Happy Tolkien Reading Day!

Tolkien Reading Day takes place annually on March 25th, the anniversary of the destruction of the One Ring and the Fall of Sauron. In celebration of this momentous literary occasion, here’s an expanded update of my previous Tolkien music playlist “Hobbit Day 2021”. This takes us through the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and

Little Finger of Vecna: A Neutral Evil Rogue of Some Question

I can’t imagine that anyone is at all interested in my not-so-original D&D character creations, especially when they only exist in an ancient video game hardly anyone plays anymore, but I do enjoy writing about them, so there’s that. This time around my inspiration comes from Petyr Baelish, a character from HBO’s fantasy series Game

Where Eagles Dare

As any fan of the Misfits can tell you, many (or even most) of their songs are about, or at least have titles inspired by or taken from, horror films. But “Where Eagles Dare” appears to be one of the exceptions. There is a movie called Where Eagles Dare but it’s not a horror film,

Eohild, Shield-maiden of Rohan

Sometimes when I play Neverwinter Nights over again from the beginning, which I do so often it’s become a running joke in my household, I create a character I love so well that I want to share them with the world. This is one of those times, and one of those characters, even though she’s

A Few of My Favourite Things, Part I

One of the things I love about blogging is that I get to tell perfect strangers all about the things I love. Imagine trying to do that during a long flight, or sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office. The difference is that I don’t have a captive audience. This blog is more

The Movies and Stories that Inspired Dave Arneson to Invent the Dungeon Crawl — DMDavid

Around 1971 Dave Arneson and his circle of Minneapolis gamers invented games where players controlled individual characters who grew with experience and who could try anything because dice and a referee determined the outcomes. The group tried this style of play in various settings, but Dave invented one that proved irresistible: the dungeon. Dave’s Blackmoor… The

That Time I Got So Skinny So Fast I Was Afraid I Had Cancer

For most of my adult life I’ve had sit-down jobs. In fact, for almost a decade I worked as a customer service representative in a call centre, which meant that I was basically tied to a desk for 90% of my work day, not counting the hour I spent sitting down to eat my lunch,

Reminiscing About Video Games Based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Vol II

A while back I waxed nostalgic about some of the video games I’ve enjoyed in the past that were set in the fantasy world created by my favourite author, J. R. R. Tolkien, and as a playful nod to the fact that both the SNES game The Lord of the Rings, Vol I and Ralph

Reminiscing About Video Games Based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Vol I

There have been a lot of these, and there may even be one or two I don’t know about, so I’m not going to endeavour to cover them all. Instead I’ll just invite you to add your own in the comments if I left any of your favourites out. But this is a nostalgia post

Medieval Monday: Battling Against the Shield Wall — Allison D. Reid

Jason looks back at our shield wall experiment day that we filmed in the summer of 2017. We put shieldmaker Luke’s handiwork to the test with a group of twenty brave volunteers, who clashed together in various formations of shield wall. In doing so, we explored some of the events recounted in ancient sagas to […]