Zeugma's page

**AHEM** clears throat

In the days before the Star fell upon the Sea
there was a warrior named al-Magrabi
Five score his foes that lost their life
Six score the women he took to wife
His deeds rang out across the sands
From East to West across the lands

"Any familiairity my good bard?"

Picks up on his tune

His manly deeds of blood and gore
spread 'cross the seas to old Taldor
where our decadent foe would dread the blow
of his sandal'd step upon their shore

Something like that?

OOC: Why can I never get the quote markup right?

Practice: plays sitar rif

crosses fingers

Dangit!

**AHEM** clears throat

In the days before the Star fell upon the Sea
there was a warrior named al-Magrabi
Five score his foes that lost their life
Six score the women he took to wife
His deeds rang out across the sands
From East to West across the lands

"Any familiairity my good bard?"

Ooh! Catchy tune! A more upbeat tempo than my piece, too.

In Praise of the Dawnflower , a tune I picked up whilest on my journeys in Osirion. I changed the lyrics. *Ahem*

*plays intro bars*

The rising sun, the breaking dawn
bear witness to our pride and might;
the goddess' love goes on and on
for we who worship in her light.

The sun, the sands, the golden flame,
all who can see bespeak her name;
I'll sing her praises with my song,
the goddess' love goes on and on.

*plays bridge*

Refrain:
Bear witness to the flowering dawn,
the goddess' love goes on and on
and on and on and on.

Tosses a silver coin to Zeugma

"Do you know the Golden Chalice of al-Magrabi by chance?"

I am unfamiliar with that song, but if you hum a few bars...

*tunes sitar*

What is food and drink without music?

puts out cap, for people to throw money

Any requests?

I watched the women's fencing competition last night, Shadowborn, and it was great! Dang those ladies were FAST! Go USA! I generally don't play fighters, but now I'm jonesing to take the swashbuckler prestige class! With extra potions of Haste!

Zeugma wrote:

Fake Healer, if you are going to DM a PBP, I'd definitely like to join. Never been in a PbP game before, but I'm willing to learn.

You'll be first on the list if I do.

:D

Fake Healer, if you are going to DM a PBP, I'd definitely like to join. Never been in a PbP game before, but I'm willing to learn.

Seriously, this looks tons of fun. I just downloaded it. Now if I could only find some players. Maybe a PbP?

I really enjoyed the series. I only wish I had the dough and time to buy and watch the whole thing on DVD. I think the movie would be awesome if it were cast the right way. Jim Henson's shop had BETTER do the creatures s/a Appa and Momo, and keep their voice artists. If they turn out half as cool as the creatures in "The Dark Crystal" I'm going to see it. Heck, I think all the special effects need to be top notch. Animation is really forgiving with special effects, but live-action films get dated really quickly. M. Night I'm not so sure about either, I've only ever seen "Signs" and "The Sixth Sense."

Cool! It's a new play, just out of development. I saw it at the Kirk Douglass Theatre in Los Angeles. It's by Tanya Barfield, whom I never heard of before.

The thing to remember as I read it is that the Eagle Knights are paladins dedicated to an idea and a nation, not a religion. And while they mask their political views in religious zeal, like many in America today on both sides of the aisle, if it came down to a conflict between their religion and the country, their country would win out in the end.

How fascinating! I went to see a play this past weekend, "Of Equal Measure," that was about the Woodrow Wilson administration. One of the questions posed to Irish-American White House Spokesman Joseph Tumulty was this: "Your country and your god, are they of equal measure?"

The U.S. isn't as anti-Catholic as in 1914,and now we have a lot more safeguards against religious prejudice in our public institutions (de jure, anyway). Honestly, though, the majority of U.S. citizens have seldom been asked to sacrifice their god to their country. Religious freedom is built into the Constitution, even if in practice there have always been witch-hunts, prejudice, campaigns of exclusion and hard choices for people of minority faiths. I wonder what would happen if we were officially asked to renounce our faiths?

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon is my commute novel, currently.

That's my commute novel too! I'm keeping it in the back of my car, so I can sneak in a chapter at the car wash or if I get to work early. I'm more than half way through and I'm really enjoying it. I didn't expect to like an alternate-history novel, but Chabon puts a lot of cool little references in that make me smile, like the former president's wife being Marilyn Monroe Kennedy! (Don't worry, that's not a spoiler). I got the book as a graduation gift. I've also read Chabon's "The Final Solution" but I haven't got to "Kavalier and Clay" yet.

You're clearly a Naf of pathfinder.

