Medieval Fantasy as Performance - The Society for Creative Anachronism and the Current Middle Ages

From organizing your first D&D game to dealing with difficult players, this book covers everything a DM needs to know. Written for the newest edition of D&D by the experts at Wizards of the Coast, creators of the game, it shows you how to:

• Build challenging encounters, make reasonable rulings, and manage disagreements
• Recognize all the common codes, tables, and spells
• Understand the parts of a D&D adventure and how to create dungeon maps and craft monsters
• Shape storylines and write your own adventures
• Find your style as a DM and develop a game style that plays to your strengths
• Script an encounter, vary the terrain and challenges, and establish rewards (experience points and treasure)
• Decide whether to use published adventures
• Use and follow the official Dungeon Master’s Guide
• Develop a campaign with exciting themes, memorable villains, and plots that keep players entranced

Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours.

Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

76 easy-to-follow recipes that the whole family can enjoy. A perfect first cookbook for junior chefs, with step-by-step illustrations in every chapter and useful hints about equipment and kitchen safety.

Former MasterChef Australia contestant Fiona Inglis is passionate about food, whether she�s growing, cooking or eating it. As a primary school teacher working within the framework of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program, Fiona is also passionate about sharing her enthusiasm, knowledge and skills with her students and with children everywhere. This beautifully photographed and illustrated book, with more than 70 easy-to-follow recipes, is aimed for 8 to 13-year olds, their parents and anyone interested in growing and cooking good food.

At what point did machines and technology begin to have an impact on the cultural consciousness and imagination of Europe? How was this reflected through the art and literature of the time? Was technology a sign of the fall of humanity from its original state of innocence or a sign of human progress and mastery over the natural world? In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Jonathan Sawday investigates these questions and more by engaging with the poetry, philosophy, art, and engineering of the period to find the lost world of the machine in the pre-industrial culture of the European Renaissance.

The aesthetic and intellectual dimension of these machines appealed to familiar figures such as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Montaigne, and Leonardo da Vinci as well as to a host of lesser known writers and artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This intellectual engagement with machines in the European Renaissance gave rise to new attitudes towards gender, work and labour, and even fostered the new sciences of artificial life and reason which would be pursued by figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz in the seventeenth century.

Writers, philosophers and artists had mixed and often conflicting reactions to technology, reflecting a paradoxical attitude between modern progress and traditional values. Underpinning the enthusiastic creation of a machine-driven world, then, were stories of loss and catastrophe. These contradictory attitudes are part of the legacy of the European Renaissance, just as much as the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of John Milton. And this historical legacy helps to explain many of our own attitudes towards the technology that surrounds us, sustains us, and sometimes perplexes us in the modern world.