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So, I want to talk a little bit about Eithniu.

Specifically, I want to talk a little bit about who she is and where she came from, but because there's honestly not a whole lot written about her, I'm going to detour and talk a little bit about the Fomorians and the Túatha Dé Danann, since both of them are mentioned in the book and their relationship is slightly expanded upon. So let's start with the latter.

In fact, let's start with the name. 'Túatha Dé Danann' means 'The Tribes of the Goddess Danu.' While some of them may have been gods in a pre-Christian, pagan Ireland that we have very little information about, we do know that a majority of them first appear as literary characters in the

Now that I've thoroughly confused everyone and their mother with the title, here's the actual pitch in a handy link format:

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Dresden Files: Emerald Isle

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The short version (you can just go to the long version for the actual document) is fairly straightforward: this is a game set in the modern-day (well, approximately 16 years in the past, but you get the gist) Republic of Ireland based on me fusing some of the Dresden Files stuff we all know and love, but with the twist that I've gone through a lot of the Irish mythic cycles in order to present a more 'accurate' picture of the

I'm typing this in a bit of a hurry, as I'm about to head out of town for a few hours, but here's my sales pitch:

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So, it's the holidays, I'm officially done with my last exam of the year (pls don't tell me how it went), and that means I have a large amount of free time on my hands and not a lot to spend it on. So, I thought I'd spend some time putting together a short little Only War campaign for people to play through over the holiday season.

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Generally, while I say 'new player friendly' above, I want to stress that anybody can apply, just that veteran players should expect this to be geared to a new player experience, and to please respect that there are folks

Deciding that this subreddit hadn't quite had enough of riffing on bad pop history documentaries, I decided to take another stab at Conquest, that classic of bad pop history made somewhat bearable by a somewhat charismatic English presenter.

This one is a doozey. Weird Weapons of the Middle Ages, covering such strange, esoteric designs as...The mace. We'll get into that later. Click here if you want to watch along.

1:08: Broadsword isn't really (to my understanding) a weapons category in the Middle Ages. Nor is it particularly accurate for a knight of this period, even if he is on foot, to use a sword and shield - while shields did continu

Right, let's hope people weren't scared away by the really pretentious title.

Alright, so, for those of us who've read all the novels we've seen a great deal of power discrepancy between God and God's angels and just about everybody else in the story, with the only people (we're told) who would be able to match Uriel in a straight-up galaxy-destroying slugfest being the Mothers.

All the old gods seem like they're significantly less powerful. Now, we know that Vadderung retired from active godhood (Jim spoke about this at an interview), but even Hades didn't radiate the same kind of power when Harry was face to face with him in Skin Game. And while the books do make the point that a power

So while I overall really enjoy the Dresden Files RPG (both GM'ing a game and participating in one), I run into the problem of Wizard characters becoming almost absurdly powerful.

To whit, one of my players currently plays a pyromancer who, with a dinky nine refresh, is able to throw nine-shift fire spells around, which makes mincemeat of quite a few nasties that would otherwise be a credible threat. And I don't just want to thow bigger monsters at them just to make something a threat to him because then everyone else feels like they're not contributing.

Do you have any houserules that make magic just a little bit more managable?

Now, this is from the RPG, so its canonicity is maybe a little dubious, but you could practically subtitle the Paranet Papers 'wizards dun fucked up':

So, as it turns out, annihilating 13 god-tier beings and a few million vampires doesn't just create a political power vacuum - it creates a literal power vacuum. At present, Chichen Itza's ley-line absorbed all the energy from the death of the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night and is basically the magic equivalent of a WMD. Also, the Church has a militant branch that thinks the Inquisition didn't go far enough.

Justin DuMorne was the one who killed Rasputin, who subsequently made a deal with Mab (and who may, in fact, still be alive

Now, while there has already been a rather excellent thread about some of the poor armor in Vikings, I thought I'd take a moment to touch on some of the other badhistory that I noticed, as well as dipping into some bad geography and what happens when showrunners pick out names without context:

Firstly, there's the name of Ragnar Lothbrok himself. Lothbrok is actually a nickname roughly translating to "Shaggy Breeches." In the original saga of Ragnar Lothbrok from which the name comes, Ragnar kills a linnorm (a kind of wingless, bipedal, poison-spewing dragon) by donning shaggy clothes treated w

First, a preface: I hope this doesn't come off as me trying to lecture anyone about these kinds of principles, and I hope this won't come off as me sitting on an ivory tower and raining judgment upon the world, but I thought I'd explain (and hilariously overgeneralize) two interesting psychological phenomena (at least as well as a first-year psych student can):

The first is group polarization. It refers to the process whereby if you gather up small groups of people and ask them to make a decision (maybe the group's sociopolitical stance), generally speaking, these groups will drift to more extreme ends than the average group member displays.

It sort of defies our default assumptions about

So, since it seems like people are interested in Warhammer Fantasy, and since a lot of the information so far has been based around faction cultures and history, I figured I'd try and do something a little different and introduce some of the ways in which the various factions play. Note that this is a very general overview, and since I don't play every army, I won't be going in-depth with tactics and more describing each army's role as it exists on the tabletop.

But let's have a look at the various factions that exist right now, starting with...

 

The Empire: If I had to describe the Empire in one word, it would be "balanced." The Empire is the jack of all trades, master of

So this idea kinda/sorta came to me in that thread about Pat Rothfuss and writing of women, and some people in the comments brought up some criticisms of Rothfuss' own work.

In that honor, I'd like to dedicate a thread to slaughtering your own personal sacred cows/favorite media/favorite author/what have you. And I'd like to begin this ritual reasonable criticism with the Dresden Files, another book series brought up in the same thread.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SKIN GAME. THOU HATH BEEN WARNED:

So there's a scene in Skin Game that a lot of people had a problem with that I actually think works really well. In Skin Game, there's a scene where Murphy's facing down Nicodemus after he's willingly