For those interested in the history of tabletop roleplaying game design, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in Ground is an excellent, near encyclopedic treatment. The author, Stu Horvath, documents major and minor game systems, how they innovated or were influenced by other game systems, and how the systems expanded with settings and adventures.

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Shared Fantasy is an ethnographic study of fantasy roleplayers in the Minnesota area from 1977 to 1979 by Gary Alan Fine. As this predates the moral panic of the early 1980s (James Egbert disappeared in 1979; the movie Mazes and Monsters was released in 1982) and the resultant explosion in popularity of the field, it also serves as a historical artifact of the hobby’s early days. Does this book provide a better historical understanding of roleplaying games? Will reading this book make you a better player? My answers are yes and no, respectively.

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Godot 4’s HTML5 export uses WebAssembly, WebGL, and SharedArrayBuffers. Browsers require a secure context for these features to be available, which requires sending certain HTTP headers when serving the game content. For development, there are two straight-forward ways to serve the content: Godot’s Python http server and Miniserve.

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Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World is an academic history of the perspective and practice of magic. Broad and detailed, Edmonds covers multiple types of magic, discussing the who, what, why, and how of each, and attempting to place the magic within the broader culture practice. Themes carried throughout include what counts as magic and how that magic might be embedded within the culture.

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