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  1. Howard Andrew Jones

    Persistence of Fucking Vision: They're like Dreams! The motionless pictures are moving?!

    I find the AI intrusion into creativity incredibly alarming. I could certainly see the attraction of its use as a guided tool by fellow creatives, but the specter of it as a replacement, and the problem of it learning by stealing skill... It has taken me a life time of trial and error and...
  2. Howard Andrew Jones

    Book Fucking Talk

    Thanks for trying it out! I'm delighted you enjoyed it! Baen just sent me the final version of the cover for 3 last week. Is it cool for me to show it here, or is that too much self promo? I'm making a final pass on book 3 right now, just a last light read before it goes to copyedit. I'd been...
  3. Howard Andrew Jones

    Book Fucking Talk

    Before Corwin even has his memory back he spares Julian. He feels badly that he has to keep leaving Bill in the dark about what's REALLY going on. By the end Corwin admits to himself that he and Eric were more alike than not and, if memory serves, speculates that they might even have become...
  4. Howard Andrew Jones

    Book Fucking Talk

    He has more depth than he's aware of, which is one of the great things I love about Zelazny's writing -- the plot and worldbuilding has layers within layers, and many of the characters are deeper than they present themselves.. Often Corwin tells you one thing but his actions reveal a *little*...
  5. Howard Andrew Jones

    Book Fucking Talk

    I loooove the original Chronicles of Amber. Blew the doors off of my imagination when I read it in junior high. The shepherd/husky mix behind me is named Corwin...
  6. Howard Andrew Jones

    Book Fucking Talk

    I spent a pleasant hour this morning reading through all of the posts here over the last few years. Gardner Fox's Kothar and Kyrik books are pretty dreadful, which is why I put off reading any other prose by him for years. But, lo and behold, he can be QUITE good. I finally broke down and read...
  7. Howard Andrew Jones

    Gods of the Forbidden North

    Any thoughts on this thing? Looks like the Kickstarter of volume 2 and a reprint of volume 1 are going to close up in the next day or so. I'm a sucker for giant hex crawls, but only if the hexes are really interesting...
  8. Howard Andrew Jones

    So Much Bad Design...

    I'm all good here. I enjoy what you both have to say on a variety of topics, and what with the forum being pretty quiet overall I momentarily feared I had returned to this place just in time to see it, too, fade into memory.
  9. Howard Andrew Jones

    So Much Bad Design...

    I realize I don't know you guys hardly at all -- not even real world human names -- but I hate to see any bad feelings developing in what's one of my favorite spots on the interwebs. If I may, I think there's a valid point to be made about the change in society being at the root of some of...
  10. Howard Andrew Jones

    5e - why you think it sucks, and why you're wrong

    Hey, thanks, man. I hope you enjoy it. As far as that algorithm, Amazon remains confusing and frustrating to me and so many writers... Murderbot is excellent and is hard to stop reading. And as it happens, Martha Wells was kind enough to blurb the new series for me, before I had even landed the...
  11. Howard Andrew Jones

    So Much Bad Design...

    I was in junior high in the 1970s, and I got introduced to AD&D, not basic, although friends of friends sometimes had basic modules. In our little corner of the world it was hard to lay hands on modules, so we didn't have much to model off of. The first one I was unfortunate enough to pick up...
  12. Howard Andrew Jones

    So Much Bad Design...

    First, kudos for you for teaching them how to be more interactive and not just hack everything to death. Second, I hear you on getting bored watching the characters declare all the things they're doing until finally you let them find the secret door. If my wife's characters say they're...
  13. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    Paul McCartney wins. The first time he got high (with Dylan and the other Beatles) he was desperate for a piece of paper. Mal Evans finally found him some paper and a pen and he jotted down the eternal truth he understood. When he came down and looked at the paper the next day it read: There are...
  14. Howard Andrew Jones

    So Much Bad Design...

    Over the last few days I've been combing through modules I splurge bought over the years -- many in the years before I was aware of this and a few other trusted review sites -- and My God but they're bad. So very very many of them are room after room of some kind of lethal trap or monster that...
  15. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    Absolutely. I jotted a few notes last night while I was inspired, so... maybe I'll get to it. Seems like maybe the way to start is with jotting down the ideas and encounters and monsters and doo-dads that are most interesting to me, and keep making notes as they come. My new book series may...
  16. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    ...of course, only hours after I wrote my first response my mind is overflowing with ideas to make it my own, which are really cool but then I'm also proving myself right, because I really do have a novel to be working on. Still, though, maybe I should re-read all this stuff, modify what I like...
  17. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    Thanks! I don't actually groove on 5E, I just liked a lot of the expansion material that was added to those OAR volumes. As a matter of fact, I usualllly stumble over some of the 5E terminology if I have to convert it at the table. DC checks, etc.
  18. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    Yeah, I was poking through my copies of those just last night. I was wishing there were some OAR volumes on those, but, alas, that seems unlikely to happen now. I do have the OAR Dread and Lost City, though (as well as Amber-- I'm not made of money, I've done a lot of work for Goodman over the...
  19. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    Well, the trick is that since the day job is coming up with stories and writing them it means that I am consequently ALWAYS thinking of stories and ideas even during my off time. If I switch gears and begin to plan out an RPG setting and hexes in detail it means less of the brain time is devoted...
  20. Howard Andrew Jones

    My "Megadungeon"

    Been digging through a lot of old posts, some of which I remember reading a few years back when I was first hanging out here. Lots of fascinating things in THIS thread, and a hexcrawling thread. It all has me thinking once more about a kind of SUPER Isles of Dread. I've long been attracted to...
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