Bjørn Røyrvik's page

To be fair you can have a fairly detailed knowledge of something without having actually seen it. For instance I haven't seen TLJ or RoS in their entirety yet know enough of them from other sources to tell they are dumb, disprespectful pieces of s*@@.

To expand on what I said earlier, if the PCs have Tsuto they have most likely gone to the glassworks, which IIRC leads to the top floor of the Catacombs. It's not a stretch to expect the PCs to check it out in case there are more nasties waiting in the shadows, especially if you tell them that they hear some strange sounds coming from the tunnel.

Perhaps Tsuto himself, either in person or in a journal, mentions the existence of the catacombs to entice the players. A gentle GM nudge like "So you want to head out to Thistletop which is a ways away and leave this very convenient and very mysterious tunnel that is RIGHT HERE until later, right?"

Here are some other ideas

And, if you use milestone levelling you don't have to worry about them being underleveled if they skip past certain encounters to get to the plot-relevant points.

Why? It exists.
Honestly, if the PCs aren't interested in exploring newly uncovered ruins for some sort of reward (usually monetary but possibly moral or academic) they shouldn't be PCs. Sure, they may want to do Thistletop first but that shouldn't be an issue.

Less snarky metagamey, the PCs could investigate to make sure there aren't more goblins hiding out in there. Maybe Tsuto could say something to the effect that he was unsure how many goblins there were with him and there may be some in the Catacombs.

On a general note, when it comes to APs, several of us have found out that milestone levelling is the best way to go. Many encounters are just there to hand out xp and often get in the way of engaging with the story. As long as the players engage in story points in the right order, just letting them level when they are finished with one chapter is a lot easier.

"Tarzan and the Madman" was OK, but seemed less entertaining than ones I've read previously. It's been a couple decades since I read much ERB so I can't clearly recall if this was truly a less good Tarzan book - it's one of the last ones written so he may have been running out of good stories - or if my tastes have changed somewhat, as they had with Howard and Lovecraft.

On to Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library, which has a moderately exciting start at least. Special thief librarians who wander the multiverse to find rare tomes.

This exchange took place in complete earnestness.

PC 1 "We need an idiot to go in and press the self-destruct button."
Player 2: "OOH! Me! Me!"

The PCs had explored an abandoned power plant and in the main control room found a big red button on the wall that said "DO NOT PRESS". They concluded that this was the self-destruct button. One player, who is basically Dory from Finding Nemo, had to practically be restrained from pushing the button when the PCs first investigated the place and leaped at the opportunity to do so later.
To their disappointment, pushing the big red button only caused another sign to light up saying "Please do not push this button again."

The same two players in another context:
Player 1: "I'm blonde; it took me a while to get [the joke]"
Player 2: "I'm blonde too and I still don't get it."

If I ever write a high-level story, with a lich villain, he's gonna have drawn from the Deck of Many Things and got the Death card. There's just gonna be a Large size incorporeal undead constantly around him, just swinging and clawing ineffectually for all eternity, but basically healing the lich for 3d6 damage every round and, if anyone tries to hit the lich or use an AoE and hits the dread wraith, a bunch just pop up and kill the adventurers. Just sharing that idea there.

I like the way you think.

Of course if an undead PC had tried to do this it would it would instead be a positive energy spirit that appeared and tried to re-dead them.

It would only bother me if Paizo had portrayed goblins as basically humans in funny skins and then on a metagame level felt they could safely be maltreated because they didn't look like normal folks.

If they were always CE then I feel one could happily kill on sight with the same abandon you could do for demons.

If they were portrayed as the innocent victims of racism it would be fine too, IMO. Not because it would be a good thing but because not everyone in the setting is a nice, sensible person and people being horrible to each other is a strong narrative tradition.

I'm also fine with NPCs doing this to groups which may not be always CE but which are otherwise definitely problematic for their neighbors - things are complicated and there can be faults on both sides.
But enough about me.

