Rediscovered Realms is catching you up on some of the coolest fantasy news that just won’t fit in our regular weekly edition. Welcome to the May 2026 issue of The Phantasy Snitch!
Rediscovered Realms’ denizens . . . er, citizens can now enjoy a curated lite dose of worthy Fantasy-related news, products, and rumours from the RPG, fantasy book, movie, D&D, LOTR, mythology, board game, art & archaeology genres (and you now have extra time to immerse yourself within all our other beefier newsletters!)
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“If you are familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, chances are that you're familiar with the artwork of Clyde Caldwell. For almost 10 years in the 1980s and 90s, Clyde's paintings graced the covers of TSR games and books. And that's just a small sampling of Clyde's four decades of work, now being collected into a single retrospective book.”
Monty Python And The Holy Grail, lobbycard, from left: Neil Innes, Eric Idle, three heads from left: Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, 1975.
“Atari has acquired the rights to multiple iterations of the Wizardry franchise. Holding the licenses for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981), Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds (1982), Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983), Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1987), and Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (1988), as well as “many other video games, rights, and other intellectual properties related to Wizardry.” This could well translate into new games in the franchise as well as series, movies, comics, or any other kind of productions.”
“Now, almost exactly 50 years after the release of the first Zork game, there’s a site that lifts the curtain on the Z-Machine in real time. The Visible Zorker is the work of interactive fiction maven Andrew Plotkin, and it tracks the state of a game while it’s running, letting the player see how the Z-Machine puts their commands into action. The effect is rather like running a car with the hood open so that you can see exactly what pressing the gas pedal does within the engine—except, y’know, safer.”
“So what is there to see? Well, one interesting thing to do is to look at the inner workings of the parser. Zork’s parsing of input certainly isn’t perfect, and many of us spent hours trying to get the game to understand something we want to try doing. (Speech was a particular problem for early parsers: commands like “tell thief to return gold” or “Thief, return my gold” generally met with bewilderment: “I don’t understand ‘gold’ in that context.”)”
See that artist’s mark? This is another amazing illustration by Clyde Caldwell!
“Death Knights are an iconic part of D&D, and no one Death Knight is as iconic as the original Death Knight, Lord Soth.
You have to work pretty hard to become an iconic villain in two different campaign settings. And yet, that’s exactly what one Loren Soth did, reigning supreme as a blackhearted villain in both Dragonlance and Ravenloft. Lord Soth was so evil that he was plucked from Krynn by the mists of Ravenloft, and even from the demiplane of dread did his infamy spread.
Much of this artwork is pretty amazing. I particularly like the inclusion of Tom Bombadill, Tom, Bert & William as well as the new Middle Earth land cards! Here’s a sampling:
“I write a lot of articles, but this one is extra special. You see, I finally get to reveal something I’m very excited to share with the world. About 28 years ago, I came up with an idea for a more accessible trading card game called Mood Swings. The idea behind it is simple. Trading card games are a lot of fun, but Magic, while amazing, can be complicated. Mood Swings is my attempt to make something simpler.
Here’s how it works. When you buy a Mood Swings game, you get a box with 45 cards. You’ll have everything you need to play the game out of the box. It’s a light strategy game for two to four people. Here’s a video that explains how to play. A two-person game takes 5 to 10 minutes. Mood Swings has all the things I love about trading card games—fun card interactions, adaptability, collecting, and trading—but in the style of a traditional card game, something you could buy off the shelf and play immediately.” - Mark Rosewater
“The rocky hills of Ithaca, home to olive groves and old Greek legends, have now yielded their most evocative secret: the possible sanctuary of Odysseus. At a site known for over two centuries as the “School of Homer,” archaeologists have unearthed compelling evidence of a hero cult that persisted for more than a thousand years — dedicated to the mythological king of Ithaca himself and protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey.”
An art board drawing by Roger Sweet of an early designer Sy-Klone. (Mattel)
Roger Sweet, the toymaker who designed He-Man for Mattel, has died at 91. The 1982 toy became a phenomenon, spawning the Masters of the Universe franchise with over 125 million toys sold in three years.
Sweet handcrafted the prototype by widening a toy figure’s shoulders and adding clay to give He-Man his iconic muscular build. Sweet worked at Mattel for over 15 years and also designed fashion accessories for Barbie.
Despite his role in creating a world-renowned franchise, Sweet publicly criticized Mattel over compensation. His wife recently raised more than $90,000 through GoFundMe to support his move into memory care following a dementia diagnosis.
Roger Sweet in an undated photograph. “I always wanted to be a He-Man and never could,” he said in 2019. “I knew almost every guy in the world would love to be a He-Man.”Credit...
“To celebrate its 40th anniversary, we connected with several of the film’s cast and crew members who look back on its unique genius. Read our mini oral history of the film below, and catch a screening of the film with a live score near you later this year at the dates listed here.”
“That rush of excitement when the movie’s synth-heavy theme song by Limahl kicks in. That strange, dreamlike pull of a world that’s both comforting and terrifying. Decades later, the film still acts as a portal — transporting viewers of all ages back to childhood on the back of a flying luckdragon.”
If I make some space in my overcrowded sanctum, this may have to fill that void!
So, I’m still not absolutely sure what this is, but all I can say is that it seems totally awesome. PrinceArmoryAcademy.com is an online digital classroom established in 2007 that gamifies and teaches you how to make your own armor and other medieval accoutrements.
The first of the five photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917, shows Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies.
Here’s a fascinating bit of fantasy trivia I recently stumbled upon. Apparently, a couple of sisters back in the 1910’s convinced the world (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame) that Fairies actually existed. They maintained that their photos were real up until the 1980s. Check out this Wikipedia page about the Cottingley Fairies.
King Richard’s Faire in Carver, Mass., was inaugurated in 1982 and is the longest-running renaissance fair in New England. Joseph Prezioso/Anadolu Agency
“Renaissance fairs were originally conceived as a creative refuge for artists sidelined by political repression during the Red Scare. Now, they sit at an uneasy crossroads between countercultural expression and commercial spectacle. Having grown into a nationwide industry with tiered tickets, branded merchandise and multimillion dollar valuations, the fairs can easily be seen as an offshoot of a corporate theme park.
As cultural geographers, we wanted to learn more about whether the spirit of the fairs has been changing. So for our recent study, we visited the Tennessee Renaissance Festival, Newport Renaissance Faire, Tennessee Medieval Faire and Tennessee Pirate Fest.”
“As explained by Dr. Philip Irving Mitchell, a Professor of English, Tolkien had a recurring nightmare in which he dreamed of the final apocalyptic fate of Atlantis. In 1964, Tolkien described the dream in a letter to Christopher Bretherton:
“This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I wake gasping out of deep water. I used to draw it or write bad poems about it.””
Thanatos by Mauricio Herrera
I will be doing a feature on this amazing fantasy artist in the near future, but in the meantime, check out a tiny sampling of Mauricio Herrera’s incredible fantasy works!
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