Author: Charlie Brooks

Award-winning author of "Fantasy as you Like It" and "Eight-Bit Heaven," Season 9 finalist in RPG Superstar, author of the young adult fantasy novel Greystone Valley, and super-opinionated nerd dad.

Sorry, but I’m Perfectly Happy if My Daughter is a Girly Girl

On By Charlie BrooksIn ParentingLeave a comment

Originally published on BabyCenter.com September 7, 2016

“Don’t let your daughter be a girly girl.”

This is something that multiple people have told me. I’ve been warned not to let my daughter dress in pink, not to show her Disney Princess movies, and to generally shelter her from the things that modern society associates with femininity. And while I can see good intentions behind that thinking, I disagree with it.

I recently wrote a novel called Conquest of Greystone Valley, which is targeted toward young adult girls. It’s a sequel to my previous novel, Greystone Valley, which I wrote before I started giving any thought toward gender politics in fiction. This time around, I started thinking about the girly girl conundrum, so to speak.

I hadn’t written Greystone Valley with gender in mind, but I was happy in retrospect that it had several strong role-models for girls. As an author, that’s a good thing – I’ve written stories that don’t pass basics like the Bechdel Test, and it’s kind of a lousy feeling to have that be your blind spot.

However, one thing I did notice about my story is that the protagonist, Sarah, was very much a tomboy. And actually, the most common way that writers make a “strong” female character is to make her more masculine. A good example in Disney films would be Merida and Mulan.

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Is the Baldur’s Gate 3 Cast Ready for Primetime?

On By Charlie BrooksIn Role-Playing Games, Video GamesLeave a comment

Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 follow.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a huge hit in a way that no other Dungeons & Dragons video game ever was. Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro and the current D&D license holder, would obviously love to capitalize on the game’s runaway success. Larian Studios decided not to make any more Baldur’s Gate games, though, so the folks at Wizards need to turn elsewhere to capitalize on its popularity. That means spinoffs, and likely lots of them.

We’ve already seen characters from the game turn up in official D&D RPG products. Karlach and Minsc grace the cover of Heroes of Faerûn, for example, with Astarion and Shadowheart joining them in official artwork within the book. Astarion got his own digital product, and the alternate cover of the Monster Manual features a mind flayer who is very recognizable to players who made it to Act Three of the game.

But those are all cameos. Beyond the boundaries of the rulebooks lie the spin-off products that feature these popular characters’ personalities, the aspects of them that fans fell in love with them. Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion comes out this month, Karlach is getting a comic book, and the game as a whole is getting an HBO spinoff series. But how will these complex and multifaceted characters translate to other media?

Larian created a very rich story with Baldur’s Gate 3, and part of that is that the characters people meet in Act One are only facades or surface impressions of who they really are. As the game goes on, you discover that they run much deeper, but only if you get their initial masks to drop. How will that sort of depth translate into spinoff stories where the corporate owners of the brand will want the characters to be as recognizable and marketable as possible?

Let’s take a look at what Wizards of the Coast has done with this sort of thing in the past and what it might mean for the future.

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You’re More Likely to Forget a Kid in the Car Than You Think

On By Charlie BrooksIn ParentingLeave a comment

Originally published on BabyCenter.com August 24, 2016

Every summer, there are entirely too many cases of children dying in hot cars. Despite this being many parents’ worst fear, it happens to an average of 37 children every year. And the really unfortunate thing about these tragedies is they can happen to anybody – even you.

It doesn’t take a negligent parent to forget their child. It doesn’t even take an absent-minded one. Sadly, the reason so many kids get forgotten in the back seat of the car during the summer boils down to biology. Our brains are betraying us. Preventing this problem means outsmarting human nature.

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Could the Sugar High Really be a Parenting Urban Legend?

On By Charlie BrooksIn ParentingLeave a comment

Originally published on BabyCenter.com August 18, 2026

It’s a story that every parent knows: you bake some cookies or take your kid to the fair, and an hour later they’re bouncing off the walls and driving you crazy. Bloody sugar highs. But almost 20 years of research indicates that the legendary sugar high doesn’t really exist at all.

If you’re anything like me, the suggestion that a sugar rush is a myth has you shaking your head. I don’t care what kind of research they’ve done. I don’t care that studies dating as far back as 1994 all come to the same conclusion. This phenomenon must exist because I’ve seen it myself.

Or have I? Maybe seeing isn’t believing. Maybe because I’ve been told from an early age that sugar causes you to get hyper, and because I myself used to go nuts when I had sugary treats as a kid, my own brain is wired to see signs that aren’t really there.

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Doctor Who: The Stories that Created “My” Doctor

On By Charlie BrooksIn Film, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Whenever fans talk about Doctor Who, or any other long-running work of fiction, they’re really talking about “their” version of the franchise. Relatively few people have seen all the episodes, and even fewer have gone through all the spinoffs and related media. Moreover, people put their own subjective weights on different stories. I personally despise the Doctor’s decision to turn humanity into soldiers against the Silence at the end of “Day of the Moon,” while others see it as an awesome moment for the character. The Doctor, like most people, is a mass of quirks and contradictions that can lead different people to have different interpretations of them.

With that in mind, here’s a list of some of the stories that most influenced my personal take on the Doctor. When I give my opinion on who the Doctor is or what they would/wouldn’t do, these are the tales that helped shape that point of view.

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Gaming Stories: The Raccoon Murder Mystery

On By Charlie BrooksIn Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

My group has a habit of getting caught up on dungeon dressing and minor descriptive bits. Sometimes they spend an hour chasing down a bird that I mentioned flying overhead in the forest, or poking at some strange bubbles in a river. There’s no rhyme or reason as to what might catch their attention, but in my most recent Pathfinder session I decided to roll with it. What was supposed to be a snippet from downtime turned into a full-fledged side quest as the group solved the mystery of a mossy rock and a suspicious raccoon.

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What Are We Saying When We Call a Dad a Babysitter?

On By Charlie BrooksIn ParentingLeave a comment

Originally published on BabyCenter.com May 4, 2016

Some time ago, Al Ferguson of The Dad Network posted a picture of himself wearing a t-shirt that read, “Dads don’t babysit. (It’s called “parenting”)” This being the Internet, it has since resurfaced and sparked a debate about a dad’s role in the parenting process.

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Comics & Quests: Down

On By Charlie BrooksIn Comics, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

I have a special spot for dwarves in fantasy RPGs these days, largely because I wrongly ignored them through most of my teen years. AD&D had a million supplements on elves, and I loved the idea of playing nigh-immortal magical beings. Dwarves, gnomes, and halflings got largely overlooked in those days (the Player’s Handbook Reference Series, which had a book for every race and class in the game, even shortchanged the latter two by shoving them together in The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halfligns rather than giving them a chance to really shine).

In my later years, I’ve come to appreciate foul-tempered, beer-loving, hairy people–and not just because I have become one. In the Fell’s Five comics, Khal became one of my favorite characters thanks to the juxtaposition of his stoic warrior nature and the gentle poet within. So if the comic had to get canceled before its time, I’m glad it went out on a note that highlighted these qualities.

Without further ado, let’s check in on Khal’s love life with the final storyline of this series, “Down.”

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