Many authors have written stories or novels inspired by RPG campaigns. There is debate about whether or not tabletop RPGs should be used as writing tools. Plenty of folks give the idea a thumbs-down, but save some room in your heart for the LitRPG. B&N has you covered with, of course, a list of novels that started life as RPGs.

P1: The Rule of Law P2: The Dark Dimension P3: The Chaos-Born Tiara P4: The Paper Victory

A list with descriptions of selected Native restaurants in the U.S.

"All this leads to the inevitable question, which one – perceived randomness or true randomness – should a GM aim to use in his [sic] games? After careful consideration, I don't think there is any one right answer to this question; depending on the circumstances, either could be correct." A neat previously featuring random maps.

"The influence of pareidolia has often been anecdotally observed in examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, where topographic features of cave walls were incorporated into images. As part of a wider investigation into the visual psychology of the earliest known art, we explored three hypotheses relating to pareidolia in cases of Late Upper Palaeolithic art in Las Monedas and La Pasiega Caves (Cantabria, Spain)." [SLPDF] Pareidolia previously, back in '03.

CITATION Wisher, I., Pettitt, P., & Kentridge, R. (2024). Conversations with caves: The role of pareidolia in the Upper Palaeolithic figurative art of Las Monedas and La Pasiega (Cantabria, Spain). Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 34(2), 315-338. ABSTRACT The influence of pareidolia has often been anecdotally observed in examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, where topographic features of cave walls were incorporated into images. As part of a wider investigation into the visual psychology of the earliest known art, we explored three hypotheses relating to pareidolia in cases of Late Upper Palaeolithic art in Las Monedas and La Pasiega Caves (Cantabria, Spain). Deploying current research methods from visual psychology, our results support the notion that topography of cave walls played a strong role in the placement of figurative images— indicative of pareidolia influencing art making—although played a lesser role in determining whether the resulting images were relatively simple or complex. Our results also suggested that lighting conditions played little or no role in determining the form or placement of images, contrary to what has been previously assumed. We hypothesize that three ways of artist–cave interaction ('conversations') were at work in our sample caves and suggest a developmental scheme for these. We propose that these 'conversations' with caves and their surfaces may have broader implications for how we conceive of the emergence and development of art in the Palaeolithic.

"Stories about a submerged land named Lyonesse abound in culture traditions of Southwest Britain and plausibly derive from memories of land loss within the Scilly Isles. We review Lyonesse stories, their links to Arthurian romances and Greek/Roman accounts of the Cassiterides, and trace their divergent evolution. From this region's history of land-sea movements and human occupation, we propose Lyonesse stories originated more than 4000 years ago when rising sea level divided a single inhabited island in the Scilly group." Lyonesse previously.

Nunn, Patrick D., and Rita Compatangelo-Soussignan. "The drowning of 'Lyonesse': early legends of land submergence in southwest Britain and geoscience." Folk Life (2024): 1-17. ABSTRACT Stories about a submerged land named Lyonesse abound in culture traditions of Southwest Britain and plausibly derive from memories of land loss within the Scilly Isles. We review Lyonesse stories, their links to Arthurian romances and Greek/Roman accounts of the Cassiterides, and trace their divergent evolution. From this region's history of land-sea movements and human occupation, we propose Lyonesse stories originated more than 4000 years ago when rising sea level divided a single inhabited island in the Scilly group. The comparable antiquity of similar stories is a compelling reason for supposing Lyonesse stories originated from observations of submergence encoded in cultural memories through oral traditions that endured in intelligible form for several millennia to reach us today.

John Sell Cotman was known for his paintings and drawings, especially watercolor. Wikipedia has the bio and suggested further readings, as well as information about others in his artistically-inclined family. Likely most people who know the name "Cotman" know it in the context of watercolor paints available from Winsor & Newton, which have appeared previously a number of times in discussion on Ask.

"We present the results of a meta-analysis of all empirical studies on the effects of these warnings. Overall, we found that warnings had no effect on affective responses to negative material or on educational outcomes. However, warnings reliably increased anticipatory affect. Findings on avoidance were mixed, suggesting either that warnings have no effect on engagement with material or that they increased engagement with negative material under specific circumstances."

