There is something not quite right about this argument against the design of an unattributed map of the Tolkien city, Osgiliath (the art, i...

The richest place in my formative years was the lending library in my well-funded, open-minded suburban hometown. It was there I laid hands ...

Having just finished Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind , a Christmas present, I can see why it's such a divisive novel. It's a shar...

Last time I offered a breakdown of all the different ways a fantasy world could be tied to our own. Commenters offered a couple of extra way...

Let's define "autonomous fantasy": a work about a world not our own, without attempting within the text to place the created w...

As a teen I read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions but never got around to its slightly later-written companion volume, The ...

Reading someone's list of th e top 13 new and forthcoming fantasy novels -- most of which appear to involve white male antiheroes caugh...

Happy 40th birthday, D&D! The world's oldest fantasy adventure role-playing game?  Yes, but ... most of the world doesn't know a...

Inspired by Appendix N fever, I recently picked up and read Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey (1973), which I'd never read befor...

Every once in a while a commenter will remind me that, yeah, I am slowly eking out a series of genre/environment cliche d20 tables and it wo...

We now pause our discussion of coolness in D&D for a word from our Joesky sponsor . In the fantasy adventuring party, some of them fig...

Cracked.com had a piece recently that may as well be called " Don't Play That, Play This " in which the author argued for the ...

Look, I'm not expecting D&D module writers to be Hermann Hesse. I'm not even ... sheesh, OK, let me back up here. This is abou...

Anomalous Subsurface Environment , by Patrick Wetmore of the Henchman Abuse blog,  is the first installment of a megadungeon. It has been o...

Continuing an irregular music series . And lo, it came to pass that the child Dungeons and Dragons was given to be fostered in the years o...

In the chronicles of the long, bong-bubbled affair between fantasy literature and rock 'n' roll, no writer has plunged deeper in tha...

Trying to come up with answers to the challenge of how to make high-level combat more than a grind, I asked myself: "What did the great...

As obscure as the counter-based epic fantasy games from the 70's are today, the ones I presented previously are actually the better-know...

All right folks. After a lot of jogging of the memory and a little trawling through Boardgamegeek, here is the first part of what I believe ...

In the 1970's and early 1980's, the established hobby of board wargaming cross-fertilized with a wave of interest in fantasy litera...