The Halloween Tree
Two sci-fi giants, one spooky Halloween classic Well, it's that time of year again. Candy. Costumes. Holiday specials airing nonstop for a month. Wait. What was that last one? Technically, there aren't a ton of Halloween movies (not counting the Halloween(tm) series...
Shardlight
Come for the mystery, stay for the atmosphere of this point-and-click dystopian adventure with serious vibes. 2016’s Shardlight is a post-apocalyptic game that immerses you in a dying world after a WWIII-like catastrophe. Exactly what happened to cause this world...
Princess Bride
Low-Magic Fantasy? Inconceivable! How a classic tale dodges fantasy’s biggest trap. Magic system. Magic system. Magic system. Start a conversation with a fan about a fantasy world they haven’t heard of, and those two words are bound to come up in short order. The Dark...
AI-Assisted Archaeology
How to build a better archaeologist. AI needed a hobby, and this could be it. Between roughly fifteen hundred and twenty-two hundred years ago, in the Peruvian desert, the Nazca lived and worshiped. Also, they graffitied the hell out of that desert. By selectively...
Dwarf Fortress UI
The Dwarfiest Dwarves Who Ever Dwarfed, Now Accessible to Non-Zealots Dwarf Fortress is the quintessential fortress management game. A two-person indie project first released in 2006, it was notorious for its intensely detailed simulation, wacky emergent behaviors,...
Frieren
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, is a surprisingly succinct title that describes exactly what this anime is about. We meet the protagonist, Frieren, on her way back from saving the world from the Demon King with her party of adventurers. Her companions are two humans...
Delivery robots
Delivery food, minus some stranger’s car. Note: Don’t tip the robot. How would you feel if you order a burger and fries on Uber Eats and a little robot showed up at your door with your food? If you live in LA or one of the upcoming pilot cities, that could happen. At...
The War Within
One take that dwarves would rather leave, aka the less-than-proud origin of Dwarves Every well-developed fantasy setting has its share of lore. Often, that extends to origins stories for the various races that inhabit the world. In various incarnations, dwarves have...
Delicious in Dungeon
The cooking/dungeoncrawler mashup you didn’t know you needed. Iron Chef? More like Adamantine Chef! Anime has a reputation for magical girl fairytales and over-the-top power fantasy combat shows. You get your occasional Death Note or Cowboy Bebop mixed in for...
Poll: Quintessential Fantasy Dwarves
When I first introduced my Dragonhammer Saga series to my Email Insiders, I posed this question about fantasy dwarves. What is a dwarf? We’re setting aside the outdated medical term and Tyrion Lannister (the very narrow intersection of two otherwise unrelated topics)...