Recent content by Sam Evren

Back before Total War, there was a game close to what you describe: Warhammer: Dark Omen. It's actually a great tragedy that the series and style never continued. I can't remember if it had much in the way of the turn-based strategic level map, but the real-time battles were amazing - complete...

I just thought I'd mention that my book The Temple of Heart and Bone is on sale over at Amazon for the next five days. I'm trying out their timed daily deals, um, deal. For the sale, the price is 99¢. You can find it by clicking the title above - and there's also around 59 pages up for...

It's not quite ready for prime-time, but I do have hopes for Divinity: Original Sin for turn-based combat. What I've played so far shows a great deal of promise.

I've played The Elder Scrolls since Arena, the first one, and I think immersion and, let's say, possibility, are the main goals of the games. As they've progressed down the years, what's really changed the most - and the greatest change was in Skyrim - are the way stats and skills are...

Hearts Valves

SeverinR, UofA as in Wildcats, Tucson, and daily A-10 flyovers? I played Wizardry from IV on through VII. I think my party - which I still have saved continuously from that first game, making them... 1987 to 2014... 27 year old game characters - consisted of Samurai, Valkyrie, Ninja, Bishop...

I can only use wikipedia on this, sadly it's been 22 years since I was at the university and all my history classes, but it was, apparently, Innocent II in the Second Lateran Council that banned crossbows against Christians. Though, if the annotation on the wiki entry is correct, there seems to...

Crossbows were banned back in the day. (According to Wikipedia that day was in the year 1139 by Pope Innocent II.) As I recall, it was an issue that a mere peasant could dispose of the well-trained and expensively equipped knight with the simple twitch of a trigger. The problem with banning...

Town Crier Stocks

The Romans believed their gods interacted with the world. Christianity would eventually supplant the Roman pantheon as State religion, but becoming the official religion of the Empire was not synonymous with becoming the pervasive faith of the people. Through all of that, gods of other...

Free-will Albigensian

I think my first fantasy novel was Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse. I moved on from Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality to David Eddings' Belgariad, starting with Pawn of Prophecy. The '80's were different, but the fantasy was, perhaps, considerably lighter. In the world of The Walking Dead...

I don't know about making them do more foolish things... As I get older, I do notice a marked tendency to wonder why some of those folks are doing the foolish things they're doing - and why their writers/directors thought it would be a good idea to ever have them do it. I try to think back...

The best advice I could give you - having never considered it at all whilst I was still in college - would be to just do. You're going to find yourself with downtime here or there. Maybe a free period between classes, waiting for a ride, whatever the case may be. When you find your mind...

Gandalf has a speach that's been rattling in my head ever since I heard it - quoting from memory here, so forgive me if I'm off. Gandalf to Frodo (about Gollum): "Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Do not be too quick to deal out death in...