Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: RPG cosmology
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Continuing to flog the dead horse of post-scarcity fantasy, I thought I’d bring my day job to bear on the task, and test the cost-effectiveness of a cleric-based public health measure to reduce infant mortality in a developing (medieval) nation. Introduction Infant mortality was a significant public health problem in the medieval era, and in…
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Following my previous post on post-scarcity fantasy, what would scientific inquiry look like in a world where economic and social relations are dominated by magic? As we saw in the previous post, even if only a small number of people have magical power, and only a small number of them have more than a little,…
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It’s often bugged me that fantasy writers don’t take advantage of the cosmology of their worlds to examine how social, political and economic relations would change in a magically-imbued world. It’s not as if this is without precedent: sci-fi writers do it all the time, but for some reason fantasy writers can’t move past a…
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The French soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt were so exhausted by the time that they entered battle that they could barely have fought, according to new research reported in the Guardian. A professor of biomechanics asked staff from the Royal Armouries Museum to walk and run in replica armour from the 15th century, based…
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From amongst the classical typology, of course. In life Jesus was clearly a powerful cleric, capable at the very least of Create Food and Water, Dismissal, and Water Walk, as well as the various Cure and Remove Curse spells. We see no evidence of his having used the reverse forms of these spells – except…
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While I was travelling my blog attracted the attention of a Danish Fascist group, the Danish National Front, for its posts on Tolkien and fascism. A post went up on their message board indicating that the Tolkien books are recommended reading for fascists and giving my post on Tolkien’s racial theories as an explanation of…
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In a recent skype conversation, one of my players from London accused my GMing style of being “very sandbox,” and even went so far as to imply that there is little difference between me and the OSR. This has me a little confused as to what sandboxing is, since I don’t do any of the…
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I discovered recently a blog post on Racial Essentialism which describes some definitions of racial essentialism, something which has been debated (and confused) here. I also discovered a blog entirely devoted to race in D&D, though it hasn’t been updated since this time last year. It includes a lecture on race in D&D that was…
Compromise and Conceit 