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In the DMG, I feel like there's so much that could be done with the Reputed Magical Properties of Gems and Appendix J: Herbs, Spices, and Medicinal Vegetables sections.

I find that while I can run using PDFs, if I want to learn and retain the information in the first place, I absolutely need a physical copy.

Some of it is luck, sure, but in a lot of ways, it's luck you make. You keep persisting in trying to find the right players, you don't tolerate bad behavior at your table. Even if you've been burned before, you still take that chance on a new player. You maintain and put the effort in to stay...

I quite like Hammerfast as a setting. It felt suitably dwarven while not just being a repeat of all the tropes we've seen before. The funny thing is, I completely missed its existence until years later, probably due to it getting lost in the firehose of product during the 4e era.

Nice....my original dice set is missing a couple, and I'm going to agree; I ate them. It wasn't that I was a little kid and lost them here and there (pretty sure one disappeared between the seats of the family woody wagon). I know that people make edible dice these days, but the inedible kind...

You ever look at particularly set of dice and you can exactly picture what they might taste like, what their texture would be, if you could actually eat them?

Nova has been sitting in my to-read for a while now. I really dug Babel-17, so I ought to get to it sooner rather than later.

My first real online experience was trying out Island of Kesmai in 1987, after reading about it in Dragon magazine. I remember being unimpressed with it, especially considering the expense of playing it. It wasn't until the mid-90s that I actively started going online. I still like his...

He's said that he never could've written Neuromancer had he actually understood how computers worked back then. All the first wave cyberpunk authors say that the only real punk rocker amongst them was John Shirley.

I finished Milan's The Cybernetic Shogun. Didn't like it as much as the Cybernetic Samurai. I feel like it had about 1-2 more POV threads than it needed. And it had a lot of unnecessary orientalist tropes. Now I'm reading The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan.

Always at level 1. I've done campaigns with advanced starts, and something often feels off with the characters' development. Missing out on those early levels skips a vital part of the experience. I also tend to find higher levels less interesting, so I'm in no rush to get there.

All of those are solid picks. If part of sci-fi's job is prescience (paired with commentary about the present), those all nailed it. What's fascinating to me is that, prior to Neuromancer, there were books that were so close to being the first true cyberpunk novel. But the vibes were just...

TIL that Mothra is a literary adaptation.

Monsters of the City has some really creative monsters. The Codfather is genius.

The way the Shadowrun books used that commentary to add an additional layer to their books really helped make the world feel alive. You could have a pistol with standard stats, but then a bunch of posts from people complaining about it breaking all the time. It was no longer just a generic...

Having NPCs be the star of the campaign is a big no-no. And yet, people do that all the time. I suppose when you have NPCs with goals and agency, it can be easy to shift the spotlight too much to them, leaving the PCs in the dark.

I think all that's the determination of the GM and the style of game everyone wants to play. Is replacing the mayor an achievable goal? Would the rest of the group be okay with one of the PCs suddenly having that degree of authority and responsibilty? I've moved away from D&D and its published...

I finished reading Sterling's The Artificial Kid. Liked it more than Schismatrix, but my favorite of his novels so far is still Islands in the Net. Now I'm reading Victor Milan's The Cybernetic Shogun. I can say so far that the covers to this series (see also The Cybernetic Samurai) deliver...

Would totally agree. I'd also add that in current D&D, there's very little bad that can happen to your character other than death, and even that is rare. When you look at older editions and other games, there's a host of dangerous conditions beyond just getting killed. Older editions had level...