If you really don't like it you could easily nix this particular bit of the mission without issue and just have the sheriff ask the PCs to try to stop the goblins and be a bit vague on how.
Or you can play it as is and let your players determine if they have a problem with the ear trophies, and potentially find solutions to the situation that don't involve extermination and mutilation. You could also have some internal drama in Brinewall where locals argue about what is an appropriate response to the Licktoads.

Iago in Shakespeare's Othello.

My condolences. It hurts to have to kill best friends like that.

Work tomorrow, hauling garden refuse on Sunday and hoping my hernia doesn't give way.

"Neuromancer" was good. It's fun to see how it shaped so much of cyberpunk.

I bought a ton of books yesterday, most from a used bookstore. They had gotten in a big stash of ERB, with some Otis Adelbert Kline (I believe someone here mentioned his name at some point so I thought I'd check him out), A. Merrit, and Doc Smith. I showed admirable restraint and only bought half of the stuff (though this was partially explained by the fact I already had a number of the Tarzan books there).

Then at my FLGS I bought a couple of Le Guin books, a new Fist of the North Star book, and the second collection of Liu and Sanada's (the creators of the excellent comic Monstress) "Night Eaters" series. Good art, great characters, and great story.

"We'll just fold this [cookie] up to make a cuboid of some sort."

My niece who just turned five.

The greased pig goes as written, and the PCs easily kill the infected pig/qlipoth. They are a bit disconcerted that the locals do not really panic and soon get back to party mode. When questioned about the monster the locals shrug and say that this evil has been in the marshes as long as the village but is generally held at bay by the Dream Tender, though out in the marshes it can get worse. The PCs are unfamiliar with this Immortal and determine to head out into the marshes the next day. The rest of the evening passes without unpleasantness. The PCs are adventurous in many respects and try all the dishes, even the giant bug ones. Shel Luperscu is 'wins' the contest and attempts to seduce Cirion, which fails miserably.

That night Shel tries to sneak into Cirion's room and get him out of there but manages to wake Cirion and Dru, and fails to convince either of them to come along on their own. The cultists do not to attempt to nab the PCs to sacrifice: that night they were very impressed by their skills, especially Pattinathar, and figure they wouldn't have much chance against the PCs.

The next day the PCs head out to the deep marshes. There is an intriguing landmark on their map called the Black Pyramid. They spend a week or more trudging through the hills and marshes, their going made extra slow due to the general wetness of the terrain. They eventually find the pyramid, a sad moss-covered thing. They have to dig a bit to get in and the first floor is mostly covered in water. The actual site is a let-down. There are the remains of some constructs but the place has been thoroughly looted. It was obviously once covered in wonderful artwork but the wet air has taken its toll on the paint, to the point where there is little detail left. They manage to get enough information to gather that the place was the grave of someone called Chalchiuhtlicue, and she was probably a noble of some sort.

Disappointed, they leave the pyramid and look around some more. The area may or may not have had more buildings, but if it did they are all swallowed by the marsh. They feel that digging everything up would be a pain, and so wander the marsh a bit more. After some more pointless roaming and finding no more nastiness than a couple of trolls, the PCs decide to head into the center of the marshes, place their map calls the Misty Swamp. Here they run in to a group of hobgoblins and barely manage to understand their dialect, to the point where only very simple ideas can be communicated. The hobgoblins indicate that the swamp is bad place but can't say anything more than 'bad' and 'dangerous'. The PCs enter and soon wish they had canoes. Cirion pulls out his turtle Figurine of Wondrous Power and the PCs ride on it for a few hours. Then they are attacked by spectres with some strange form of magic resistance. A couple negative levels later and the PCs are sure they are on to something.

I tried to dangle the Shel Lupescu hook in front of the players but no one cared. They took the vague reference to the evils being 'out there' and ran with it. So Shel gets sacrificed and the cultists carry on their merry way sacrificing people until that head cultist hatches.

"Amulet of Samarkand" was OK. I'm not in any hurry to pick up the other books and donated it to my sister, who recalled liking it when she read it a few years ago.

On to William Gibson's Neuromancer. It's been a while since I read it and I remember little of it other than being a bit lost in unfamiliar names and concepts. It seems far more comprehensible this time around.

