Things I'm liking:
Supermgood, but what IS that thing https://www.completecompendium.com/catalog/dr/Dragon172/
Dozen more https://www.completecompendium.com/catalog/dr/
Foreshortening dragon face is great https://www.completecompendium.com/catalog/dr/Dragon238/
Disappointing. I tried to like it more for the kid. It's not terrible. But it was disappointing in:
These things are all related. Check out the whole Wordsmith entry for it:
This
week’s theme
Words with hidden animals
This week’s words
auspicate
ettercap
The Crying Spider, 1881
Art: Odilon Redon
PRONUNCIATION:
(ET-uhr-kap
or AT-uhr-kop) 
MEANING:
noun:
1. A bad-tempered or spiteful person.
2. A spider.
ETYMOLOGY:
A variant of attercop, from Old English attorcoppa, from ator (poison, venom) + coppa (spider). It’s the same element that shows up in cobweb, literally spider’s web. Earliest documented use: before 1525.
NOTES:
If you know someone who is always spinning webs of gossip or ready to bite your head off, this is the perfect label for them. The form attercop got a modern boost from J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins uses it to taunt the giant, venomous spiders of Mirkwood, and the insult works. No spider, Tolkien tells us, has ever liked being called attercop.
USAGE:
“At
least we can see the auld ettercap into the ground now, Christ be praised.”
Pat McIntosh; The Counterfeit Madam; Constable; 2011.
A
THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified,
is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead. -Ernest Hemingway, author
and journalist, Nobel laureate (21 Jul 1899-1961)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=68Hds0OYrbg&ra=m
Time 8:27
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/06/06/the-carnyx-a-long-curved-instrument-used-by-the-celts-during-the-iron-age/ says -- Prior to 2004, fragments of only five such instruments had been preserved, from Germany, Switzerland, France, Scotland, and Romania, but in November 2004 archaeologists discovered more than 500 fragments of unique military and religious objects in a Gallo-Roman site at Tintignac, in southern France. These objects, all made of iron and bronze, included 10 helmets, a dozen swords and scabbards, iron spearheads, a shield, two animal heads, one foreleg, a cauldron, and seven carnyces. Once one of the carnyces was restored, it proved to be the most complete carnyx ever found.
wikiped -- Six of the carnyces had boar's heads, while the seventh appears to be a serpent-like monster.
-- The carnyx (pl.: carnyces; /kɑːnɪks/, KAR-nicks) is a wind instrument that was common in Celtic cultures during the Iron Age, between c. 200 BC and c. 200 AD. It is a type of trumpet made of bronze with an elongated S shape, held so that the long straight central portion was vertical and the short mouthpiece end section and the much wider bell were horizontal in opposed directions. The bell was styled in the shape of the head of an open-mouthed boar or other animal.
The Celts used the carnyx in warfare, probably to incite troops to battle and to intimidate opponents, as Polybius recounts.[1] The instrument's significant height—typically around 1.8 metres (6 feet), standing as tall as its player—allowed it to be heard over the heads of the participants in battles or ceremonies.[2] The carnyx was not only used by the Celts but also by the Dacians in modern Romania, and depictions have even been found on a Buddhist sculpture in India, attesting to the far-flung connections of the Iron Age world.[3]
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/10dvmb3/a_nearly_complete_1st_century_bce_carnyx_found_in/ says -- A nearly complete 1st century BCE carnyx found in 2004 at Tintignac, France (the one in the left picture, with a reconstruction in the right). Fashioned as a snarling boar, the carnyx was a war horn used by the Iron Age Celts between c. 200 BCE and c. 200 CE
Starting Swords in the Mist now.
Wikiped says Contents
"The Cloud of Hate" (1963)
"Lean Times in Lankhmar" (1959)
"Their Mistress, the Sea" (1968)
"When the Sea-King's Away" (1960)
"The Wrong Branch" (1968)
"Adept's Gambit" (1947)
Origins
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GhNtYhvDsvo&t=856s
Time 14:20 shows that yeah, Ridley Scott probably stole this old idea of planting eggs in spaceship crewmen feom this story “Discord in scarlett” by A. E. Van Vogt.
Or did that author van Vogt steal from John Campbell’s creatures in “Who goes there”?
Youtuber J. Scott Phillips.
BTW, that usual yellowish comicbook art you see everywhere of them incorrectly shows hands (wrapped and less fingers on Nongauble) on Sheelba and Ningauble. I just finished reading the stories in “swords against death” and specifically nobody knows if the two wizards have human anatomy on their faces or hands still (or feet). When Fafhrd gets to borrow the blindfold of true seeing, one of the wizards, I think Sheelba, says NOT to put it on right then or risk insanity and death (implying the perhaps Lovecraftian nature of the two wizards).
