While I was painting a Warhammer 40,000 Genestealer Cult army and an opposing army of Adeptus Mechanicus, I decided to listen to the book Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work by Guy Haley. This is my review of it, and it contains no spoilers. But I'll cut to the chase and say that this is one of the...
I recently realised that reading Tolkien is a solo RPG. You read his work, you piece together the scraps of lore he sprinkled thnoughout the books and left to us in the form of letters, and you ponder it and map it out until you understand Middle Earth. If he'd been alive today, he'd have just got...
I grew up with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as bedtime stories. Those books have been part of my life literally for as long as I can remember. There is no beginning, they were just always there. When I got out into the real world, I was surprised to learn that there were people who knew way...
Taking a break from the 31st millennia for a while, I just finished Cadia Stands by Justin D. Hill. Set solidly in the 41st millennia, this novel is about the planet Cadia, a sentinel guarding the massive Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror. This review contains major spoilers. You have been...
Good storytelling is usually about the process of achieving something. That's the story part of a story. A character wants something, but can't have it. The character goes through some transformative trials until the thing is "earned", at which point the character gets the thing and the story is ove...
The Internet's a funny place. You make friends you never meet, and sometimes inevitably you lose a friend, too. In June of 2024, the Internet lost Craig Maloney, a creative contributor to free culture, RPG, podcasting, and open source.
I never met Craig, or even talked to him, but I became a fan o...
I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of the fifth book in the series, Fulgrim by Graham McNeill. There are spoilers in this review.
The fifth book in the Horus Heresy continues to escalate the tension while simultaneously re-telling, like Flight of the Eisenstein did, eve...
Are you curious about roleplaying games, but not ready to buy a rulebook or to find a bunch of people to play with? There are tabletop games that can help ease you into RPG, or serve as alternatives to playing an RPG. Here are 5 of my favourites.
The obligatory disclaimer before the list is that p...
Zombies are the perfect mindless threat. I'm a fan of zombies in movies and video games and tabletop games. Do you want to know why? Well, there are 10 reasons.
1. Zombies have no soul
You can kill them without remorse. You'll never walk into the back room of a bunker to find the innocent zombie...
I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of the fourth book in the series, Flight of the Eisenstein by James Swallow. There are spoilers in this review.
This is an important book in the Horus Heresy series, as it transitions us away from standing next to Gavriel Loken, and gets...
I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of the third book in the series, Galaxy in Flames by Ben Counter. There are spoilers in this review.
In my review of the previous book in the series, I mention that Horus himself feels like he skipped a notch or two between "really great...
When I first read The Silmarillion as a kid, I didn't understand what it was and I didn't understand what it was trying to say or do. But I recently decided that reading Tolkien was a little like collecting lore achievements in a video game. The main quest is to understand The Hobbit and The Lo...
Like much of the existing Tolkien work outside of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (LOTR), the content of Children of Húrin was written long ago and stashed in Tolkien's writing desk for half a century. Parts of the story were published here and there, including in the The Silmarillion, but...
I was the target audience for the original Star Wars. Or at least, I was the audience the movies found. I've heard from slightly older friends of mine that they saw the original Star Wars (it wasn't called "A New Hope" or even "Episode IV" then) when they were teens. I wasn't old enough to see the o...
The Fallout video games are the story of a desolate and dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Each Fallout is a computer RPG known by varying degrees for branching story paths, player agency, a unique real-time yet turn-based combat system, and character customization. The board game attempts to...
If you've played a popular RPG like Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, or anything in with direct D&D lineage, then you know that there are at least two modes of the game. First, there's the roleplaying mode. When you're roleplaying, you pretend to talk to non-player characters and you make choic...