Search Results for: Dungeons and dragons

Spider-Societies, Alien Structures, and Grim Wastelands: March/April 2022 Print SF Magazines

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March/April 2022 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, 123RF, and Mondolithic Studios One of the bennies of digital publishing is the luxury of enjoying magazine reviews while the magazines are still on the shelves. I haven’t purchased the March/April F&F yet, for example, but my interest has been sharpened by reviews like this one, by C.D. Lewis at Tangent Online, for Tobi Ogundiran’s “The…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Piracy – Two Wrecks and a Prize Ship

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Yellowbeard (UK, 1983) By the Eighties the once-thriving genre of pirate movies had been condemned and hung from the yardarm, and based upon the crimes against cinema of this week’s first two films, it’s easy to see why. The terrible Cutthroat Island would follow in 1995 to put the final nail in the genre’s coffin until it lurched from the grave for a surprise resurrection in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean. But don’t lament too loudly, for if there’s one…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Fables and Fairy Tales

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Legend (Universal, 1985) The fantasy film boom of the Eighties mostly drew upon pulp sword and sorcery tales, but some harked back farther to earlier traditions of myth, fables, and fairy tales, often because the filmmakers had a more vividly enchanted look in mind. Whether hit or miss, these movies and their typically rich visuals provided a welcome diversion from the then-prevailing norm of mounted barbarians thundering across windswept steppes.

Explore Jack Vance’s Rich and Dangerous Universe in The Gaean Reach from Pelgrane Press

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The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created. Twenty…

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The Cold and Encroaching Doom of Death in Space

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Player and gamemasters (GMs) of tabletop roleplaying games often refer to “crunch.” This is in reference to how the mechanics of the game work, and generally (though I suspect some folks will fight me on this), a crunchier game has more context-based rules. For example, the least crunchiest game is someone roles a 20-sided die and no matter what, if it rolls above 10, it is always a success. You start adding crunch to it when the rules start to…

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Nazi A-Bombs, Alien Invasions, and Monsters Under the Bed: September/October 2021 Print SF Magazines

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September/October 2021 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Eldar Zakirov, Kurt Huggins, and David A. Hardy The September/October print magazines are still on sale for a few more days, which means there’s still time to grab them before the November/December issues push them off shelves. Here’s a few reasons to do that. We’ll start with Victoria Silverwolf’s Tangent Online review of the current Asimov’s. “Sleep…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Lone Wolf and Cub Part 2

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The Mandalorian We’ve already gone into the origins of the Lone Wolf and Cub films in the manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this week let’s look at its influence on later productions, particularly the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. I’m far from the first person to point out the connections between the two, but as they show the continuing relevance of Lone Wolf and Cub even fifty years later, I think it’s worthwhile to revisit them….

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Come and Get Me, Coppers … in Gangbusters

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Though it no longer exists, the gaming company known as TSR, Inc., will always be associated with Dungeons & Dragons. However, TSR published a lot more tabletop roleplaying games than D&D. The science fiction game Star Frontiers to this day has a strong fan base, and the game Gamma World continues to find some love. That being said, many of TSR’s other RPGs tend to have been forgotten by a wider audience though they might still have a community of…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Lone Wolf and Cub, Part 1

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Lone Wolf and Cub 1: Sword of Vengeance (Japan, 1972) Lone Wolf and Cub, the celebrated samurai manga series by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima, began in 1970 and, wildly popular, eventually ran to many thousands of pages and was adapted to both film and television. However, it was virtually unknown in America and Europe until 1980 when the compilation Shogun Assassin was released, drawing on the first two motion pictures. But Shogun Assassin emphasized the series’ brutal…

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Co-op Adventuring in Dungeons & Dragons

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When I started playing RPGs all the way back in the early 1980s, I did not have a group of players at my age to play games with (well, at least none that I ever found). Hence, I subjected my brother to Traveller and Star Frontiers — and eventually Marvel Super Heroes, Twilight: 2000, and others. RPGs had always presumed that the game would have a game master (GM) — sometimes called Dungeon Master, referee, storyteller, keeper, and others — and the players. The GM…

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