All posts by pbly

Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out in 1992.  It stars Gary Oldman in the title role (Dracula, not Coppola or Stoker) and a bunch of other people you can look up on IMDB.  As a human being, I was aware the book existed well before I read it in high school.  I haven’t…

Yellowjackets has been a staple at our home since the premiere just over three years ago.  However, things are not going great.  The show has been very slow to hit plot points.  And there’s a notable pacing and intensity difference between the two timelines.  The storyline in the woods is gripping.  The modern story is…

Cibola Burn is my least favorite Expanse book and the hardest to get through.  There I said it.  This can be a frustrating story where things just keep getting worse and worse and worse until the characters get lucky and limp away from a shit show at the fuck factory. The situation in Cibola Burn…

This one has been a long time coming.  For years 5e products have made obscure references to Vecna, the biggest baddest lich in Dungeons & Dragons canon.  Those references got a shot in the arm when Stranger Things season 4 in 2022 named its antagonist after Vecna.  This was accompanied by The Vecna Dossier, a…

Editor’s Note – I dug this one out of the archive after the Great Blog Crash.  It’s an Eberron set sequel to Curse of Strahd and I thought it was a good idea.  The similarities to Vecna: Eve of Ruin make me feel a little clever so here it is. I just got back from…

I was shocked that I liked Alien: Covenant a good deal more than Prometheus. For a brief recap: I despised Prometheus when I saw it in the theater when it came out.  I read Roger Ebert’s 4 star review.  4 stars, nothing you’d change?  There were a lot of comparisons to Alien and I was…

The third Expanse book, Abaddon’s Gate, picks up about three years later after Caliban’s War.  We ended the 2nd book with two stingers.  The impossibly huge ship takes off from Venus and Detective Miller shows up in a rush of blue fireflies. The TLDR summary on Book 3: That alien ship reached its destination.  It…

DM’s Note: This was written in 2019 prior to the release of Descent into Avernus. One thing I want to do is adapt some adventures from other campaign settings.  This way if my home game has a night where the DM can’t make it they can see some of the other campaign settings outside the…

Since 5e came out Wizards of the Coast has been very….very…very slowly releasing the campaign settings of editions past.  Some settings like Greyhawk or Eberron were an easy lift and one is justified for pondering what the hell took so long.  Others like Dark Sun have some problematic shit in their blood and may never…