Category: Fantasy
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I think by now that it’s well known and accepted that Britain’s ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is a vampire. Questions remain as to what magic he was using to enable him to go outside during the day – was it fairy blood, or the souls of Iraqi children? Alchemists across the multiverse want to know…
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Reports emerge of archaeologists who have discovered the remains of men staked to prevent vampirism in Bulgaria. The rate of Vampirism in ancient Bulgaria appears to have been 2 per 700 adults, though perhaps only men were staked. A rare but deadly condition, which apparently was prevented using wooden or iron rods (iron was reserved…
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The chart above shows hits on my old blog post A Game of Thrones and the Misogyny of Imagined Worlds between 23rd February and 19th May 2012. The second season started on 1st April, and there’s a clear series of weekly peaks in views on my post, that occur between Tuesday and Thursday each week…
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Shadowrun is suited to campaign settings rife with economic corruption, the desperate and abandoned poor, powerful corporations who control the social fabric, shady underworld groups and street gangs in conflict. Sounds rather like a vision of Greece after the default, if you were to chuck in a bit of magic. So let’s do that! And…
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The first suggested reform idea in my series of ideas to reform the NHS will start with this, the most radical. This reform plan presents a way to raise a large amount of money to pay down government debt, expand private and public investment in the health system, make the health system more flexible and…
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Sliding Void is the first in a series of hard SF novels by Stephen Hunt, author of a series of steampunk novels that I really enjoyed: The Court of the Air, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, and The Rise of the Iron Moon. Hunt’s interest in space opera and SF was fairly clear in The…
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I recently finished reading Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles, second in the Majipoor Series but easily readable in isolation. It is not a single novel but a series of short stories set throughout the history of the eponymous planet; some of these stories are directly connected to the events of the first book in the series,…
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I once ran a campaign in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, shortly after the war of the ring during the period when it could be reasonably imagined that elves were still present in Middle Earth, and the kingdom of Gondor was still recovering from the war. I imagined that this would be a fairly…
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A slightly weird idea I know, but I was struck by it while sitting in a Japanese drinking restaurant (izakaya) attempting to read the fantastical labels on all their Sake bottles. I tried a variation on this theme a while back, when I suggested translations of Osaka place names as inspiration for adventure settings. While…
Compromise and Conceit 