Ezren

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A lot of people (including the original writer, IIRC) have said that Ezakien Tobyn was really, really bad at being a cleric of Desna, especially when it came to Nualia.
What if you flipped that a bit and said that his crap parenting was because he was actually really, really good at being a cleric... of Asmodeus? Maybe a missionary sent out from Korvosa/Cheliax to the Blighted Barbarian Wastelands of Varisia in the hopes of Converting the Benighted ’Eathens to the light of ‘Civilised Ways’, and this aasimar foundling was his Perfect Opportunity?

(In the almost fifteen years(!) since this AP was printed, I’m virtually certain that this idea has been raised before. Unfortunately, my (too?-)hasty search hasn’t turned up any previous threads about it, and despite possibly being redundant, I wanted to make sure the thought got out there before I lost it somewhere in the Warehouse 13 that is my head....)


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The Fort Rannick maps I (re-)posted not a half-page up this very thread. :P Alas, if I ever saved hero339’s version of the Graul homestead map, I can’t find it again.


Indeed I am, and that particular plot-element may, or may not, come into play.

Spoiler:
After all, at the end of the day, a local politician with a small army at his command who gets proven to be as crooked as a dog’s hind leg... still has a small army at his command. “Power flows from the barrel of a gun point of a halberd,” and so forth.
Then again, perhaps I’ve seen Rio Bravo and El Dorado too many times....


Thank you for your thoughts. Unfortunately, as it happens, I need a reason to make this fellow a relative insider, since most of the other characters are from out of town. With a little finessing, he’s now the (former) personal bodyguard to Lianel Scarnetti. Backstory and intended story-arc in the spoiler below, for those who might want to mine it for ideas....

Spoiler:
The day before the Swallowtail Festival, Delarah Scarnetti, her son Lianel, the character in question, and a couple of other servants and guards arrive in Sandpoint by ship after visiting family in Magnimar. As they’re disembarking, one of Lianel’s beloved wolfhounds chases a rat off the ship and into the river, jumps in after it, and promptly gets chomped by a reefclaw. Lianel, in this interpretation being a twelve-year-old fellow with an adorable personality somewhere between Draco Malfoy and Joffrey Baratheon, blames the character for the dog’s death and summarily dismisses him from Scarnetti service, including stripping him of most of his gear.

Which will make things even more awkward when Lianel finds himself in Aldern Foxglove’s role in the Festival shenanigans (and losing his other wolfhound to a goblin), thus obliging Titus to reward the former underling he just terminated with prejudice. (And indeed, Titus and Lianel had been strongly considering making that the well-known ‘extreme prejudice’, considering some of the things the guy said on his way out the door.)

(FWIW, this take on the campaign is going to bypass chunks of what would have been The Skinsaw Murders in favour of... well, other events. Including Titus Scarnetti seeing the Nualia/goblin crisis as a perfect pretext to march a large number of mercenaries in Scarnetti livery into Sandpoint, then demand Kendra Deverin step down as mayor ‘in favour of someone who can actually protect our citizens and their livelihoods’. With the local Valdemars under Scarnetti’s thumb and a bereaved Ameiko the only surviving Kaijitsu, he figures he can make a ‘recall election’ stick.)


Has anyone has ever drawn up family trees of the various noble families in Sandpoint? I’m looking to place a character as the personal armsman to a young noble, ideally a Scarnetti, and I’m just wondering if anyone’s ever gone to this degree of trouble to track the various lineages.

FWIW, I’m throwing together a chart of the Scarnettis in a Notepad file now (not being a genealogy type, I lack dedicated tools for it), and even an order-of-birth for Titus’ three children would be helpful. (I can always fudge it, I know, but I have this issue with being detail-oriented....)

(OTOH, charting the Kaijitsu family is pretty straightforward. Even with the fidelity issues. :-D)


What bothers me about Foxglove Manor is that it’s a manor house. I realise that R. Pett was running with a classic ‘haunted house’ theme to go with the module’s other horror elements, but as Mr.Sandman notes, when Vorel built his ‘country home’ Chelish colonisation of this part of Varisia was so new that the nearest ‘major’ city (Magnimar) had barely hit its 20-year anniversary. The land was all but untouched, completely untamed, and the Hinterlands gazetteer makes it plain that, in the words of CPL. J. Rico, “this place crawls, sir!”: you can’t go six miles in any direction from Foxglove Manor without running into the home ranges of all manner of beasties. The Whisperwood is thick with bugbears (which get their kicks terrorising people to death), and several local terrain features house tribes of goblins (who may be ‘just stupid little freaks’, but are also sadistic, pyromaniacal stupid little freaks who work in surprisingly large numbers... not that you need more than one to start a catastrophic fire). And Magnimar — the closest possible source of help before Sandpoint was founded — is almost three days’ ride south, meaning that any meaningful relief force is going to take at least a week to arrive.

