The sonnet version:
He hangs in his balloon above the cliff
That is the titan’s ear to hear his call,
Sir Isaac shouting down his sermon: If
You throw it high enough it will not fall.
Awake at last for one last do or die,
Great Atlas shudders, straightens out his back,
And shoves with all his might against the sky.
Earth rocks. The sky flies clear. Blue fades to black.
Whether it’s strain that kills him, or respite,
The titan crumbles, shattered with his hopes.
Cold Newton might ha
They speed from all directions, sea and sky,
The gaunt dark spectral figures gathering
Unto this withered heath and ruined tower.
Some stalk in sunken lanes, some drift on scows
Along the dank canal, while some alight
From prows of stormblown ships with ghostly crews.
Some thicken from the mist, some rise from crypts;
Some merely slip through doors, while others slide
From scaley necks of ancient batwinged beasts.
Not one but carries something. Some hold staves
Of runescarred twist
A Lady of Morandau
In the wide staging ground outside the gate, some sixty men and women are mounting horses and hitching wagons. No voice is raised, but every movement is brisk. They will all be gone in a few moments. The men wear dark coats and brimmed hats. It is late autumn and the air is cool. The women wear cloaks, and hats of a more elegant style, though equally somber. The people’s skin and hair are of all shades, but darker skins predominate, and whiter hair, even on those wh
Solving a riddle is a D&D trope, or at least it used to be. It seems that every DM runs a game at some point where the players have to solve some bizarre word puzzle.
The IC problem with riddles is explaining why the heck the riddle is there to be solved. In a world of magic it's easy enough to accept that reciting the right word can open a gate or whatever. As for why any evil wizard would deliberately provide a clue to the right magic word, in the form of a riddle, I guess it's easier
One evening in 1978 my family visited another family that my parents had known for years. Their son was older than my brother and me, and he entertained us with his home-brew version of D&D. He just made up his own rules, and those I remember seem kind of odd to me now. When we rolled up our characters, for instance, we rolled 3d6 for most abilities but only 2d6 for wisdom, because "people in those days didn't know very much". I remember I got 10 wisdom, and this was good for 'those days', s
In a small rural library near my parents' summer cottage, I once found a little book about tabletop wargaming with miniatures. It wasn't a sociological study or anything, but simply a book about how to get started in the hobby. It talked about how to make terrain models, and measure ranges between units on a tabletop, and stuff like that. It also discussed basic rules, not in the sense of laying them down, but of discussing what things you should consider when inventing your own rules. All I rea
"Wormy" was this awesome series that ran in Dragon magazine back in the 1980s, around the same time that Phil Foglio was getting started. Wormy was drawn by a guy named David Trampier, who also did a lot of the artwork for the first edition AD&D books. The title character is the pool-hustling dragon in the episode below. He's sort of like a retired mobster — decent enough now that you don't worry about him killing you, but on the other hand you still give him a wide berth. He's pretty tradit
Check out the South African band Lonehill Estate, who have this great song Technoband. If you just google them or the song, you'll see their YouTube video.