"Infinity welcomes careful drivers", the first RD book, was a bit of a letdown, to be honest. The prologue detailing how Lister got on the Dwarf was frankly not interesting, and his life up to the point of the start of the show was little better. We did get more inside looks into Lister and Rimmer's characters, but frankly we didn't need it.

The rest of the book was a retelling of a few episodes and an extended plot of a specific one, which carries on into the next book.

All in all, I would recommend the book only if you are a diehard smeghead. Otherwise, just watch the show.

On to Johnathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand.

The PCs hang around for a week cleaning up the residual shadows and enjoying the baron's hospitality. Oddly, they don't do anything about the released fetchlings or take the baron to task for his crimes in offing his father and brothers. They are also surprisngly accepting of the baron's faith in Nyx. Partly because Othariel already allowed Nyx to set up a church in the Rift, partly (I suspect) because they are too full of modern ideas about moral and religious equality.

They decide to head back to Gulluvia but take a slight detour with a small band of traveling merchants so they can see a bit more of the Adri Varma. On their trip they head to a small village in the big central marsh of the plateau. They PCs are relieved to have some moisture in the air again but this find there is a bit too much, and the clouds of bugs are bothersome. The clouds of bugs turn into a stirge that bursts out of the brush along the road and attaches itself to Marianya. Shortly after a small...kid?...bursts out, yelling something. Through luck Marianya failed to hurt the stirge, and the peddlers manage to warn the rest of the PCs to not hurt the giant bug. The child, who would remind readers of a series of stories in a certain other world of the description of a young Nobby Nobbs. The stirge is successfully retrieved and the peddlers explain that the inhabitants of this village are short on traditional animals but have plenty of bugs of various sizes.

The clouds of bugs don't get any better in 'town' though the locals don't seem to pay them much mind. The party arrived just in time for a local festival and the merchants peddle their wares. The PCs wander about trying to make themselves understood when no one has the local language on their character sheet and need to prepare spells before getting something useful. The locals definitely look at bit inbred and fulfill just about every stereotype you might have about the appearance of dirty, poor, inbred and ignorant dwellers of remote pockets of nigh-civilization. Still, they are not outright unfriendly, more xenophobic from lack of understanding of how to relate to outsiders than actual ill will, or so the PCs feel. There isn't even much worth shopping for, though Cirion garners goodwill by healing the pockmarked and anemic cattle that she soon realizes are kept to provide blood to the stirges and giant ticks in the area. Later, Cirion notices a silver raven sitting discretely in a bush and she retrieves the message.
It is from Pheandar, who has some information to impart. Cirion teleports to him and he imparts the knowledge he's gained of Tuma.

Tuma was the home of some fairly powerful Glantri expats who protected their city with magic. The magical protection was somehow coopted by some curse which trapped the inhabitants in a form of stasis and caused the city to drift in and out of the Ethereal plane and regular intervals. The intervals were based on the phases of both moons, but since Phaendar was initially only aware of one moon, finding out the schdule was difficult. The nature of the curse has proven frustratingly opaque - Phaendar likened trying to identify it like trying to determine the color of an invisible object by looking at the distortions it makes in the air. His extraplanar allies are also very unhelpful when it comes to providing useful information. The bets he can say is that he thinks the curse is an ongoing emenation from some source rather than an instantaneous or permanent effect. He can only recommend the PCs that they wander around the plateau and poke and prod into everything in search of answers. He also hands over the Ring of Invisibility Othariel gave him when he was young saying he had no need for it and the new generation of heroes probably could use it. Cirion thanks the archmage and returns to Ravenmoor.

The night of the festival the PCs are invited to take part in the celebrations and various games. Pattinathar rolls very well on several checks and impresses everyone with his strength, agility and accuracy. The other PCs do not do quite as well, though Marianya manages to out-throw Dru on the knife-throwing contest. The PCs do not take part in the raven fights.

The session ends just as the crowd are getting ready for the greased pig event.

I'm running the Feast of Ravenmoor, which I will tie into Speaker in Dreams and make them part of the mystery of Tuma, which will manage to tie in to existing adventures from Othariel's past.

