Category: Web Excerpt

The first law of [kenpō] states that when your opponent charges straight in and attacks, you should use your feet to move your body along a circular path. You should also consider moving your arms in a circular pattern to deflect the oncoming force. When your opponent attacks you in a circular fashion, however, you should respond with a fast linear attack—along a straight line from your weapon to his target. Just as the circle can overcome the line, the line can overcome the circle.

— 10 Kenpo Laws Every Martial Artist Should Know – Black Belt

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source article.

For large swathes of its history Japan was riven by internecine warfare, notably the periods of ‘feudal anarchy’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [C.E.]. During those years the feudal lords (Daimyo) kept large standing armies which were constantly on the move throughout the country. It stands to reason that adventurers traveling in such a setting would have a relatively high chance of stumbling across one or more military units. This is a system for generating random encounters with such units.

The results will generate encounters with units varying in size from 11 individuals to 10,000 soldiers. Larger armies will include scouts, usually mounted, so DMs should take their existence into consideration when such an encounter is rolled….

— Random Encounters with Military Units in a Feudal Japanese Setting – Monsters and Manuals

…I don’t think that every class should get a raft of soldiers. The cleric should get less soldiers and more zealots and believers, but probably this was a bit creepy for the 1979 company [that published Dungeons & Dragons]…. I can cheerfully allow an “evil” cleric player character to gain eighty or so deranged, murderous thuggees ready to konk women unconscious and burn them alive in monthly festivals…. This was done in reality, once; no reason it shouldn’t be done in a player’s imagination.

— Food for Powder, Food for Worms – The Tao of D&D

Seven-Part Pact is played using a framework….

At the start of each in-game month, every player decides how they plan to Spend Time that month. You have 4 tokens, one for each week (roughly). You can place these tokens on various people, places, and tasks. Place one on your Sanctum to spend time there, maybe change something about it. Place one on a Companion to spend time hanging out with them. Place one on the Grimoire to spend a week casting a spell slowly, patiently, carefully. Place one on your Domain to attend to your Wizardly duties (e.g. managing the wilds or advising the king or looking into the Dreaming or whatever it is you do). Etc. etc., many ways a Wizard can spend their time.

These represent the major stuff. The primary task you plan to focus on that week, the activity that’ll receive most of your attention and effort. It’s simply assumed that your character is still otherwise, y’know, living their normal day-to-day life and attending to mundane affairs….

Once everyone’s placed their tokens, we begin resolving the next month of activities. Going around the table, one at a time, each player retrieves one of their tokens and resolves that action….

You can resolve your…tokens in any order. Additionally, once per month, you may move one of your tokens before resolving it, at any time and for no cost. So you have a little bit of leeway to reschedule things on the fly. In this way, players plan ahead but can still be fairly flexible.

So far, this might sound less like an RPG and more like a board game. “Alright, this week my Wizard visits the island of Ishana to recruit a Bard to join the king’s Royal Court.” Done. Next player. Turns go by pretty fast, which I consider to be an advantage. But when does it feel like a roleplaying game?

Well, let me tell you about…Scenes.

In addition to your four Spend Time tokens, you also get one star-shaped token. Wherever you place your star token is where you get to have a Scene. A Scene is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the part of the game where we zoom in and start roleplaying as our characters moment by moment, speaking in dialogue, moving around rooms, casting spells, etc.

For most players, Scenes are the highlight of the game. But to me, it’s important that they merely punctuate the game. They’re an exception to the baseline mode of play. Instead of asking, “when is it time to zoom out and switch to a downtime timescale?” like in D&D, we ask “when is it time to zoom in and switch to a real-time timescale?” If we’re resolving an event as a proper Scene, then that means it’s important….

— Seven-Part Pact: Time – A Knight at the Opera

Author’s emphases both bold and italic.

I read that blogpost and immediately saw this game mechanic as a sufficiently light structure to use with our leisurely Xenoverse free-form roleplay. My friends and I do not play there much at all these days, but we do continually discuss what we want to play. These are broad strokes that easily fit into week- or month-long “game turns”—with the Scene being a spur to actually have regular in-character (chat) session, however short.

