Skelebear

It is weird how children’s media and horror so often run up in close proximity. This morning my younger son and I were playing with an alphabet puzzle where one picture is, I think, supposed to be a bear standing up and holding an X-ray, but actually looks like a bear pulling open its belly to display its bones.

The idea of a skeletal grizzly bear stalking about in an ill-fitting sack of its own pelt is one of the more horrific ideas that has graced my brain lately.

Originally published on Google Plus

Uplift in heroic fantasy RPGs

I reread Startide Rising and The Uplift War recently, and it occurred to me that that interspecies dynamic would be an interesting way of handling the profusion of intelligent races in an “everything in the books”-style D&D campaign.  Sure, maybe bugbears and ogres are basically the same thing, but that’s just because the illithids thought the aboleth had too good a thing going with ogres to let the idea go unswiped.  If you have a problem with that, I’m sure the beholders will be happy to field your complaints about their client race.  Or their patrons, if you can find the right Outer Plane.

Originally published on Google Plus