"Too like the lightning" was good, possibly very good. I'm going to pick up the rest of the series later this week. Recommended.

On to the first Red Dwarf book by Grant Naylor (i.e. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, go watch it. It's up there with "Yes, Prime/Minister" and Blackadder in quality, and is wrtten by two of the main writers for the old Spitting Image.

So far the book isn't quite as funny as the show, though I suspect that's the lack of a laugh track and the comical performances of the cast to lend a comical air to the events. Much like the series, it leans into comedy and tragedy being two sides of the same coin and how it's presented determines if you laugh or cry. Fortunately I can add all details such as the accents and expressions of the cast when reading it and make it come out funny.

Not directly related but I highly recommend Charles Stross' "Laundry Files" series of stories. It's basically DG in England, has an older BRP edition RPG and a new one coming soon. The major difference

In the Laundry-verse, typical allies of the governmental department for occult affairs that aren't directly part of the organization include police and emergency services, various medical professionals, military spec ops (for when you need some firepower and not just computer nerds or bureaucrats), the occasional highly specialized academic in some obscure-but-suddenly-extremely-relevant field of history or religion, some high-level bureaucrat in another department, spooks of rival agencies (both domestic and foreign), etc.

*insert joke about player vs. character*

If you need ideas for undead campaigns. check out the old Ravenloft supplement "Requiem: the Grim Harvest" for ideas, both about appropriate types of undead and how to run games with undead PCs. It's 2e so you will have to do some balancing if you use stuff. There's also the 3e Ghostwalk setting which is worth looking into.

After defeating the shae and fetchlings, the PCs briefly loot anything obviously magical and make a quick sweep of the rest of the mirror-prison, fighting the few hostile things left in here. They quickly surmise they have to chop their way into the heart of the prison and do so. The fight against the Heart was long. The PCs' main damage dealer, Patty, was quickly immobizlied for much of the fight after being grappled by the Heart. Other than that, the Heart couldn't hit very well but hurt a lot when it actually connected, and the PCs had a hard time hitting the Heart due to its high AC and generally poor rolls. Eventually, they did manage to defeat it and bludgeon it into paste using the Nyx artifact. The prison starts collapsing and the PCs make a beeline for the mirror mirror in the basement.

The entire trip probably didn't take more than 20 minutes, so the baron was still hovering around anxiously. In addition to the PCs, the first NPCs they met in the mirror had managed to make it out, and are standing stunned by the sudden heat, color and brightness of the outside world. The baron and the PCs attempt to make things more comfortable for them. The baron is extremely grateful to the PCs for fixing his problem. The PCs level up and we call it a night early.

I watched that one on your recommendation and was not disappointed.

What are people watching this season?

The Bakemonogatari spin-off is not as good as the main story, but I'm still enjoying it.

Apart from that and Pseudo Harem, the only show that has me interested is Too many losing heroines. Slice of lifey, a reluctant protagonist who ends up hanging out with too many girls who get rejected by their crushes. The animation is surprisingly good for a show of its type, and the humor is just right low-key and relatable.

I tried Love is indivisible by twins but all I got out of it was the author saying "look at all the Western media I know of".

Mayonaka Punch is CGDCT. 'let's learn how to be Youtubers' edition, with vampires. I watched the first three episodes but I will probably drop it.

My deer friend is a gag anime about a girl with deer antlers and a former delinquent. I might watch the second episode at some point.

The Suicide Squad isekai lost me at the first episode, Partially because I'm very picky about my isekais, partially because they chose a horribly dull and boring voice actor for the two lines that they gave the Joker.

Hope you recover soon.

Dinner with MIL tomorrow, possibly make a cherry pie on Sunday. Maybe a plum pie to get rid of the last of last year's plums.

Just wait til the plums are ripe. Then you can have jam, booze, syrup and baked goods of three varieties. Possbily four if the girl's family heads out to pick blueberries.

The Magicians' Guild" was OK. I think I've said it before but I feel kind of bad when I describe a piece of media as "OK" and nothing more because a lot of effort and skill goes in to making something that is merely OK. Sadly, at the end of the day, that's all I can say about it, really. The characters were OK, the plot was OK, the writing was OK, and the world building was minimal. Franky, it's not particularly memorable. If I find the rest of the series cheap I may pick them up.