Full Abstract: "Trigger warnings, content warnings, or content notes are alerts about upcoming content that may contain themes related to past negative experiences. Advocates claim that warnings help people to emotionally prepare for or completely avoid distressing material. Critics argue that warnings both contribute to a culture of avoidance at odds with evidence-based treatment practices and instill fear about upcoming content. A body of psychological research has recently begun to empirically investigate these claims. We present the results of a meta-analysis of all empirical studies on the effects of these warnings. Overall, we found that warnings had no effect on affective responses to negative material or on educational outcomes. However, warnings reliably increased anticipatory affect. Findings on avoidance were mixed, suggesting either that warnings have no effect on engagement with material or that they increased engagement with negative material under specific circumstances. Limitations and implications for policy and therapeutic practice are discussed." Citation: Bridgland, V. M. E., Jones, P. J., & Bellet, B. W. (2023). A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes. Clinical Psychological Science, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026231186625 Note that the Association for Psychological Science has a more public-facing writeup about the research, if you'd prefer a non-researcher-oriented read. If, instead, you'd like to read more research, you might take a look at the articles citing/responding to the meta-analysis.

"I think my first impact with horror images could be traced back to my childhood. I was used to leaf through my father's art books, I saw that Giotto as well as many other painters, flemish and Reinassance painters, often painted Hell, demons, obscure atmospheres, where death and popular beliefs shroud their magnificent paintings."

If you've spent much time reading horror fiction in the last decade, you've probably seen Daniele Serra's art illustrating recent and classic works of horror, often the cover. 2018 interview 2014 interview Artist's website.

"Simon's paintings are figurative but not photographic. Semi-abstract, they are a blend of abstraction in the shapes – rectangles, curves, circles – and identifiable features. The colour palette is muted; he says he is more interested in tone and texture than colour."

More Simon Palmer. More Simon Palmer, over at the wonderful Lines and Colors, where (if I remember correctly) I first saw his work.

Carolina wrens have expanded their range northward over the past century.

Previously on Ask.

Some say that lying non-player characters can motivate player characters, at the cost of paranoia. Some say that characters in crime fiction may be justified in their dishonesty. Marvel comic books are full of liars. Psychology experts have advice for you about how to spot liars. Some recent research has addressed factors associated with designing video games with falsehoods. A relevant previous Ask.

About the "research" link: "Lying and deception are important parts of social interaction; when applied to storytelling mediums such as video games, such elements can add complexity and intrigue. We developed a game, "AlphaBetaCity", in which non-playable characters (NPCs) made various false statements, and used this game to investigate perceptions of deceptive behaviour. We used a mix of human-written dialogue incorporating deliberate falsehoods and LLM-written scripts with (human-approved) hallucinated responses. The degree of falsehoods varied between believable but untrue statements to outright fabrications. 29 participants played the game and were interviewed about their experiences. Participants discussed methods for developing trust and gauging NPC truthfulness. Whereas perceived intentional false statements were often attributed towards narrative and gameplay effects, seemingly unintentional false statements generally mismatched participants' mental models and lacked inherent meaning. We discuss how the perception of intentionality, the audience demographic, and the desire for meaning are major considerations when designing video games with falsehoods." Yin, M., Wang, E., Ng, C., & Xiao, R. (2024, May). Lies, Deceit, and Hallucinations: Player Perception and Expectations Regarding Trust and Deception in Games. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15).

"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)."

Full abstract: "This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs). Distinct from prior applications of LLMs used for video game design, PANGeA innovates by not only generating game level data (which includes, but is not limited to, setting, key items, and non-playable characters (NPCs)), but by also fostering dynamic, free-form interactions between the player and the environment that align with the procedural game narrative. The NPCs generated by PANGeA are personality-biased and express traits from the Big 5 Personality Model in their generated responses. PANGeA addresses challenges behind ingesting free-form text input, which can prompt LLM responses beyond the scope of the game narrative. A novel validation system that uses the LLM's intelligence evaluates text input and aligns generated responses with the unfolding narrative. Making these interactions possible, PANGeA is supported by a server that hosts a custom memory system that supplies context for augmenting generated responses thus aligning them with the procedural narrative. For its broad application, the server has a REST interface enabling any game engine to integrate directly with PANGeA, as well as an LLM interface adaptable with local or private LLMs. PANGeA's ability to foster dynamic narrative generation by aligning responses with the procedural narrative is demonstrated through an empirical study and ablation test of two versions of a demo game. These are, a custom, browser-based GPT and a Unity demo. As the results show, PANGeA holds potential to assist game designers in using LLMs to generate narrative-consistent content even when provided varied and unpredictable, free-form text input." Buongiorno, S., Klinkert, L. J., Chawla, T., Zhuang, Z., & Clark, C. (2024). PANGeA: Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI for Turn-Based Video Games. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19721.

"The ice cream had a nice toothsomeness to it, with enough structure to hold everything together. For our absolute favorite chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich, you'll have to head to your corner store."

Edward Burne-Jones was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Frank Cadogan Cowper was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Christiana Herringham was so late in the game, she was more of a Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance painter.

None of them, of course, were anything near as late as the television portrayals of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, such as Desperate Romantics, Dante's Inferno, or The Love School.