lighting. Same pacing. Same approved by committee bullshit that feels like it was run through twelve executives and an algorithm before it was allowed to exist. It is safe. It is clean. It is emotionally explained to death. And somewhere in that process, the art form gets buri…

2 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Jose Zambrano Cassella

has an excellent discussion of the role that death should and could play in role playing games. A lot of modern gaming experience and GM advice seeks to minimize the threat of death and allow player characters to dominate narratives as the stories move from “spotlight” to “spotlight.” Kate argues that the risk of death adds to both play experience and narrative depth and she is correct. She’s also got a new online Zine that she’s putting together and I think it’s absolutely fantastic.

Kate Plays

Death is the only teacher

Death is the Only Teacher…

2 months ago · 23 likes · 5 comments · Kate Korsaro

over at had a recent post where he discussed two of my favorite topics: Michael Moorcock and Blue Öyster Cult. In the post he ranks his favorite BÖC songs as well as discussing his favorite BÖC songwriting pairs. I was glad to see Astronomy and Black Blade in the list of his favorite songs and he gives a shout out to my favorite song, Veteran of the Psychic Wars. It’s a song I’ve always enjoyed, but that I like even more after reading the Corum stories by Michael Moorcock.

Top 10 Blue Öyster Cult Songs - Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix

I was a recent panelist on The Contrarians Youtube channel in which we were asked to name our top ten Blue Öyster Cult songs. I guess I’m too much of a contrarian to follow instructions, so I ranked my top ten BÖC songwriting pairs instead and then named my favorite song from each. You can watch the whole video here…

3 months ago · 11 likes · 7 comments · Matt Thompson

Pollster has written a piece over that provides a brief synopsis of the longer article that she wrote for National Journal discussing how we need to update how we talk about partisanship and ideology. She highlights how what pollsters, and political scientists, call “leaners” don’t actually fit in the place we put them on an ideological scale. Let’s say we have a line ranging from 1 to 7, with 1 being Strongly Democratic and 7 being Strongly Republican. We typically place “moderate” at 4 and the “leaners” at 3 and 5. The problem is that leaners aren’t really more moderate than “weak” partisans.

What Is It Like To Be a Partisan? Measures of Partisanship and Its Value for Democracy - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate

Herding Cats & Polls

Our understanding of partisanship and ideology is outdated

Hello …

3 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Natalie Jackson

In political science, we’ve been discussing this for some time with McWagner and Much writing about it last year and Magelby and Nelson writing a very detailed discussion of the issue in 2012. In essence, “leaners” (those partisans who claim to be “independent” before being cornered into admitting partisanship) behave more like strong partisans. Add to that the fact that a Democratic Socialist would ideologically be significantly to the left of a Strong Democrat and yet would, on this measure, appear as a moderate. You can see now messy that is and Natalie Jackson’s article is a nice look at this issue.

Affective Leaning Independents Mcwagner And Much 2025

1.99MB ∙ PDF file

Myth Of The Independent Voter 2012 Magleby And Nelson

818KB ∙ PDF file