Welcome!

I saw someone on Reddit call Honor the God of pinky promises and I can’t stop laughing at that. Honor, God of oaths and keeping to one’s word, but also the God of spit handshake agreements

Tolkien uses names to hook you like a drug dealer. First there’s the easy stuff: Bywater, the Shire, the Lonely Mountain. Then the medium stuff: Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor. Then, when you’re addicted, it’s the Silmarillion’s hardcore names: Valinor, Dor Lomin, Menegroth, Nargothrond, Dorthonion, etc. 

One of my favourite phenomena in indie tabletop RPGs is when somebody decides they're going to make the Perfect OSR Game™ by going straight back to white box D&D, then very gradually discovers over the course of much playtesting and many successive revisions that certain later developments in game design happened for a reason.

To be properly authentic they should set in in 8-point font in Courier on a bunch of mimeographed paper held together with two staples because if it was good enough for our ancestors

Split into multiple booklets whose page counts are determined principally by how much elbow grease you're willing to put on the stapler, and sold in clear plastic bags because that way you don't need to design packaging.

The Silmarillion tagline: When you play the game of thrones, you die. Everyone who is a king dies. Everyone dies. You’re going to die. 

Theoden in the books is so much more impressive. Like, when he comes out of his depression, he doesn’t suddenly go back 30 years. He’s still an old dude. But when this one rider from Rohan (who is coming to warn the army to turn around because Saruman will win) realizes that Theoden is with them, he’s like, yeah, we can win this now! We have this 80 year old man! We got this!

*sits up in bed shaking gf* Why did Illuvitar make elves more like the Valar and men more like himself? What was Tolkein trying to say? Don’t roll over and pretend to sleep, tell me.