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• Blogroll July 2025 – VDonnut Valley

Let’s consider a campaign setting dialed toward the pagan end of the spectrum. I will mostly be referencing Germanic paganism for this example because it is the historical culture I am most familiar with (note that this includes most of northern Europe from England to parts of Eastern Europe). Pagan gods are not all-powerful, nor are they omniscient or benevolent. They have different goals, biases, flaws and are more often worshipped out of reverence and respect and less out of love and devotion. They are given offerings in exchange for protection, favors, or just appeasement. On paper, this is pretty standard for your traditional D&D setting. But what we don’t really see is the implications and effects of this worldview on the setting. A pagan worldview is not one that is likely to lead to the traditions of medieval Europe nor the fantasy version of it with the holy knights, ornamented cathedrals, and battles between angels and demons.

Firstly, no place of worship was more important than the home, or more specifically, the hearth. Every proper home should have an altar around the hearth where offerings are prepared and daily prayer rituals are done. These alters can contain different shrines to different gods as well as shrines to non-deities such as ancestors and house spirits. That’s right, gods are not the only ones that receive prayers and offerings. It is just as important for a villager to give offerings to their local Kobold house spirit to keep them from causing trouble. On top of that, their ancestors are constantly watching, judging, and influencing from the afterlife. PCs and NPCs alike will want to pray to their ancestors for wisdom and seek to please them.

In general, the objects of worship: gods, spirits, and ancestors should be much more day-to-day than normally seen in fantasy settings. Farmers prayed to Thor to protect their cattle while housewives prayed to Freja to send cats to deal with mice. This doesn’t mean your adventurers can’t also summon the strength of a god to divine smite a giant, only that the gods are for everyone—not just high-level adventurers….

— Heathenizing Your RPG Campaign – Tabletop Tales

You want it? Quest for it. The moonlight sword, the favour of a cruel prince, the bio-nuclear heart of the Old Machines… These are how you will chisel your fate. So go get them….

Many games tell you to quest for the things you want. Blessings, magical swords, political favours—the big power-ups should come from going on a quest to get them.

I’ve always liked this concept. It helps to recreate the fiction that inspires these games. Protagonists should go on big damn adventures to get big damn rewards….

— How To Encourage ‘Quest for It’ – many_bubble

Imagine a setting where Charm Person sits within reach of every sociopath, malignant narcissist, fascist ideologue, sexual predator, human trafficker, abusive spouse and undifferentiated Just Kind of a Piece of Shit in the world. Think for a moment about how easy it would be to kill someone with Mage Hand and Shape Water.

That alone is more than sufficient to build a wizard-hunting campaign on, but wizards provide a great deal more practical benefit than just that. Why is there a dungeon that violates the laws of nature? Wizard did it. Why are their horrible monsters shambling through the hills feasting on travelers? Wizard did it. Why is there a nameless horror from beyond the stars with its sights set on our placid isle of ignorance? A wizard god-damn did it. Power corrupts because power is the ability to get what you want, and the more power you have the less anyone can get in between you and the thing you want….

— Exorcists and Wizard-Hunters: Alternate D&D Frameworks – Throne of Salt

Witnessing unspeakable supernatural horrors—always a professional risk for any protagonist in a ‘swords and sorcery’ adventure—can drive a mortal man or woman mad. Deliberately delving into ancient eldritch secrets for the purposes of unleashing unnatural forces or contacting demonic intelligences radically increases this risk. Insane sorcerers and men whose minds have been broken by ancient evils are standard staples in ‘swords and sorcery’ tales.

In order to simulate this aspect of the ‘swords and sorcery’ genre, these rules treat a character’s Wisdom score as a measurement of his/her sanity. A character with a Wisdom score of 18 has a firm grasp of the nature of reality, considerable self-discipline, and remarkable strength of will. In contrast, a character with a Wisdom score of 3 is barely lucid, easily confuses reality with fantasy, and is on the border of lapsing into madness. Characters with Wisdom scores of 2 or lower are utterly insane, and must be treated as non-player characters. (If this Wisdom loss is temporary, as explained below, the character is under the control of the Game Master until he/she regains his/her sanity.)

— Sanity – Akratic Wizardry

Fighters are strong and resistant and overcome mundane opponents in mundane means. As they grow in skill, they become more resistant and more lethal. However, as lethal as they can be, they still are mundane and can’t harm enchanted beings.

Enemies that can’t be harmed are awesome. As in, literally, terror inducing. Because we mundanes have no way of defending ourselves from them.

For those, fighters need a magic weapon.

Crucially, magic weapons, and especially magic swords, are the most common permanent magic item in [Original D&D]. Magic swords can only be used by fighters, and magic swords are pretty much the best magic weapon in the game: beyond giving the capacity to hit magic beings, they often give extra powers, like detection of invisible or magic, or even more, which are incredibly useful and not easy to come by (at least they require casters to spend precious spell slots).