On to Ada Palmer's Too like the lightning, which promises to be anything but merely OK. Only four chapters in and the writing is above average, the worldbuilding is good - possibly very good, the plot (as little as has been hinted at so far) is intriguing, and the characters seem interesting. If the rest of the book lives up to first impressions I will pick up the rest of the series next time I visit my FLGS and keep an eye out for the author's other efforts.

Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:

Limeylongears wrote:

I have an online course about the life & works of a 15th century magician (Cornelius Agrippa) to attend instead.

Is that the one by Esoterica?

It surely is. Grand stuff.

Indeed it is. Wonderful channel.

So apart from a couple hours giving Her Furry Highness the laptime she so richly deserves, I spent all day yesterday picking cherries and then cleaning and pitting said cherries. I picked 24 liters from that one damn tree, and that's just the ones I could reach and that were good enough to do something with, ignoring the at least 1/3 of the initial that weren't ripe, were too small, moldy or too damaged by insects and birds to be of use.

The good stuff will be frozen for pies and jam, the not so good stuff will be juiced for syrup and booze.

In addition my parents picked a bunch of red currants which I'm going to juice.

I hope to finish the lot before bedtime today.

Not being aware of any RAW ruling I'd say you couldn't - you are still too disoriented after the DDoor. I might agree that you could do so if you had Combat Reflexes, since that feat allows you to make AoOs even if you are flat-footed.

I have an online course about the life & works of a 15th century magician (Cornelius Agrippa) to attend instead.

Is that the one by Esoterica?

Work tomorrow, probably take trip to see the folks on Sunday.

It *is* pretty dark…

Reminds me of an incident in one of my old groups. The party was making camp for the night when they heard something. "How dark is it now?" one of the players asked the GM.

Not a second later all the power for the entire neighborhood went, leaving us in the dark of winter for about 30 minutes.

The sorcerer identifies the mirror and is informed that it has to be destroyed from the inside with an artifact-level weapon or a weapon blessed by Nyx, creator of the Mirror. Cirion/Othariel has an artifact weapon and I had expected her to find some way of getting the other PCs to look away when she kills the Heart, but to my surprise she pulls out an artifact they found in the Rift, another one created by Nyx and that turns people into vampires. She reasons that since Dru is an expert at using improvised weapons, this should be enough. I did not expect that but I'm all for clever solutions and have privately OKd this. The PCs will still have to try it out and hope for the best.

The next day the PCs get ready to enter the mirror. The baron repeatedly informs the PCs that the mirror is a one-way trap, barring the mind-swap effect. They are confident they can handle things.

They make their way quickly to the first fetchling encounters and talk to them and get the feeling they are not fans of Nicosar. Then they head straight up to him and get into a long, frustrating fight with the shae (pl) and loyal fetchling servants. No one had Daylight so the locals had their miss chance, and a nominally 50% miss chance turned out to be at least a 70-80% miss chance. as people spent most of the combat missing. The shae did little better due to poor rolls on my part and some impressive AC on the PCs. The best thing the shae could do was use their Lesser Shadow Evocation to emulate Magic Missile. Marinanya, despite having Magic Missile herself, decided to spend almost the entire fight shooting her gun and missing after failing to cast Burning Hands.

This fight took most of the session.

Some tasks I assigned to my players for their quests for Immortality have been:

Seeing if a paladin could use time travel responsibly by sending her back in time to get to know people in the past and not interfere in the coming apocalypse.

Seeing if said paladin could forgive an enemy that she loved and who betrayed her and raised an army of undead to attack her domain.

Seeing if said paladin can help her domains rulers in future to stay on the path of Good. She had to do so from the shadows - teaching them to help themselves instead of charging in and swatting the BBEG of the day on her own. It's a struggle for her to learn to work through weak and limited subordinates (a good lesson for an aspiring god).

Seeing if a cleric with a twitchy spell-trigger finger could learn restraint by not renewing cast spells until she was finished with a particular quest, and not telling her of the restriction in advance.