A naf is the opposite of a fan. While a fan can't get enough of Southpark (so no amount of episodes is enough), a naf is born with having seen too many episodes, since the proper amount of episodes for him to see is a negative number. The only amount to reach having seen 0 too many episodes would be watching something that is the exact opposite.

Gah! Now my brain hurts trying to think of what the opposite of Southpark would be. A Family Channel after-school special of some sort? Oh, I know! Episodes of "Full House"!

The Whispering Tyrant is so evil he...spawned Demogorgon, only with the Olsen twins' heads!

Eeek, hope I got that one right. Demogorgon is the one with the baboon heads, right?

10 gp. on monkies, please. 'cause, ya know....lemmings don't do so good with water. Even if they can now fly over it, it has to mess with their game.

Terren, I think you are making very good points in this thread. Yet I felt bad your link to Dictionary dot com had the first definition of rape specify women as primary victims. This is most likely true, but if we as a society are willing to talk about rape in terms of structures of power rather than focusing on the gender of the victim, it opens up our dialogue to discuss even more "taboo" subjects s/a prison rape and gay-bashing, and further de-mystifies those acts of violence. I agree with your argument, but just wanted to point out how your link's list of definitions still "ghettoizes" rape as a "woman's problem" first.

Here's the real story.

This is awesome! A friend of mine is actually writing a thesis paper on Dr. Seuss and this poem just made my day. I need to e-mail this to him!

Long quote of request for clarification that looks like a personal attack followed by a personal attack on the poster who made the request.

Has anyone tried out the alternative rules for Diplomacy at giantitp.com? I personally haven't, but they look intriguing and perhaps offer a chance for more involvement of other PCs. They seem to provide a more concrete system for resolving social conflict modifiers but without too many dice rolls; this might be the sort of thing I'd like to see if social conflict gets some more rules, but I haven't tried it out in-game yet.
edit: Rich Burleu's website.

RIP. Mr. Gygax. Thanks for introducing me to some great people and a great hobby which has opened new corners of my mind.

I want to say I think Seelah the Paladin looks awsome! I never wanted to play a paladin before because I saw them as too "know-it-all" and "more-pious-than-thou" but she looks like the kind of paladin that isn't afraid to smite first and ask questions later. Thanks for making me reconsider the palladin!

I like that Joe's monsters submission is easy to read. It seemed very well organized and because all the information was easy to find I can see myself printing it right off the website to use in my game without having to do a lot cut-paste-highlight on the text.

See now I have an image in my head of a surly 'clan' of Dwarves who have been ritually shorn of their hair (and had the process made permanant by some sort of painful alchemical process) because of crimes against Dwarf society, and then cast out. They are the Dwarves that live on the surface in ramshackle villages or restored ruins that their ancestors abandoned. Theey sometimes deal with human society, and humans have all sorts of crazy theories about how Dwarves lose their hair when exposed to sunlight or them being different subraces, unaware that the bearded 'real Dwarves' don't lower themselves to trading inferior (non-masterwork) product to the surface folk.

Because of this tradition, Dwarves who naturally lose their hair go to *insane* lengths to try to conceal the fact, and spare no expense on magical treatments to try and correct the hair loss, since they associate hair loss with oathbreakers, and Dwarves who randomly start losing their hair (instead of having it ritually hacked off) are said to be suffering some sort of divine punishment and having their secret wickedness exposed!

Hey Set! I think this is a really cool idea! It could make a cool side-quest in a campaign: some balding dwarves are desperate for a miracle cure and hire the adventurers to get them some "Rogaine" on the sly; top secret, hush hush.

P.S. Rat pelts make great toupes!

Wicht wrote:

oops. forgot to [/threadjack]

So...

since they don't smelt under the sea... What do you suppose is the coin of the realm down there where its wetter and life is so better?

Pearls? Clams? Shiny bits of corral?

Wood. They use the clams for their clothing.

Sand-dollars! duh!

Or cowrie shells, lots of societies used that even before we used domesticated cattle and blocks of salt for currencies.

EDIT: Then again, the shells would still have little animals living in them...but I suppose the mermaids would eat them?

Ungoded, you are hilarious! I laughed through your whole post! But it's great. I agree 100%! Let freedom ring!

I'm interested to hear in more detail what you thought about the article, if you don't mind. What you liked and disliked, what didn't make sense, that sort of thing. I've been familiar with modrons for a very long time and I tried to write the article with an eye towards both those who already knew who they were and those who never heard of them before. But since they are so ingrained in my mind, I'm interested in hearing how the article felt to those just being introduced to the little lawful fellas.