Magic swords also have the habit of having intelligence and big personalities and taking sides in the Eternal Struggle between Law and Chaos. They can also possess their fighter, and shift from being an empowering tool for the fighter into a master for the fighter, their body and limbs mere tool for the Sword.

This might seem like a douche move. However, these swords are quite the equivalent of having a Faustian deal with the devil: great power comes at a great cost. Sure, they lead you to gems, and let you vanquish vampires, but what do the Swords ask in return?

And the Faustian deal usually generates buckets of solid, engaging drama at the table: for example the sword can force a noncompliant fighter into giving itself away to a fighter more worthy of the sword mission, and more compliant. If you want to keep the sword, you need to make the sword want to keep you.

So when you find an intelligent magic sword in a dragon trove ask yourself what kind of reckless sucidal action the sword must have forced on the fighter wielding it. The sword is in the dragon hoard because either it forced the fighter into fighting the dragon, or it let the fighter believe it could.

Magic swords use their fighters to leave a trail of death until they lead their own fighter to death. Then they lay unused in a hoard until their new owner is killed by a fighter. And the trail of death can start again. And again. And again. And again, until the timeless magic sword, and its unquenchable bloodthirst, is no more.

Good luck with that. Magic swords are much more resilient than the countless arms that bear them. Beside dragonfire and powerful magic, they have little to fear.

D&D Magic Swords are awesome as the creatures they can harm. As in, they inspire terror. Not only when facing them, but also when wielding them.

Because, mostly, what fighters do to fight the supernatural is wielding supernaturally angry steel that has a proven history of leading previous bearers to death.

— A few disordered thoughts on writing magic, starting from a detour on magic swords – Lost Pages

When you get a +1 sword, you don’t just get a sword that does more damage and hits more often. In D&D, this sword is inherently magical – the enhancement is the result of literal magic, as opposed to superior craftmanship. And that strikes me as really, really weird. Like, I was reading this series of posts over on a Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (super cool blog btw), and it seems like there was quite a range of possible qualities when making and finishing a sword. There are many fine considerations that go into making a predominantly metal weapon. What kind of iron and steel are using? How did you laminate the differing types of steel to make best use of their different material qualities? How do you finish the blade?

In a pre-capitalist society, there’s a lot of room for smiths of differing ability to be making dogshit swords or really really good ones, depending on region, price and demand, and I feel this isn’t represented very well in D&D rules. Like, okay, there are masterwork weapons in 3e but to be honest those rules kind of suck. Most of what makes a weapon special is magic.

What galls me in particular is the effect this has on internal logic in low-magic worlds. Like, okay, magic is rare, except every adventuring party has a wizard AND every every fighter past a certain level has a magically enhanced sword. And you could always just say "No magic swords" but in D&D this is the same thing as saying "No +1 swords." Which is pretty fucking boring for the sword-wielding members of your party.

So fuck it. The new enhancement scheme is +0 to +3 non-magical swords, to reflect differing abilities of smiths.

So a regular +0 sword is basically pure iron, or steel but made by someone who doesn’t know how to work steel well. It’s probably worse than a bronze sword, because pure iron is actually worse for weapons than bronze. Mercenaries and very rural or isolated nobility or the nobility of less metallurgically advanced societies usually carry these around. People who shouldn’t be able to afford swords, like adventurers or peasants, but somehow inexplicably have them will only have +1 swords. If you pull a sword out of a dungeon, or get it from salvage, it’s probably going to be a +0 sword because of long abandoned maintenance.

A +1 sword represents a smith who knows what the fuck they’re doing making an honest to god steel sword. It’s still rudimentary, not heavily layered, but its superior metallurgical quality still carries through. A knight from a kingdom’s core regions, well-off or high ranking professional soldier, or successful adventurer is going to have a +1 sword.

A +2 sword is getting into the real good stuff. This is the best work of the top tier of smiths currently alive. These are always commissioned, usually for richer nobles and kings. Actually, +1 swords are commissioned too, but commissioning a +2 sword is a Big Deal. A +2 sword is the best any adventurer should ever expect to get. +2 swords usually have names, and if they are wielded by someone famous, they will become famous as well.

A +3 sword barely even qualifies as a sword. Most people who own them think they’re too precious to risk actually using in a battle. It’s really more like an art object. If your players recover one of these, and decide not to use it, it should count as treasure for XP and stuff. Longstanding dynasties might have one of these, passed down from generation to generation, and they’ll sometimes wave it around before battle to motivate their troops. All of them have names. In my campaign, they’re all named after battles the Romans lost, like Carrhae, Cannae, Ebrittus, Caudine, or after their enemies, like Volsci, Aequi, Samnite, Alaric, and so on. The people who made them have names, and are legends unto themselves. A smith capable of making such a blade is trained once every half-millennium. Or maybe they’re like, a cyclops or something.