Seeing if another paladin could maintain cover in a misotheist country by helping people and finding an important document without using his divine abilities.

"Powers" was quite good.

On to The Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan, the first book in her Black Magicians trilogy. The opening paragraph was very nice and poetic but the language changed rather abruptly to functionally prosaic for the rest of the first chapter.

In short, the show had a good idea but it was clumsily implemented. A lot like the prequels in that regard

The PCs wander around town a bit and find clues leading to a chandlery. They break in and soon encounter a very bright little fey and some unfortunate victims.

Most of the session was taken up by combat, since said fey was invisible in light and they had no good way of removing the light in the area. Though Marinaya had See Invisible, she failed her save against Blindness/Deafness twice. The fight was a bit of a slog but the PCs managed to drive off the little pest and save the few victims who were still alive.

Though sorely depleted on spells, they decide to confront the local lord with some accusations based on something the fey said. The lord confesses to a host of crimes, starting with making a deal with a nasty entity in a mirror he found in the basement to summoning a light fey to deal with the shadows plaguing the town. (in case you haven't noticed, I'm running Midnight Mirror). The PCs investigate the mirror and Marianya greatly annoys Cirion by pulling her gun and shooting the mirror. Cirion berates Marianya for her foolishness and threatens to take the gun from her until she learns to behave.

The PCs decide to rest and look more closely at the artifact in the morning.

The first two books at least are pretty good. Sort of like a cross between Hellblazer and Stross' Laundry Files, though nicer than either.

There aren't really any that sprang to mind. There are certainly many books that have elements I would like to see in certain games but either I don't want the entire package of story/setting/specific elements in a game, or stories/settings I think would atually be lessened by trying to tell my own in them.

The old classics. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone, Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser

I have some good news for you...

That phrase is only fancier if you aren't used to farm life.

F+&& cancer.

Leviathan Wakes was good. Lots of stuff I remembered, a bunch of stuff I didn't so I'm unsure if it was in the show or not. I'll probably pick up the rest of the series at some point.

On to Le Guin's Powers, third book in her Annals of the Western Shore series. Luckily for me it doesn't appear to be a trilogy so I hope i'm not missing much. So far so good - as I expect from Le Guin.

Double update, which still makes for slim readings, due to poor prep on my part and delays and early endings.

The PCs send a message to Wizardspire to get some arcane muscle to help them solve the mystery of Tuma. Secretly, Cirion teleports to talk to Phaendar and manages to convince him to get off his lazy arse and do some work. Phaendar has to work through the odd feelings of realizing that though when he was younger he looked up to her with admiration and a feeling of never being able to reach her heights, he was actually only a few years younger than Othariel but is now much older and full of old man grumpiness at the impetuousness of youth.

Back in Gulluvia, Viron, their guide to Tuma, asks the PCs to check in on the N-granddaughter of an old adventuring buddy of his. She married a minor noble halfway across the plateau last year and sent frequent letters but has not been heard from in the last six months or so, soon after she had informed her family of pregnancy.

The PCs accept the quest and head across the Adri Varma, a rather dull affair through badlands which turn into grasslands as they near the village of Thorold. Here they come upon a town with some obvious problems. Lanterns are hung at every street corner and the manor house local lord has people preparing large bonfires around it. They knock on the door and are made welcome by a butler-y type of person who shows them to a sitting room where they can wait for the lady of the house.
Said lady soon shows up and puts to rest any fears of something unpleasant having happened to her - she looks a bit tired but assures the group that she has merely been busy with her infant. Upon being questioned about the odd goings-on outside she admits that the village has been plagued with disease and disappearences and shadows roaming the streets. She says the manor has been blessedly free of any of those ills but her husband has become very distraught and withdrawn, presumably weighed down by responsibility.

