Reviews and Comments

I really do appreciate that the authors were trying to explore settings with a different perspective than the pseudo-European/North American cultural base used for most #DnD settings.

But since this 224 page book is split up between 13 adventures and 15 cultures, the glimpses we get of each culture is so frustratingly brief. As someone who wants their settings to come with lots of details, this would make it difficult for me to bring the cultures in question truly come alive. In lieu of further detail, it might have helped if they had spelled out which culture each setting is based on - in some cases it was fairly easy for me to guess, but in others I was unsure.

I also have to admit, I prefer running campaigns where the PCs largely stay in one particular region rather than traveling around - and when they do travel around, there should be a good reason for why they are doing all this traveling. The 13 adventures in this book do not really have any real connection to each other than their presupposed home base (the Radiant Citadel) - the PCs just show up in some place for whatever reason the GM come up with, and solve some local problem.

Still, the brief glimpses I get of all these worlds are intriguing. And I am curious if any of the original authors have developed their miniature settings further on the Dungeon Master's Guild - I would certainly take a closer look! #ttrpg

It's high time someone added the latest #folklore works by @SimonRoyHughes@thefolklore.cafe to the Open Library records (and #Bookwyrm , of course).

I enjoyed reading and watching the German translations of the "Don Camillo" books and movies, so the #Italian originals are another obvious choice for my efforts to learn the language.

Though I suspect I will catch a lot more of the political context of these books than when I was a kid.

Reading dodgy conspiracy theories for #ttrpg inspiration was rather popular, 10-20 years ago.

Of course, back then most of us weren't as aware of the racism underlying many of these fantasies (I certainly wasn't). And now that conspiracy fantasies have become mainstream thanks to the resurgence of #fascism , this approach has lost a lot of its shine.

Wie viel #Cringe muss man bei einem 21 Jahre alten deutschen Fantasy-Rollenspielbuch erwarten, das an "afrikanische und australische Vorbilder" angelehnt ist? Ich weiß es nicht, aber ich befürchte da immer schlimmes.

Hat dieses Buch jemand aus der #pnpde -Bubble gelesen?

#Midgard

Werde ich jemals diese alten #Midgard -Quellenbücher lesen, die bei mir zu Hause rumliegen? Keine Ahnung... 🤷‍♂️

#pnpde

This book by @hellcowkeith@dice.camp is not a book that focuses on a specific topic and covers that topic in detail, like the assorted 3.5 books for Eberron did. It is best to see it as a collection of essays on a variety of niche topics - some of which are very niche, such two minor gnome subcultures.

Some of the chapters are broader in scope, and personally I found the chapter on the Overlords, The Dark Six, and the lore and folk-lore about undead the most useful. As an amateur folklorist, I especially appreciated the last one - to run good adventures about monsters, you should not only contemplate their stats, but also what the people within the world know about them, and what kinds of stories they tell.

Fans of Keith Baker's previous work will find plenty to like here, but I see this work to be more for completists rather than a "must have" for Eberron fans.

Still, I suspect that Keith Baker's next work - "Frontiers of Eberron: Quickstone" will be more to my liking, since it is a more focused work on a specific topic and region. And as it happened, it is out right now - so excuse me while I download it. 😉

#ttrpg #dnd #Eberron

This sounds interesting - I don't know about the #liberation movements which ended #colonization in much of the world, but I want to.

www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243752585/how-indonesias-revolution-paved-the-way-for-decolonization-worldwide

I've translated the following folk tale from this #folklore collection:

"Of Murderous Dead People" ("Von mordenden Todten"): www.patreon.com/posts/murderous-dead-90458855

During my research of German folklore, I have read numerous old collections of folk tales of highly variable quality - and "Schlesische Sagen" does pretty much everything right. It draws from a very large number of sources (and gives proper citations!) to cover the folk tales of a particular region (Silesia, in this case) in great depth.

Furthermore, it actually has a good structure for the order in which it lists those tales, which is far from universal. Too many collections just add one tale after another without bothering to sort them into a proper context. Among those who do, the authors either list the tales by regional geography or by topic. A good argument can be made for either, but for research purposes I prefer the latter - which is what "Schlesische Sagen" is doing. Yes, this means that you will often read several rather similar tales in a row, but I'd rather have such collections be comprehensive than leave interesting variants out.

This first of the three volumes, "Spuk- und Gespenstersagen", focuses on undead of all kinds - ghosts, revenants, hauntings, will-o'-wisps, and so forth. A particular highlight were the many local vampire variants, which are mostly absent in the more western regions of Germany which I had focused on before.

I can't wait to see what the other two volumes in this collection will unearth!