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I have never owned a Dungeon Masters Guide. I discovered Dungeons & Dragons in the fall of 1975, when I started Junior High School. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It combined the backyard playing pretend that I have never outgrown with rules to settle those pesky “I shot you!”/”No, I shot […]

When Jeffro asked if I could help explain why his series on Appendix N helped to start a literary movement and how it played into my becoming a retro-pulp editor and starting Cirsova Publishing, I’d warned it might sound a bit hippie-dippie. “A harmonious convergence of galactic coincidence,” I’d called it. There were so many […]

I still remember the first time I heard those three magical worlds. My cousin Ariel was visiting. She was a whole year older than I was and lived in Manhattan. She was a sophisticated young lady compared to my country mouse self. A couple of years earlier, she had told my parents about some books […]

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” — Frank Herbert, Dune. There are many ways to look at Jeffro’s Appendix N series. The quest to better understand the roots of D&D started off innocently enough. I was following along, curious to see how authors like Jack […]

People that have no idea what Appendix N really is are quick to leap to conclusions about it. Rather than reading the stories singled out on it, they instead start making up their own: The list was, instead, a collection of works that were personal favorites of Gary Gygax, and from all indications were the […]

I’m not typically a big fan of the meddling, minor gods trope.  It’s theologically incoherent and usually makes for nonsensical worldbuilding.  Neil Gaiman’s highly overrated American Gods is the worst offender.  Ken Liu does a bit better in The Grace of Kings and The Wall of Storms.  The Tritonian Ring works better, perhaps because it’s […]

When I surveyed the inspirations for the original tabletop role-playing game, I was repeatedly astonished by the extent to which elves had been dumbed down, diluted, and de-awesomed over the past few decades. With each volume I covered, I took extensive notes on just precisely what it was that made old school elves so different […]

There ought to be term for it: that sense of elation and astonishment when you stumble across something in an old book that is surprisingly applicable to contemporary events. Of course even if there was such a thing, you’d need another one for when it keeps happening and you keep being surprised by it anyway. […]