Art (Goodman Games): For nearly 25 years, Goodman Games has published RPG products with extraordinary art. Today, we’re looking at some of the many images that legendary painter Sanjulian has completed for Goodman Games.

Fiction (Fine Books & Collections): The Strand Magazine today releases in its issue 76 the previously unpublished Raymond Chandler manuscript Nightmare that has remained unseen for decades.

“In this unsettling piece, Chandler recounts a dream with the tension and atmosphere of his greatest fiction, a glimpse into the private imagination of the man who defined American noir,”

Tolkien (Liturgical Arts Journal): Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings, has always drawn attention, but since the release of the film adaptations of these books more than twenty years ago, it has become somewhat fashionable to fixate on Tolkien, his mythology, and in some circles, his life and faith. If you were to ask me, the landscape in this regard actually became over-saturated and overdone, with all sorts of people wanting to ‘claim’ Tolkien to their particular point of view.

Clark Ashton Smith (Comics Radio): Smith’s third trip to Mars can, I think, be considered to be in the same universe as the story “The Vaults of Yoh-Vambis.” And like that story, it went through some pre-publication shenanigans before being published in a diluted form. Before being published in the February 1933 issue of Wonder Stories, it had been rejected by Weird Tales. Strange Tales was his next try, but that magazine folded.

Cold Steel (Scholagladiatoria): The Renaissance EDC! Cinquedea Short Swords with Royal Armouries Curator Iason Tzouriadis

Pulp (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Monsters lurking in swamps or other wetlands is a Pulp classic trope. In act, “Ooze” by Anthony M. Rud was the first, being the first Pulp oozy as well as the first story to appear in Weird Tales. March 1923 saw the theme pretty much the way it always goes.aten as well. The idea would show up in other stories, in comic books, a lotta places.

Writing (Rev. Bradon Warr): RazörFist Gives Advice to Christian Writers Entering the Iron Age of Media

History (Frontier Partisans): Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he has decided that the 20 soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for their actions in 1890 at Wounded Knee will keep

their awards in a video posted to social media Thursday evening.

Radio (Comics Radio): An insane professor vows to take violent revenge on the college that fired him. He’s assisted by a super-strong deaf-mute with further unwitting help from the world’s dumbest security guard.

History (Real Crusades History): Writing About the Third Crusade: Live Q&A w/ J Stephen Roberts and Helena Schrader

Fantasy (Arkhaven Comics): The next volume of this ghost series on sword and sorcery has the genre in its virile infancy, adolescence, and young adulthood. The spark of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror added to the gothic elements and sword & planet swashbuckling resulted in the classic pulp sword and sorcery.

Fantasy (Camelot Project): Since I interviewed Alan Garner the day after my arrival in Britain from Canada, I was suffering from jet lag. To my surprise, I found that Garner lived in not one but two houses, the second of which had been moved onto his property and was being lovingly restored. He and I settled down in front of an open fire in his study for the interview, a very appropriate setting for the author of the Alderley Edge books, The Wierdstone of Brisingamen (London: Collins, 1960; rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1963) and The Moon of Gomrath (London: Collins, 1963).

History (Michael K. Vaughn): Revisiting the Ancient Greek Historians

Clark Ashton Smith (DMR Books): In my last post, I took you on a tour of Clark Ashton Smith’s version of our solar system. In this one we will go beyond it into interstellar space. Unlike the stories set in the solar system we do not know what exists in the rest of the universe. Anything could exist, and in Smith’s fiction, often does. These stories are, even more than his solar system tales, dark fantasy and weird fiction set in space.

Tolkien (Imaginative Conservative): In Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings, Saruman the White renounces his title and office, declaring himself to be “of many colours.” He is no longer content to see reality as being a battle between good and evil, between the light and the darkness. Too “wise” to be bound to such a black-and-white understanding of the cosmos, he spurns the white, the unity of all light, fragmenting it into a pluralistic spectrum, beyond good and evil.

