GROGNARDIA

This being the 136th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I thought it the perfect opportunity to write another installment in my increasingly irregular Reconsiderations series.

I'm still knee-deep in work on the revision of Thousand Suns and a couple of other writing projects, hence my continued neglect of the blog.

Needless to say, I've been very remiss in writing new posts for this blog, even within the context of the less rigorous schedule I proposed two months ago.

More reconsiderations posts are in the offing, probably next week, but, as has been the case since the end of April, I remain hard at work on completing the first draft of the upcoming second edition of my science fiction roleplaying game, Thousand Suns.

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school."

Toward the end of his life, St Augustine began a project called in Latin the Retractationes.

First, a couple of brief updates: I’m still hard at work on the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns and, while it’s going well, it’s not moving quite as quickly as I had originally hoped.

I know that I made some of you aware of this earlier, but, as the time draws closer, I thought I'd share the information more widely.

My attention remains on the first draft of Thousand Suns second edition for a while longer.

I'm still hard at work finishing up the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns, so I'm not yet ready to return to regular blogging here.

I'm not dead, but I am deep in the proverbial salt mines, working hard to complete the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns.

Lingvo Tera by James Maliszewski Thoughts on Language in Thousand Suns Read on Substack

I mentioned in yesterday's "The Articles of Dragon" post that, by 1985, I had begun to sense a nebulous but nevertheless real shift in TSR Hobbies and its games, though I could not then have really articulated what precisely it was that I was sensing.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that, for all the fanfare that accompanied the publication of issue #100 of Dragon (August 1985), it nevertheless felt like the end of an era – at least to me.

Chronicle by James Maliszewski A Brief History of the Thousand Suns Read on Substack

Though not my original intention, apparently I am going to be writing more posts about the stories that gave birth to the characters described at the back of the Traveller supplements 1001 Characters and Citizens of the Imperium.

One of these days, I'll need to do a proper campaign update for my Dark Between the Stars Fading Suns campaign, which I've been refereeing since October of last year.

Back in the far-off days of the early Old School Renaissance, when Labyrinth Lord was everyone's go-to B/X Dungeons & Dragons retro-clone, Goblinoid Games published two supplements to it that I really liked: the Advanced Edition Companion and Realms of Cr…

I know that, for some readers, White Wolf's World of Darkness games represent a definitive break with the early days of the hobby and, therefore, aren't a fit topic for discussion on this blog.

Though I haven't devoted many posts to the subject, Dragon magazine published quite a few adventures in its pages over the years.

The Terran State (Part II) by James Maliszewski Further Thoughts on Interstellar Governance Read on Substack

The trouble with Muses is that, ultimately, they're in control, not you.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post in which I briefly touched on the variety of names by which the Game Master or referee is known in older roleplaying games.

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite What's New with Phil & Dixie strips appeared in issue #65 of Dragon (September 1982).

The Terran State by James Maliszewski Whether Federation or Empire, Some Truths Remain Read on Substack