The Gaming Den

Bows didn't become obsolete because guns did more damage or were more accurate. Until the mid-19th century, getting shot with an arrow was often as bad or worse than being shot with a bullet. And guns (pistols, at least) had an effective range of like 20 ft. All those Old West gunfights had few cau...

All of them are, starting with Tolkien, and it's mostly through British stereotypes of Africans, not US of African Americans, though of course there is overlap. I'm not sure that I can agree with that. The only real trait that orcs share with British stereotypes about Africans is that they are sava...

Sorry, but what kind of Orcs is coded as 'Black'? I'm not American, so I have not a lot of experience of viewing stuff through the lenses of US racial politics, but I cannot remember any popular depictions of Orcs who are stereotyped as Black/African people. Maybe Warcraft ones?

What gets me about this era of Gygaxian design is that 1: The dungeon does not follow the game's rules for magic. AND ALSO 2: The dungeon does not follow my understanding of either physics or narrative. Well, it is more or less an origin point for the 'rules are the worst enemy of the dungeon maste...

kzt wrote: I can't find a list of Communist states that didn't engage in mass murders.

You will not find any notable country in the world that wasn't been engaged in mass murder at one point of its history or the other. It is what countries do.

Can anyone explain to me a joke about peasant dwarf adventurer named Carlos?

OP classification of machine guns is also make little sense as it is mixture of obsolete and incorrect. Sub-machine guns have little relations to actual machine guns in all but name. SMGs were used initially as a poor man substitute for machine guns but still were different weapon entirely. Light ma...

angelfromanotherpin wrote: Also there's a new nation called Sarmatia which is a democracy with a king or something, seems incoherent, should fit right in with the other nations.

It is a Poland expy.

The original, Polish version was "Proba Traw", which translates into "Trial by/of Grass" - so it is a case of the translator being faithful to the source material. We don't know the details, but Witchers call many - if not most - of their special herbs "grasses", so th...

Is that unusual? In Russian it's "испытание травами (Трансму&...

Interesting. It's been a long time since I read The Last Wish and I didn't really get into Blood of Elves for real world reasons. I got that witchers were going away. The trial of grasses is lethal enough that the investment-to-payoff ratio is pretty fucked up. Sorry, but I have a question: do they...