Fiction (Wormwoodiana): The first was A Century of Creepy Stories, which came out in June 1934. Next up was The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories in October 1934. The December release of the regular-sized New Tales of Horror, by Eminent Authors, ghost-edited by John Gawsworth, initiated a series of four thick anonymously-edited Gawsworth anthologies from other publishers: Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries (1935); Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (1936); Thrills (1936); Masterpiece of Thrills (1936) 

Fantastic Fiction (Black Gate): Flash Gordon is sometimes labeled Sword & Planet fiction. It meets quite a few of the characteristics. It has an Earthman, Flash, ending up on a strange world where he engages in battles with strange monsters and weird humanoid aliens, including winged men, bird riders, lion men, and others. However, it fails the S&P test on one major feature, the primary weapon used. When Flash is first challenged, if at all possible, he reaches for a ray gun rather than a sword.

Horror (Old Style Tales): Dyson, a recurring character in Arthur Machen’s stories such as The Shining Pyramid and The Red Hand, stands as an unusual and reflective figure among the ranks of literary occult detectives. Unlike more pragmatic sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Dyson is not driven by logic or forensic deduction, but by a deep fascination with the uncanny, the symbolic, and the hidden patterns beneath ordinary reality. He approaches mysteries not as puzzles to be solved but as portals to metaphysical truth, often relying on intuition, literary knowledge, and a sense of mystical resonance rather than empirical evidence.

Comic Books (Open Letters Review): “The Tower of the Elephant” first saw print in Weird Tales magazine in March, 1933. The short story has been adapted in comic form several times, including twice in the 1970s by Roy Thomas and once in the mid-2000s by Kurk Busiek. Those issues had to cut and squeeze Howard’s story into panels, bubbles, and boxes. With this incarnation we get the entire text along with a set of original oil paintings by Elric artist Valentin Sécher. The book is a thin 56-page hardcover sized at a somewhat awkward 9.6 by 12.7 inches. It features a beautiful montage cover, twenty-six two-page spreads (one painting each), and four bonus pages that show off Sécher’s preliminary sketches and storyboards.

Myth (Lotus Eaters): Fairy Tales Are Based, Actually

D&D (Grognardia): The first entry, the Vikings Campaign Sourcebook (1991), written by 2e’s chief architect, David “Zeb” Cook, set the tone for what followed. Vikings had been part of D&D’s DNA from the beginning. Deities & Demigods included Odin, Thor, and Loki, while Gygax’s Appendix N highlighted Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, a novel steeped in Norse myth and heroic fatalism. Cook was tapping into a deep well already familiar to most players and the Vikings Campaign Sourcebook offers Dungeon Masters and players alike a toolkit for adventures inspired by the Viking Age.

History (Public Domain Review): Beneath the waves, off the Suffolk Coast, lies a city taken by the sea through centuries of erosion. Matthew Green revisits Dunwich, a once lively port transfigured into a symbol of loss, both eerie and profound, for generations of artists, poets, and historians drawn to its ruinous shores.

Fiction (Imaginative Conservative): One writer who captured the mood perfectly was Raymond Chandler, whose everyman private eye, Philip Marlowe, embodied the jaded world-weariness that held such appeal at the time. Consider the opening of Chapter Eight of arguably his finest novel, The High Window, published in 1942. “Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.

History (Jess of the Shire): Sutton Hoo is more than just an archeological site. It was discovered at a pivotal point in our storytelling history, and its impact can still be felt in modern history and fantasy today, from the Lord of the Rings to Beowulf.

Fantasy Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The 1960s was an exciting decade for Sword & Sorcery, laying down the foundation for the 1970-1980s explosion. It is easy to forget the important firsts during this time of experimentation, when Sword & Sorcery finally received its name. Fritz Leiber dubbed it “Sword & Sorcery” in 1961 through a conversation with Michael Moorcock in the pages of Amra, the heroic fantasy fanzine.

Streaming (Frontier Partisans): The Witcher is a venture into the timbers of Fennario on a distinctly Slavic frontier. Sapkowski’s cycle of short stories and novels were turned into a powerhouse video game franchise, and a Netflix series that is an absolute steaming pile of Striga shit (NOT Henry Cavill’s fault; a prime example of show runners and writers who decided they needed to “fix” the source material and made a hash of something that should have been great).