The PCs wrangle an audience with said lord who definitely shows signs of fatigue. The lord is initially a bit curt but mostly within boundaries of expected discourse but soon starts rambling about curses on his family and assumptions that "Tanyt" will save them and how good a job the priest is doing at saving people.
Cirion is the only one who recognizes the name, an alias of Nyx (Immortal of Night and Undeath) and the party excuses themselves. The presence of a Nyx cult is bad(ish) news but it does explain the rather dark and foreboding church they passed on the way through town. They visit the Nyx church first and are invited in by resident cleric. He and Cirion look down their noses at one another but are otherwise civil. Though the PCs are sure this priest is evil they get the feeling he is innocent of the specific ills plagueing the village at this time and so continue their investigation elsewhere.

And there they killed off one of the few characters I actually liked.

Does anyone else think Larys looks a bit like Nick Cave?

If magic exists in any significant amount (which it does in default D&D) it's going to be commodified and subject to economics.

There isn't a one stop shop magic mart in my game, but magic sellers do not have to work that way. IMG there are merchants with a few items, shops with stuff under the counter, private individuals selling collections, other adventurers getting rid of stuff they don't want, crafters selling specific items, etc. The biggest cities will have dedicated magic shops with a variety of common items and a couple of uncommon ones.
This doesn't mean that everything will always be available at any one time and certainly not at a single place, but that most things can be available if the PCs are willing to shop around (possibly out of the country) or wait for orders to come in or hire someone to craft items.

In short, if you are in a tiny village of 200 people you'll be lucky to find a couple level 1 potions. If you visit Sundsvall, capital of Alphatia (a country with one thousand level 36 magic users) you can find most things fairly easily.

We all love a good harem comedy, but how to choose best girl?
Do we go for the cheeky one with the put-downs, the cool and collected girl or the classic tsundere? The answer is "why not all of them?", and to save time and effort, make them all into the same character.
This is Pseudo Harem in a nutshell. I was surprised it got an anime considering the manga ended a few years ago, but the surprise is a pleasant one. It's a sweet little romantic comedy which will brighten my day.

I've also heard some rumors of more Bakemonogatari on the horizon, so I'm giddy with excitement for that.

Spent it working. It's been years since I ceased to care about the date. Over here it is the traditional day for people like my uncle who collect vintage American cars to drive around in them.

Yikes!
I very much want to believe his innocence, and I also very much want to believe victims of any form of abuse. Sadly, it's probable that the allegations are true, based on how these sorts of things usually turn out.

We don't play 2e, but assuming this is a fair conversion, it's not that much different than stuff the PCs I have in mind have already faced and whupped. Does that count?

Shadows of the Empire was OK. Middle of the road for SW books.

On to James Corey's Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the series that got adapted to TV as "The Expanse".

I've had a some fun with cursed items.

The first was a Ring of Protection -5 that registered as a +5. The player started to wonder if I was cheating when enemies kept hitting his character's ostensibly excellent AC. At some later point the PC got hit with a curse and when he got Remove Curse cast on him his ring popped off. The player's look of initial confusion-to-dawning realization was priceless.

The same player, same PC, later ran through White Plume Mountain solo as part of his quest for Immortality. One of the trap items in the dungeon is a ring that gives a telepathic message that it is a powerful magic item that grants wishes but hides its magic from those who cast Detect Magic. Needless to say, this was merely a latent effect that activated when picked up and expired, leaving a non-magical ring. The player kept this ring for over a year. The other players were in on the joke and when the player said he was going to use the wishes they would come up with a good reason not to. This kept up for over a year until one moment the player really wanted/needed a wish and got out his carefully hoarded ring, and utterly failed. He spent several minutes trying to make it work before the light once again dawned on him.

That and the new Ranma project are indeed not expected, but not as surprising as they would have been without the remakes of "Spice and Wolf" and Urusei Yatsura already gracing our screens.

"Train to the End of the World" was entertaining, but definitly a story where the journey is the important bit, not the end.

"Mysterious Disappearances" was mostly fun, and I think that's most of what I watched this season.

This all basically correct. IIRC, while other traditions might be pretty good at one particular aspect of the Force, possibly better than anyone else, the Jedi and Sith were more comprehensive and detailed in their training in general and on average produced more powerful adepts.

You do have planet-specific traditions, like the Sorcerers of Tund or the Nightsisters of Dathomir.