Note that this only applies to swords, in a sword-centric culture. Around here, the best a spear can be is +1, to account for better materials. This also helps keep swords distinct, as I tend to have a lot of different weapons In foreign places, maybe they’re really obsessed with axes or spears, and I guess all of this can apply to those weapons instead.

I also chose +3 because my campaign is supposed to have some pretty hard caps on to-hit bonuses. The highest to-hit bonus anyone can reasonably get with a +0 weapon is +4, for example. You can easily do the same thing with a traditional +5 scale.

"But wait!" You protest, "now none of my fighter characters have cool magic weapons! This blows!" Not so. I love magic swords. I just don’t see why they have to be +X or whatever. In fact, I think this kind of has the result of making magic weapons lame. To illustrate:

"You recover from the demi-liches a mighty sword, clearly of magical provenance."

"Holy shit, awesome! What does it do?"

"Um, it gives you +4 to hit and to damage."

Not exactly titillating, is it? But by tying sword enhancement to magic, I think this sort of play ends up being encouraged. The benefit of a magic sword should be the magic.

You could enchant a +1 sword to be magic, but most of these are being dug out of treasure piles of the gullets of scary monsters, so they should probably be +0. Or you could enchant a +0 sword to have +1 to-hit and damage, but that’s pretty boring and should require, like, a wizard that inexplicably has professional level knowledge of blacksmithing techniques. Sort of like this twitter thread I saw recently where a guy talked about how he (no joke) went to clown college and worked as a clown before pursuing a PhD. Incidentally, the clown stuff paid better than the PhD. But yeah, a wizard who can just make a +1 sword for you is going to require that specific melding of expertise in vastly different areas… if you want a +1 sword it’s way easier to just find a competent smith.

Mostly, magic swords should be weird or have cool but situational effects. Check out this (also a super cool blog especially if you like glog stuff) generator, except, you know, leave out the +1 stuff. I’m also cracking up imagining an intelligent sword that’s +0 and kind of insecure about it. Come on, that would be hilarious.

— +3 Swords – Profane Ape

“Then you are after the gem, too?”

“What else? I’ve had my plans laid for months, but you, I think, have acted on a sudden impulse, my friend.”

— Tower of the Elephant

Intelligence, impulsivity and the language of immediate action; even pairs of heroes don’t discuss much what they have done, what they are doing or will do. A handful of words are all that’s required and the stories are short, and are better for it. All of a character must vibrate in a fist of paragraphs, a cupful of deeds, and spring from the page, immediate and clear.

In longer stories the same souls might feel like fools. They would need…background, complex long-term relationships, god forbid, a socio-political viewpoint? (Some have a bit of this).

In a short story that only has enough room for immediate actions, those actions become the moral truth of the tale, something oddly similar to the opening games of a D&D group, where the ‘Characters’ barely exist yet, and the only real truths about them are; who will stick their hand in this jar, and who refuse? Who will be the first through the door and who will be right behind them? (and who will carefully be a long way behind them?). Who will be the first to suggest torturing that goblin, who first to provoke a foe and who first to negotiate? Who will run and who stand, should the day go awry? Action is the axis of a character, everything else just spins around their deeds.

Impulsivity, immediacy and atavism, but always with intelligence, sharp wits and keen senses. These stories are about things happening now. Too late! In the time it took you to read this sentence the Barbarian has killed a man and moved to another scene.

And they are of the body. These heroes have no extra-material powers and less manipulations. (Cugel, Elric and some others are a counterpoint). They are their bodies, which makes thought and action one. A strong strand of the genre, (if this is one), is the pleasure of having a body and doing things with it. The first and most precious object of a galaxy of things.

— A Review of ‘Appendix N: Weird Tales From The Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons’ – False Machine

Author’s emphases.

To talk about the night watch, we first have to talk about night itself. In a pre-industrial world, artificial light was expensive. Candles of tallow and beeswax are animal products, so can be produced only in limited amounts. Firewood, peat, and dried dung are labor-intensive to gather and prepare. So too is olive oil or flaxseed oil for lamps. Before gas and kerosene, you could light the night if you really wanted—but it would cost you. Consequently, nights stayed dark. Most Europeans were home by twilight, barred their doors, and stayed indoors. In the Middle Ages, many cities imposed curfews: only a select few were permitted out after dark. This cut down both on burglaries and people breaking their necks falling into open cellars.

