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Wikipedia is not a source, and there’s even a page on Wikipedia explaining why — if it’s the actual origin point of any piece of information, something has gone wrong. (Literally it is not the source of anything, it is an intermediary.)

It is, however, a great starting point if you’re looking into something you’re not already familiar with. It gives you a (usually) accurate summary, with in-text citations and a bibliography of places where you can learn more. Which is exactly what you need in that situation, and which ChatGPT cannot provide in any useful way.

(Also that thing about citations in the above post is well put & exactly correct.)

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A Lich Lord covered his head with rags and disguised himself as a cleric, then joined the heroes' party. His reasoning? He was bored and wanted to see the world without instilling fear.

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so like. book!Dorothy Gale is like 6-8 in the first book right. and she murders two people in quick succession, the second being one she was sent to assassinate. and both times literally everyone was like "oh they sucked, good job kid." that's GOTTA do something to your psyche right. she's gotta think murder is her best solution to any problem right. like when she killed the west witch in the book she literally was just like "um. ok" and then cleaned up her puddle before going to tell anyone. do you think two weeks later aunt em was like "ugh the debt collectors are so rude" and dorothy was straight-faced "well why dont we try killing them" and em was just. "what"

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in defense of the evil stepmother

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Here's how to write an authentic Grimm style fairytale, brought to you by a Certified German TM:

Forget everything Disney movies taught you, besides maybe Snowwhite, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. But even those are on thin fucking ice. Also ignore modern fantasy literature conventions, especially Dungeons & Dragons type stuff.

Ideally only the protagonist or none of the characters ought to have names. And the names should either be really fucking ordinary, or some kind of epithet. Like, either that's a Franz or a Bramblesock, cause when Bramblesock was a child he lost a sock in a shrub of brambles. Everyone else is either the king, the grandma, or the carpenter.

The common types of protagonist: Regular working class guy who cons his way into a life of riches, poor downtrodden peasant who through hardworking kindness is granted salvation (usually via gaining riches), too pure too good for this world princess who can't catch a fucking break, too nasty too bratty for this world princess who gets taught a lesson in humility.

The characters are generally very one note and the only kind of character growth they can experience boils down to "maybe I shouldn't have been a dick, huh?"

The location is either as vague as possible or super fucking specific for no reason; either the story takes place literally nowhere or in the town of Buxtehude.

Animals and inanimate objects that can talk for no apparent reason and no one bats an eye at are always a great addition.

If you want to add any fantasy races, use giants (large, dumb brutes), dwarves (angry little guys who live in the wilderness and get really angry if you touch their beards), or gnomes (mischievous house spirits who might be helpful but watch out!), but never more than one of these. Fairies are rare and usually the "tall beautiful wise woman" type, not the small annoying pixie type. Dragons are very pointedly no-where to be found, those distinctly belong in sagas, which are their own distinct type of literature.

Weird moral of the story that either boils down to "be smarter than all the other fuckers", "good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people", or "don't upset the supernatural".

Random tidbits of gore that no one bats an eye at.

Witches eat children, if a mother gets more than single line dedicated to her she's evil, fathers are spineless and/or assholes who either die or come around in the end.

Ugly means evil, pretty means good. Except when it doesn't.

Optional: Repeated rhyming phrases and numbers. Seventh son of a seventh son kinda stuff. The numbers 3, 7, 12, and 13 in particular.

Ideally a 19th century scholar should be able to read some clumsy Germanic pagan wishful thinking into the story, no matter how big and obvious the Christian overtones are.

Optional: Start the story with "Once upon a time" and end it with "And if they didn't die, then they are still alive today."

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i say this in all seriousness, a great way to resist the broad cultural shift of devaluing curiosity and critical thinking is to play my favorite game, Hey What Is That Thing

you play it while walking around with friends and if you see something and don't know what it is or wonder why its there, you stop and point and say Hey What Is That Thing. and everyone speculates about it. googling it is allowed but preferably after spending several minutes guessing or asking a passerby about it

weird structures, ambiguous signs, unfamiliar car modifications, anything that you can't immediately understand its function. eight times out of ten, someone in the group actually knows, and now you know!

a few examples from me and my friends the past few weeks: "why is there a piece of plywood sticking out of that pond in a way that looks intentional?" (its a ramp so squirrels that fall in to the pond can climb out) • "my boss keeps insisting i take a vacation of nine days or more, thats so specific" (you work at a bank, banks make employees take vacation in long chunks so if youre stealing or committing fraud, itll be more obvious) • "why does this brick wall have random wooden blocks in it" (theres actually several reasons why this could be but we asked and it was so you could nail stuff to the wall) • "most of these old factories we drive past have tinted windows, was that just for style?" (fun fact the factory owners realized that blue light keeps people awake, much like screen light does now, so they tinted the windows blue to keep workers alert and make them work longer hours)

been playing this game for a long time and ive learned (and taught) a fuckton about zoning laws, local history, utilities (did you know you can just go to your local water treatment plant and ask for a tour and if they have a spare intern theyll just give you a tour!!!) and a whole lot of fun trivia. and now suddenly you're paying more attention when youre walking around, thinking about the reasons behind every design choice in the place you live that used to just be background noise. and it fuckin rules.

