Old School Dungeons & Dragons: Part 35

Posted on August 29, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Time for the latest compilation of old school Dungeons & Dragons threads; all of the compilations can be found in my Dungeons & Dragons blog tag. I’ve been more in a mood to do these posts on Bluesky, so this post came pretty quickly after the last one.

Fantastic Personalities (1981), by Bill Paley and Edward R.G. Mortimer. Back in the day, there were a lot more gaming supplements focusing on teaching inexperienced people how to play the game better!

Judges’ Guild was the second best RPG publisher back in the early days of D&D, and they published adventures, campaign settings, and gaming supplements. Fantastic Personalities is a collection of 85 non-player characters to be used to spice up any campaign! Let’s look at a few…

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Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman

Posted on August 28, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 27 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

It is almost impossible to imagine how horrible life must have been during the Black Death. The plague killed between 30% and 60% of the population of Europe rapidly and in particularly nasty ways, causing a complete collapse of the social order and infrastructure. I cannot even fathom struggling to find food when you can’t even go to your neighbors for help because they might infect you with an illness that will kill you faster than starvation.

To the people of the era, it must have felt like they had been abandoned by God; in his 2012 horror novel Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman weaves a story that treats this quite literally.

The novel originally came out in 2012, but it was rereleased this year in a lovely new edition with a foreword by Joe Hill and a gorgeous cover and sprayed edges. I’ve seen it on the shelves for a few months and finally decided I needed to read it.

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Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman

Posted on August 23, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 26 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

In my reading and blog writing, I tend to focus on lesser known authors and books and shy away from the mega bestsellers. Part of this is as “service”: I like to highlight things that people are less likely to have seen. Part of it however is just my own aversion to join the “hype” in a popular work! This is part of why it took me until 2024 to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

But I became curious about Dungeon Crawler Carl, a now lengthy series of novels by Matt Dinniman named after the first book that came out in 2020. I wasn’t necessarily expecting to get drawn into it, but I was really won over by the story, which went in directions and had more depth than I anticipated!

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Internet nonsense and the St. Petersburg paradox

Posted on August 20, 2026 by skullsinthestars

On various social media sites I’ve seen the following hypothetical scenario bandied about:

You are given the option to get $50,000 automatically or flip a coin for a 50% chance to win $50 million. Which option would you take?

Most people, it turns out, will opt for the $50k, which caused a lot of internet randos to say that people clearly aren’t very numerate, because the best return on investment is Option 2, which will on average give you $25 million.

A lot of you can probably already see the flaw with this basic argument about which choice is best, but it reminded me of a classic “paradox” in probability theory known as the St. Petersburg paradox. This felt like a good excuse to talk about that paradox and connect it back in a roundabout way to the scenario described above!

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Old School Dungeons & Dragons: Part 34

Posted on August 17, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Some time ago, I fell out of the habit of doing old school Dungeons & Dragons posts on social media, but recently I’ve been trying to get back in the game! This is the latest compilation of threads; all of the compilations can be found in my Dungeons & Dragons blog tag.

Incidentally, up to this post, I’ve written about 157 old school topics!

X3: Curse of Xanathon (1982), by Douglas Niles. I’ve done this one before, but recent political occurrences made it feel worthwhile enough to revisit with some snark!

The adventure starts in the city of Rhoona, where the Duke of Rhoona has started making increasingly bizarre and nonsensical proclamations.

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The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, by Nakamura, Fukunaga, and Hotta

Posted on August 15, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 25 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

One of my recent wanderings of my local bookstore uncovered a book that I just had to have: the translated original novelization of the famous kaiju movie Mothra! The book is titled The Luminous Fairies and Mothra: the original appeared in a magazine in January of 1961 and was written by Shin’ichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga and Yoshie Hotta, though the English translation only came out in January 2026 and was translated by Jeffrey Angles.

It should be noted that the original story is a novella that takes up on 44 pages of the 114 page book — the rest are extensive translator’s comments that fill in details of the history and politics underlying the story and its inception. I can happily say that both parts are really fascinating to read!

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19 Years of Skulls in the Stars?

Posted on August 14, 2026 by skullsinthestars

I just got the notification from WordPress that today is the official anniversary of my blog launching — I’ve been doing this for 19 years now! I don’t have too much to say about it at the moment, as I’ll probably wait until next year for the big 2-0 to have a significant retrospective. Thanks to folks who have followed and read!

I originally started this blog to get better at presenting science to the public in a non-technical manner and to pursue my love of weird fiction. Happily, I think I’ve managed to do both pretty well.

If you want to see how my blog began, here’s the link to my original post: Educate or Bust, which is also the name of an unpublished Robert E. Howard story!

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Polybius, by Collin Armstrong

Posted on August 9, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 24 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Some books have an idea so compelling that I end up buying them multiple times, albeit inadvertently! This is what happened with Polybius (2026), by Collin Armstrong, which I recently got at a bookstore because it looked compelling only to realize that I had bought it a couple of months earlier and forgotten about. I decided I had better read it before I ended up buying it a third time.

If you know I was born in 1971 and was a kid through the heyday of 1980s arcade games, you can see why I was compelled. The story centers on a mysterious video game of unknown provenance that finds its way into an unsuspecting community and wreaks havoc.

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Queen of the Cicadas, by V. Castro

Posted on July 31, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 23 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Now a little ahead with my reading schedule. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve been enjoying reading some horror by Mexican authors lately such as Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and so when I came across V. Castro’s Queen of the Cicadas (2021) in one of my bookstore wanderings I pretty much knew I had to grab it. The fact that it is very recognizably published by Flame Tree Press, one of my favorite publishers, sweetened the deal.

From the title, one might expect that it is a story of Mexican folklore analogous to La Llorona, and it does feel that way at first, but the story becomes so much more as it evolves.

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How Djadja-Em-Ankh Saved the Day, by Lise Manniche

Posted on July 28, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 22 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Now a little ahead with my reading schedule.

With all the hubbub about The Odyssey in theaters the past few weeks, I decided to crack a joke on social media about rereading an even better historical epic from ancient Egypt — the story of Djadja-Em-Ankh! I took classes on ancient Near East history in college and learned of this classic tale from the Westcar Papyrus. The story is very, very silly, which would’ve been the joke on social media. However, while looking up Djadja-Em-Ankh (impossible to forget that name), I learned that an absolutely delightful edition of the story was published in 1977, translated and commented on by Lise Manniche!

I immediately needed this book for my collection, and was able to secure a copy for only about $20 — lots of used books can be had cheaply simply due to lack of demand!

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