But having an entire city asleep posed its own problems. The biggest was fire! Medieval European cities were tinderboxes. Entire city blocks burned down every year. And if no one was awake at midnight when someone’s improperly-banked coals set their house on fire, the blaze might spread to multiple houses before anyone even noticed. Plus, you had the problem of crime: if no one else was about after dark, that gave thieves full run of the night. The solution to these problems (and honestly more the former than the latter) was the night watch.

Many night watches began as citizen’s brigades, with each able-bodied male resident assigned to patrol the streets so many nights a year. As early as 1150, the guilds of Paris were on the hook for providing the city’s watchmen. Sentinels sat in the tallest church steeple in town to watch for fires. (Amsterdam was big enough that the watch manned four separate steeples!) Other watchmen patrolled the streets alone or in pairs watching for fires and thieves. Your beat might cover the whole city or just your own neighborhood. If you saw a fire, you set up a cry so sleepers could awaken and help put it out. If you saw a burglar, you tried to grab him so he could appear before a magistrate in the morning. For worse crimes, you also started the ‘hue and cry’ to summon your sleeping neighbors to help. This watch system, while practical, was unpopular. No one much liked being a watchman. If you could afford it, you hired a substitute to take your place….

— Tangling With the Night Watch – Molten Sulfur Blog

Author’s emphases.

Here’s the problem: skill-based lockpicking with clever tools is really only necessary to subvert a specific kind of lock, which I will call a ‘modern pin tumbler lock’. It’s a tumbler with a stack of pins whose variable height at the shear line and rotating barrel mean that pins must be set to the exact height that the key is designed to lift them to. And it’s a kind of lock that was only invented, and entered use, in the late 1800s.

Earlier locks were of two main types. First, there were ancient pin-based locks, but their pins couldn’t be lifted ‘too high’. Even a well-designed one could be defeated easily by putting a bent rod or stick in the keyway and pushing all the pins up. (A poorly-designed one that didn’t protect the pins could be defeated in a single motion by putting anything in the keyway.) You could completely master subverting old pin locks in well under an hour, and you don’t need special tools for it.

The second type, and the best lock technology for thousands of years, was a warded lock. This has complex ‘wards’ (metal shapes) meant to prevent the wrong key turning in it. A warded lock can be defeated by a skeleton key (a filed-down regular key). Picking a warded lock therefore amounts to using a big bundle of ‘tryout keys’ and if they failed, trying various bent rods until one was the right shape to move the latch or bolt. Again, lockpicking before the advent of the modern pin tumbler doesn’t require much skill, so we have a pseudo-anachronism.

— Lockpicking! Windows! Maps! Burning oil! The concept of fantasy pseudo-anachronism! – Periapt Games Design Blog

…[The first Texas Rangers only] had three shots: they had a Kentucky long rifle…and two single-shot pistols.

Lo and behold, this inventor named Samuel Colt had come up with a prototype…it was a five-shot pistol. They had five shots here, one interchangable cylinder: now ten. Ten shots in each pistol….

— How the Texas Rangers Changed the Course of Modern Warfare – YouTube

The speaker describes an interchangeable revolving cylinder. With that first revolver, changing cylinders requires partially disassembling the pistol. So the reloading time is a couple of minutes.

The Remington Company manufactured revolvers with truly removable cylinders in the 1850s. The 1985 film Pale Rider shows this reloading process done leisurely for dramatic effect in the final scene. (Warning: spoiler video.)

Meat is readily available on the menus of every inn and tavern in your campaign world. Where does it come from?

I already asked about ranches. Those are a relatively recent invention, though.

“From the time of the Norman conquest to the middle of the last century, any traveller in Wales might find his way blocked by hundreds of cattle, large herds of sheep, pigs and flocks of geese. From the eighteenth century, turkeys were added to the stream of beasts on their way east to the rich men’s markets.”

— Encounters with Drovers – Monsters and Manuals

Where there are cattle there should also be cattle rustling.

Divination can’t “tell your future.” For one things, there are too many variables involved. And to repeat the wisdom of Isaac Bonewits yet again “fuzzy targets yield fuzzy results.” Ask a vague question and you’re going to get a vague answer. But I see three main things divination can do for us.