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"Okay, but it's not a dragon, a dragon has" if putting it in the sky would be sick as fuck, it's a dragon. Whales are dragons.

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Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years

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It would honestly be such fun to have like an rpg campaign or a collab comic or something like that where everyone involved just agrees on the specific year where the story starts before scurrying into their own corners to come up with their own characters, and the first plot brainstorming session is about how the hell these characters even meet each other in the first place.

Like tossing it in the air that the story starts in the year 1731. The characters are a Mughal Empire mercenary, a Jamaican pirate, a blacksmith from the Ottoman Empire, a Swedish noblewoman who fled the country after almost seducing Queen Ulrika, and a simple humble fisher from Palau who is on a quest to personally go address the current pope in order to make him stop sending jesuits.

The only thing that any of their backstories and personal storylines have in common is that they're set in the same year, and historically speaking could plausibly be happening at the same time.

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The Old Copper Culture was a culture that existed around the Great Lakes from between 7500 BCE to maybe 1000 BCE. As the name implies, they used a lot of copper, which was a result of the world's largest naturally occurring pure copper deposit. They made knives and spear points and adzes with it.

And then something interesting happened, which doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else in the world: they stopped using it for tools. The term for this is "technomic devolution" and it's pretty rare to happen across human history: generally speaking, you don't go back to stone tools from metalworking. Instead, copper began to be used for ornamentation and ritual use.

Part of it seems to be that the copper just didn't sufficiently justify itself in terms of how long it took to make a copper knife as compared to a stone knife, and copper wasn't all that much more durable. And because this was very pure copper that was completely cold worked without any advanced metallurgy, there was never a "bridge" to bronze or brass.

Another part is social stratification, a speculation that class differences meant copper was used for ritual and ornamentation rather than tools. This would, in turn, have been a result of increased population allowing that greater stratification.

But of course, we don't really know. Copper was one of the few things to survive, being a metal, so it's hard to say anything about the entire rest of their society, like what their rituals were, what their clothes were like, what other technology they might have had that was made from e.g. wood and animal products that have long since rotted.

I'm just across the border from Wisconsin, and was talking to my nine-year-old son about how there's a state park that would be a road trip away, and a museum that has a huge collection of artifacts, and he seemed incredibly enthusiastic about it, so maybe that will be one of the things I do this summer: go see what little remains of a culture that existed here nine thousand years ago.

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There are good reasons even most OSR games don't use old-school "declare actions at start of round, then roll initiative with modifiers per action type" rules, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi that's only achieved when you don't know what order your actions are going to go off in until after the wizard says "I cast fireball".

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sending my kid to montresori school where they learn to seal eachother up in the wall

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Google docs is getting out of hand

it changed "rapture" to "raptors" like three times

"rapture overcame him" -> "raptors overcame him"

honestly? probably makes for a better story

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they accidentally gave me the unheimlich manoeuvre and i choked to death in a distinctly uncanny way

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Dumbass RPG character idea:

A roguishly handsome adventurer who otherwise doesn't seem to much care for maintaining his rugged good looks, but is comically particular of his iconic ridiculous hat, which he never takes off. Like, ever. He sleeps with the hat tilted over his eyes, won't remove it indoors even at a dining table, bathes while wearing it. Nobody wants to know how the hell he washes his hair. Telling him to remove the hat is an absolute dealbreaker - if any place demands that he removes the hat before stepping inside, he'll rather wait outside by the door while the rest of the party does their business inside. It's obnoxious but what are you gonna do.

Then, when trapped in a situation where the party must either sacrifice one of its members or all will die, the guy volunteers, on one condition: the party must take his precious hat, and give it to someone worthy. Ideally someone spectacularly handsome who will look good in it, but he'd rather have anyone at all wear it, than nobody at all. Nobody in the party, though - none of them are allowed to wear his hat. Baffled but grateful, the party agrees to his conditions.

Some time later, once the rest of the party has escaped, they slap the hat on the first person they encounter and deem sufficiently fitting. The person freezes in shock, blinks twice, and suddenly shifts their stance to a familiar posture, sighing "oh thank the gods, you actually fucking did it", in a new voice but a familiar style and intonation. The character was never The Guy, it's a demon bound to the hat, who possesses whoever is wearing the garment.

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If in doubt, what your fantasy settings needs is a fane. Can't go wrong with a good fane.

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Regarding the fish with the weird tentacle thing that @evolutionsvoid mentioned, this is it.

No, that is not a spout. Yes, that is a weird fleshy thing.

So what is this supposed to be anyway?

It's referred to as the reversus indicus, or Indian upside-down fish. It is actually a remora.

This interpretation of the remora came from stories of remoras being used to hunt turtles and seals. You tie a rope to the remora's tail, it swims off and sticks to a larger animal, and then you reel them in. The name "reversus" comes from the fact that it sticks upside down to other animals (and generally looks weird).

Somewhere along the line this got interpreted as the remora being this big serpenty fish that aggressively seeks out other animals and uses a sort of fleshy tentacley thing to grab them. As you can see in the picture, there's the turtle and seal!

And yes, that means that there were multiple versions of the remora floating (ha) around, the ship-delayer and the seal-catcher. That's just how it worked.