Wow. I guess this thread is dead, but I didn't notice the response till just now. I think the thing that made me read the article first was that there was a huge picture of a modron on the cover, which got me intrigued. Then, I read that they were from Mechanus, which was cool because the MM doesn't have a lot of cool lawful monsters to populate Mechanus with, characters that really fit with the plane's concept. (I picture formians living on a huge ant farm, not a watch-cog world). I also liked that there were a lot of details about their relationship to the plane. I don't know how much of that background you took from earlier sources, but it all seemed to fit together.

Falkdtung, I dunno about all the female iconics looking "frail" -- sure, the half-elf rogue looks like she could use a filling meal and some time with the weightlifting machine at the gym, but the cleric seems pretty buff. I kind of expect the elf characters to look frail, anyway. I think Wayne Reynolds did a good job capturing them being "not human looking" -- too many elves look like Legolas or Vulcans from Star Trek.

BTW, When my sister played a male bard, the other gamers in our group kept getting mixed up and calling him "she," although part of that was a dig at the bard's masculinity. It takes some getting used to for a group to be comfortable differentiating between the person and the character. Good roleplaying takes time.

Hello, just had a quick question for anybody. Does anybody know if their was a Witch Queen Prestige Class in Dungeon Magazine and which number that may have been, that's it :D Thanks

I don't know about a witch PrC in Dungeon, but there is a Dread Witch PrC in Heroes of Horror.

Call that bad mo Xibalba.

I think I still have that issue of National Geographic! It's the Aztec underworld, right?

Edit: I don't like the idea of a "mirror" underdark. Paizo has the chance to do something radically different, not just a name change.

Zeugma wrote:

Who did the cover art?

Larry Elmore.

Thanks for the link.

Who did the cover art?

I really liked the art for the ferrous dragons, and I was kind of glad there wasn't too much back-story for the article because it let me come up with my own ideas about how to fit the dragons into my own campaign.

Whimsy Chris wrote:

But to me, there are things in D&D that are more offensive. One word is nothing, in my mind, compared to the portrayal of women, which are often scantily clad. I remember one time seeing a woman on the cover of Dungeon barely wearing anything and then reading that this NPC was supposedly wearing full plate armor. My friends made a joke about it, calling it her "full plate bikini", but really, wouldn't this turn most women off? I personally find this worse for the "impressionable youth" than one little "s$*#"!

Thank you!

Words have power but not as much power as an image. The word s%#% doens't have as much power as f*%! and neither of them are nearly as powerful as n*@#~& or f*#. None of those words hold a candle to an image of a starving child, the aftermath of a large battle, or of kids playing in a field of flowers. Images do more damage than words can ever hope to do, though both are powerful.

With that thought in mind, how do you (as gamers and as people) think that an image of a voluptous scantily clad woman in distress effects the (sub)conscious mind of our society? What about a barbarian in a chainmail bikini? What about the "hero" objectifying women at every turn? I know that theorectically we are all equal and we all should try our hardest to avoid offending others and blah blah blah. But when minorities are still being put down (if only in our subconscious mind through media) are we really equal?

So, in response to your complaint I don't think it's a big deal that s%#% appeared in print becuase many pre-teens and teens say that word without batting an eyelash, so when reading it they are nonplussed. And if you've got a complaint with language, maybe you should look at the game on the whole before picking out one minor detail.

I'm off my soap box now, I swear. >.<

I think you both bring up good points. I didn't previously know that Dragon has PG-13 standards, but it makes sense in the context of the game as a whole. It is about killing human-oids in a vaguely medieval-Gothic setting and taking their stuff (unless you go the more thespian not dungeon crawl route)and for the most part seems aimed at pubescent males who (whether they admit it or not) most probably feel a little insecure about mature women (whom I asume you mean in your reference to disparaging minorities) and who probably cuss just a little (hopefully in private) to boost their self esteem. There has been the occasional Dragon magazine cover with more skin than I feel comfortable buying without a brown paper bag, even though the contents on the inside are excellent and have nothing to do with contents of skin mags whatsoever, but that would take too long to explain to the people I imagine are staring at me in the checkout line at B&N as the blush crawls across my face. The s#$% word? I didn't even NOTICE it when I read the story. I just enjoyed it. It's not something I'd give anyone under 13 to read, and it isn't Shakespeare, but I wouldn't give a 13-year-old Shakespeare to read either.

Before Dragon goes completely kaput, is there any chance you guys could whoop out some sort of Modron Web Enhancement converting the remaining modrons?

Don't leave us Modron fans truly hanging! :(

I agree! I really liked the Modrons, even though I'd never heard of them before the April issue. I was thinking they'd be a perfect side-trek for a campaign with a lost-tech feel. Now that I know about them, I want the complete set.

P.S. My First Post on the Paizo boards! Huzzah!