Trivia from that PDF (note that "The Twain" means Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser):
Something that was produced though was the game of
Lankhmar, originally released by TSR in 1976 and usheringin a long-time partnership between Leiber and the “GameWizards.” The game of Lankhmar was based on a wargameof sorts created by Leiber and Fischer and played during theyears of the Great Depression. The original board, a massivepiece of cardboard that showed the terrain and geography ofNehwon, was long lost along with the rules the two wrote.When Gygax learned of this game, he expressed a desire toreproduce it, leaving Leiber and Fischer with the chore of reconstructing the game from memory. These rewritten rules,penned in longhand, can be found in the Papers Collection.
As part of the development of the game, Gygax sent Leiber
and Fischer a number of illustrations done by David C.
Sutherland, III, each depicting his take on the characters
in the game. Fischer sent these back to TSR with a number
of corrections, pointing out where Sutherland had veered
away from Fischer’s own personal interpretations of the
characters and cultures of Nehwon. Sadly, these corrections
arrived too late for them to be implemented. The annotated
illustrations are preserved in the Collection, granting an interesting insight into how the Twain’s co-creator envisioned
the duo and the world they inhabited.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-yYZdrUi_Zw
Transcription from vids, so it's not super fancy prose... it's just basic info, which is just fine. It'll be updated a couple times a year.
He says "Download link is right here https://tenkars-tavern.games/TavernGuide
— no email, no signup, no store page. It's CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so print it, share it, post it in your Discord, hand it to your table. Read the chapter that matches whatever's actually broken at your table this week, pick one procedure out of it, and run it three times before you judge it. Then tell me whether it held up."
Extra good parts:
Step one: the player states intent, and "I search" doesn't count. "I'm checking the fireplace for drafts." "I'm feeling the mortar lines for a seam." "I want to know if that chest's lid seam looks tampered with." Intent tells you what kind of clue to hand back.
Step two: you respond with information, not a verdict. Not "you find a secret door" — "the soot above the fireplace is thicker on the left, but there's a clean arc on the right, like something's been swung open, and you feel a faint cool draft near the right inner stone." You've told them nothing is confirmed and everything is worth pursuing. Layer the clues if a player keeps investigating: one standout detail, one suspicious detail, one confirmation of safety.
Step three: roll only when time, risk, or precision are actually in question. Not "did you find it" — "can you do this quickly," "can you do it quietly," "does this trigger while you're working it." The roll stops being permission to discover and becomes a cost for speed or stealth.
Applied to traps, the same three steps hold, with one addition: think about what job the trap is doing. Traps exist to make the dungeon feel engineered — somebody built this place and expected intruders — and to make time matter, the same way searching does. If a trap doesn't create a decision, it's just random damage.
WORKED EXAMPLE — THE NEEDLE CHEST
Slot-machine version: "I check for traps." Roll. Fail. Open it. Save vs. poison or die. Nobody learned
anything — that's a death tax, not play.
Clean version: "Before we touch it, I check the lock, the lid seam, the hinges — anything out of place."
You: "There's a hairline scratch around the lock plate, like it's been removed and reset. The keyhole smells
faintly of bitter almonds." Now the table has a real decision — rotate the chest so the lock faces away and
work it with a pole (slow, safe, a turn); force it (fast, loud, risks the contents); or hand it to the thief with
time to work (a roll, but a chosen one).
Give real credit to good tools and good method. A 10-ft pole probing ahead, chalk or flour dusted on a floor to catch a disturbed seam, a mirror on a rod checking behind a statue, water or oil poured along a seam to reveal airflow — if the approach is sound, let it succeed outright. The thief's Find/Remove Traps skill isn't the only way into this system; it's the cleanest option for a fine, dangerous mechanism under time pressure. Everyone gets to investigate and attempt a bypass. Only the thief gets to neutralize the hard ones cleanly.
Telegraphing Danger: The Escalation Ladder (just a piece of his write up below)
Three rules keep this from turning into spoilers. Give clues, not labels — "little animal skeletons in the corner, all frozen mid-scream," never "this is a basilisk's lair." Make every warning actionable — a scratched note reading "mirrors help" is useful; a vague sense of dread is not. And keep the truth accurate but incomplete — the player should be thinking it might be poison, might be gas, might be something on the ceiling. Uncertainty creates tension. Ignorance just creates resentment.
A book list of fantasy and sf, some good ones, maybe some I need to read:
