Recent content by Ralif Redhammer

You have to keep in mind that I started gaming at the age of nine, and I only had so many touchstones for fantasy at that point. This would've been before 2e came along. Thankfully, I got better. These days, so do I. DCC RPG is probably my favorite retroclone. But back then I absolutely scoffed...

If I were to describe Greyhawk, I'd say it's a block of marble that you can sculpt into what you want. The setting, at its best, is a loose framework that inspires with a few succinct details. It is also arguable the most D&D-ish setting of all the D&D settings - the game's core tropes and...

I like this one quite a bit. I dig how they're just chilling with the monster and some tea.

I think it'll receive a similar treatment as FR did with 5e - the timeline will be moved forward, but the setting feel and details will be changed to be more in line with earlier versions. I'm not talking mechanics (I fully expect dwarven wizards and tieflings to appear, and happily), but they...

How very cool! As I've said before, Rose Estes deserves a ton of credit for bringing people into D&D with her Endless Quest books. Quag Keep is not a module, but the first piece of official D&D fiction. It is, unfortunately, not one of her better works.

Yeah, when you look at the Greyhawk Folio, it's concise enough that you can strip it down a bit more and still be able to present a usable campaign setting in a single chapter. That would be impossible with the level of detail that the Forgotten Realms runs on.

Cautiously optimistic on this. I enjoyed the first season enough to watch it twice.

There are some books I read as a kid that really haven't aged well at all, or just don't hold up to an adult perspective. Piers Anthony's Xanth series are so bad I retroactively regret having read them. Hiero's Journey is gloriously gonzo. I should do a re-read sometime. It is a bummer that the...

They're definitely comfort food reads for me. I'm instantly taken back to when I was a kid and we were all reading them (a player in my group even had a character named Garet Jax). The Sword of Shannara, for being a Tolkien rip-off, was still massively influential in hindsight. It feels more...

If we ever see Lord of the Rings as a TV series, my hope is that it includes Tom Bombadil & Goldberry, the Barrow-wights, and poor Glorfindel who always gets excluded. Not to mention the Scouring of the Shire.

Funny how distant and inconsequential it seems, twenty years in the rearview mirror.

Huh. Please no de-aged Viggo Mortensen and Sir Ian McKellan. I have mixed feelings on this. I get why the Tolkien Estate is holding onto The Silmarillion adaptation rights, but I worry that we're going to see a continual strip-mining of LOTR and its appendices until we've got a Barliman...

I finished McKinley's The Blue Sword. Enjoyed the heck out of it. The story felt very much like Dune meets The Wind and the Lion. Now I'm re-reading Terry Brooks The Sword of Shannara. Its 700 pages are way beyond my usual reading length these days.

Of the times I've participated as a player in the last ten years, one campaign was completed out of five. Technically one other finished, but it was far from where the GM wanted to go, as everyone was thoroughly sick of the system. There will always be more people that say they want to play...

The party has floated this idea, and I am so excited for them to try at some point. With the borked supply chain of the Time of the Red, the way I'm running it is that only corpos, well-funded gangs, and nomads have cars (or at least, cars worth stealing - someone might give you a few eddies for...