Satrap of Saturn

The question arose on the OSR discord , Are gnomes anti-Semitic?  I've encountered the idea before, specifically that the conical hat worn by garden gnomes descends from medieval Christian impositions of distinctive dress upon Jews. I don't much care about gnomes, whether the D&D illusionist variety, decorations in gardens, or early modern earth elementals, and I hadn't followed up before tonight. Gnomes, as we now think of them, are at the intersection of fairy folklore and dwarf folklore, and emerged as fictional beings with their own identity in the 17th century before becoming the kitsch critters we know in the 19th.  The best scholarship I found on the question focuses on that conical hat, toward the end veering into dwarfs, their magic, gold, fine craftsmanship, and their habits of wearing pointy hats and being distrusted by European Christians. Extract from Naomi Lubrich, " The Wandering Hat: Iterations of the Medieval Jewish Pointed Cap ", (Jewish Hist...

 Quotha comrade T— Let's say I'm a fairly typical citizen in the second-largest city in the world. I find myself from a young age just enthralled with the baking process. How do I get to make my living baking? Sorqite cities are pretty diverse in terms of lifestyles, markets, and ways of going about the fundamentals of life. The polis with a hinterland around it is the most common regional unit* ; within each city there is a tendency toward lots of neighborhoods that are colonies or developments of other city-states and their cultures, so each polis is like a bunch of modules connected together in a big arcology or coral reef of structures. Almost any craft or profession is going to have a plethora of venerable guilds, unions, schools, and fraternities practicing it, doing a trade well and making an art and a performance out of it being widely valued and seen as a good use of one's life; a respectable way of life. The traditional guilds and such are cultural institutions, b...

A friend on discord has peppered us with quæries regarding SORQ, an ancient world irradiated with outpourings from other planes, a world of peace and prosperity for all those who live in civilized lands along the equatorial sea and within the great walls separating decency from barbarous wastes. This pestering waxes productive, and haply we shall post our outsquoze thoughts. Let it be said that we have never once considered how money works, or if indeed there be fiat currency, and yet this was asked of us! O heavens, that's a good un init? One of the axioms of Sorq is that it is home to very old, cosmopolitan, sophisticated civilization. The surface world along the equator is mostly peaceful, mostly equitable. There are robust civil societies, courts, mediation; basically no warfare or overt striving on the surface and inside the great walls around the equatorial zone. There are abundant trade networks and nearly universal prosperity: it is not as who should say a post scarcity civ...