Divination will tell you where you’re going. If you keep walking down a path you’re going to end up somewhere. Divination won’t give you the coordinates of where that is, but it will tell you what things will look and feel like when you get there. Does that look and feel good to you? If so, keep going. If not, you probably should make some changes. I strongly believe the future is not fixed, but at some point your accumulated choices start to look like destiny.

Remember any question about where you’re going can never be answered with finality. You’re going to keep moving throughout your life until you die…and even then you’ll move on to whatever comes after death. So if the answer to “where am I going?” seems incomplete, that’s because you’re only seeing one part of a longer journey.

The older we get, and the more difficult the world becomes, the harder it gets to extract yourself from a bad situation and get moving toward what you really want and need. Divination will help you make course corrections sooner and avoid major backtracking.

Divination will help you see what you’re not seeing. Divination isn’t a very good map, but it’s an excellent set of headlights. It won’t tell you how long something will take (or at least, it won’t tell me—I have zero luck with divining time frames. “Time runs differently in the Otherworld”…), but it will show you the major obstacles you’ll encounter on your way. The warnings are likely to be less specific than you’d like—your job is to be on the lookout for something that fits the general description.

Your job is also to take action that is both appropriate and realistic. If a reading says you’re going to get run over by a beer truck, you probably can’t stop the truck from going out of control. You can, however, be somewhere else when that happens, or steer out of its path because you saw it coming a split second earlier than you would have otherwise….

Divination allows you to ask questions of the Gods and spirits. While there is certainly a psychological aspect to divination (particularly when you’re reading for yourself) the word itself points us toward its source: divination comes from the divine. There is no substitute for ecstatic, mystical, and worshipful experiences of the Gods. But sometimes you just need an answer. “Is this sacrifice acceptable?” “Is this candidate ready to be Your priestess?” “Is this message really what You want me to tell this person?”

— A Need For Divination – Under The Ancient Oaks

Author’s emphases.

…What if the best ratio of supply to demand [for materials of war] is not found in the big city, which has to stay peaceful and organized to attract trade and reap taxes, where the state is strong, and men, arms and magic are regulated…? What if instead the deals are to be found on the borders of civilization, where swords and mail are regularly looted from the slain? Stocks in the house of war have to be high, for any day now a warlord could strut by looking to garrison a castle or equip a company. And if magic items are bought and sold, the ones useful in a fight are more likely to command a good price in a place where the line between life and death is as clear as the sea’s horizon.

— The Price of a Hauberk in Gomorrah – Roles, Rules, and Rolls

…Amber is a golden-colored gemstone made from fossilized tree resin, and its beauty has attracted the attention of rock collectors and jewelry makers since the Neolithic period (10,000 to 2,000 [BCE]).

It was apparently associated with Sun worship and spirituality in some societies, and Professor Czebreszuk believes the Mycenaeans must have valued amber primarily as a symbol of the Earth’s solar companion. He states:

"Already in the Neolithic in Central Europe, we have disc-shaped artifacts with radial decorations that clearly point to the Sun. Amber probably also comes to the south as a solar material. And the Sun is power, it is the most important celestial body, so it is also a heavenly body, it is also heaven. And all these symbols together gather into one beam, which made it such an important raw material."

Wearing an amber necklace or other type of jewelry would have signified that a person was blessed by the Sun, which would have acted as a justification for their aristocratic status in the class-conscious Mycenaean society.

In Bronze Age societies in general, the elites thought of themselves as a separate and distinct group that had more in common with elites in other societies than they did with average citizens in their own. Consequently, Professor Czebreszuk explains, they remained in contact with each other and traded with each other over long distances. Amber would have been exchanged across this trade network, ensuring that elites would have exclusive access to this coveted gemstone.

— Ancient Mycenaeans Wore Amber Jewelry to Symbolize Their Elite Status – Ancient Origins

Bangsian fantasy is a fantasy genre which concerns the use of the afterlife as the main setting within which its characters, who may be famous preexisting historical or fictional figures, act and interact. It is named for John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922), who often wrote it.

— Bangsian fantasy – Wikipedia

My favorite work in this genre is Legions of Hell by C.J. Cherryh. Its back cover teaser immediately hooked me:

“It was one of those days in Hell when Brutus showed up in Julius Caesar’s household, seventeen, and not remembering a thing about that little scene on the Ides of March. Well, that’s Hell for you…”

The Athenian general and author Xenophon (427-355 [B.C.E.]), was so particular about the quality of his equipment that his shield came from Argos, his breastplate from Attica, his helmet from Boeotia, and his horse from Epidaurus.

— Al Nofi’s CIC #187 – Strategy Page