I have written a lot in this blog about AI and machine learning, and have probably established my credentials as a sceptic. It is not 'intelligence' and it will not, in my view, ever be able to c...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/on-emotion-in-creative-process.html
It is an important question, I'm sure you will agree, as to what qualifies as a 'golem' as distinct from an automaton, an animated statute, and so on. It has long troubled me that the 2nd edition...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/thoughts-on-theory-and-doctrine-of.html
Readers who have been following along with my posts about AI in RPG publishing (see here , here , here and here ) may be interested to read the latest missive from the excellent Ted Gioia . In i...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/three-boos-for-ai.html
Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words. Let us, then, tell many thousands of words with the following images, from what I think of as the holy triumvirate of artworks depicting a conceptual W...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/feel-like-my-soul-is-beginning-to.html
I increasingly look to the future with an inchoate sense of foreboding. The physical world around us seems to be deteriorating before our eyes; there is a degeneration of basic civility in our in...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/nostalgia-hope-wonder-world-of-tsran.html
Dear readers - I am around 40 posts shy of reaching the 2000th post at this blog. The celebrations can wait until the finishing line is reached, though I have a vague plan to write a post a day...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/monsters-and-manuals-best-200-of-first.html
The most important decision in all of public life, on either side of the Atlantic, is now before us: ARE FROST GIANTS BETTER THAN HILL GIANTS: YES OR NO? This is the question that has been re...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/forget-trump-v-biden.html
Philosophy can be defined as the pursuit of answers to permanent questions, and there is no finer example than the question of the best type of D&D giant. Vote for your own favourite in the com...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/favourite-giant-poll.html
A lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to describe what the 'old school' approach to role playing is in a nutshell. Quite a lot of people have boiled it down to XP for gold, which I thin...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/03/how-to-osrise-any-game-in-one-easy-step.html
While idly looking at cricket scores on the BBC website earlier today I came across a link to this recent 5 minute 'BBC sounds' podcast on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of D&D . This took ...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/it-is-important-that-it-be-fully.html
Nostalgia can do powerful things. I must have bought the 2nd edition AD&D DMG at the age of about 12 or 13, at a shop in Tel Aviv on a road lined with palm trees; it was early evening and the sky...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/17-times-incidental-illustrations-in.html
My previous post generated considerable debate (chiefly about, of all things, Daddy Pig). But it raises wider, and more important, questions that I think it would be worth devoting a post to addr...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/does-what-happens-at-table-matter.html
Yesterday, I had the misfortune of attending the cinema to watch Peppa Pig's Cinema Party , consisting of 10 'never before seen' Peppa Pig episodes (question: Do Americans, Australians, etc., kno...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/whats-story-problem-with-plot.html
PCs in Behind Gently Smiling Jaws each have one of four ancestries, and a background which follows from whatever their ancestry is. Ancestries may be randomly determined, chosen, or assigned, as ...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/ancestries-and-character-backgrounds-in.html
I recently came across this video on t'internet. In it, Mike Mearls does his best to look very serious and thoughtful while he talks about alignment. But what he has to say is not only devoid of ...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/mike-mearls-moral-philosopher.html
Each Sunday (well, almost each Sunday), I share seven links to items of interest that have crossed my eye across the preceding week. Here are this week's: Do you know about d4 Caltrops ? You o...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sunday-seven-5th-february-2024.html
Have you noticed something about my blog, over the past few years? I have. Sit still for a moment and you will too. I want you to be very quiet. Quiet as a mouse. Still your breathing. Don't fidg...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/no-more-drama.html
Each Sunday (well, almost each Sunday), I share seven links to items of interest that have crossed my eye across the preceding week. Here are this week's: You may be amused to learn of the exis...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-sunday-seven-28th-january-2024.html
When it comes to fantasy novels I am now old, jaded and cynical, like the Ron Perlman character in Enemy at the Gates. I like it to be brief and to the point. Unless Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance or JRR...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/are-you-sequel-worthy.html
I don't have time to do all of the many things I have to, let alone want to. So it is probably a bad idea to embark on the project of writing a choose your own adventure book. But I have never le...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/on-writing-fantasy-gamebook.html
The moon has played an exceptionally important role in the development of the human imagination. The sun gives life; we know this intuitively, and we have long worshipped it as a result. But ...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-importance-of-moon-as-underused.html
A few years ago, I wrote a piece on D&D as a kind of 'monastery of the mind ', which seemed to strike a chord with some readers. I was thinking about this earlier today when paging through a ...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/gimme-shelter-tolkien-wodehouse-gygax.html
Stamford - a fetching but obscure small Lincolnshire market town - had in the early 14th century a rival to Oxford and Cambridge universities . A falling-out between scholars at Oxford led t...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-institutional-campaign-and.html
One lesson I probably should have learned by now after over 15 years of writing this blog is that, since I treat it as informal, casual brain-splurge, I don't always take the time to properly gui...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-predicates-of-d.html
I mentioned in a previous post that I am currently reading The Masters, the first volume in the reworked Stone Dance of the Chameleon series. I vaguely remembered the original iteration of these...
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/01/implied-magic-no-magic-low-magic-fake.html