And with all this danger lurking outside, the design and layout of Foxglove Manor shows... absolutely zero defensive features. No watch-towers or arrow-slits, no barracks for a guard-force, not even a moat or a curtain wall! By all rights, it should be a keep or small castle — or at the very least, a walled estate!

(I mean, as I said above I get precisely why the author chose a manor-house to go with the module’s old-school horror themes. I also understand that making Foxglove ‘Manor’ into a keep or castle would have made it the natural origin-point for Chelish expansionism into the region, rather than their founding an all-new town at Sandpoint. It just... bugs me, and my sense of the law of natural consequences.)

/rant


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Locky Reid wrote:
Trace Coburn wrote:


Turns out I also have hero339’s maps of the Hambley farm and its fields, for the ghoul-hunt portion of that module. Does anyone want/need those?
Oh yes please. I was looking for those yesterday and couldnt get any good versions.

Hero339’s maps of the Hambley Farm

Daytime
Farmland by day

House and barn

House, upper floor

Night
Farmland by night

House and barn

House, upper floor


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After a little digging...

Hero339’s maps of Habe’s Sanitorium
Basement

Ground/first floor

second floor

top/third floor

Hero339’s map of Sandpoint Sawmill
Both floors

Turns out I also have hero339’s maps of the Hambley farm and its fields, for the ghoul-hunt portion of that module. Does anyone want/need those?


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Locky Reid wrote:
Has anyone got the hero339 maps for habe's sanitorium and/or sandpoint lumber mill please?

Let me double-check my hard-drive; with luck, I can find them and upload them to Imgur.

In the meantime... having returned to these forums after a long absence, I found a PM from January(!) asking for Peet’s tweaked version of the Night’s Watch ahem, Black Arrow home fortress. In the spirit of ‘better late than never’....

Peet’s revised layout for Castle Black Fort Rannick
First/ground floor

second floor

third floor

fourth floor

fifth/top floor


Male

Like The Rising Pheonix, I’m loving the RP/character-development; I’m just doing too many things at once. :-S


Male

... in all honesty? This might be a good point for me, and Pavanna, to bow out of an active role in the campaign for a while. GM Salsa, we could say that once Quinta showed up with her contingent of Iomedaeans, Pavanna returned to Magnimar with her to spend some time in additional training (for her new role as a cleric) and reflection on what’s happened to her so far. (The current situation could see Asuriel swapped into Ting’s body.)

For some time now, I’ve been having an ever-harder time concentrating on the campaign and writing proper fight/RP posts for it. Work, other projects, various computer games, lack of sleep, and a general overall sense of fatigue and apathy have been sapping away more and more of my time and energy, and I just don’t feel like I’m doing justice to the game — or being fair to everyone else involved — if I can’t properly focus on what’s happening and simply ‘go through the motions’.

I’ve loved playing this game so far, and hanging out with all of you both IC and OOC. I hope I can return to it once I recharge my batteries... but right now, those batteries are bleeping ‘we’re flat!’ warnings at me. I’ll almost certainly hang around to keep reading and spectating as things go on, but I really think I need to step back from participating for the time being.
And even saying that makes me feel like I’m letting you all down, as well. :(


Male
Thirzin Bronzebeard wrote:
I'm likely gonna be scarce tomorrow. It's been a rough couple of days. My grandfather aspirated & is in the ICU at the hospital with some kind of unknown bacterial infection in his lungs.

Eek. Best wishes, mate.


Male

I like to think I never do things halfway. :-J

Seriously, on an intellectual level I know it’s a lot of #FirstWorldProblems, but the frustration of all that damned near drove me to tears at points.
By the same token, I also know that I should count my blessings that I don’t have to deal with everything in sight being under half a metre of snow, like some friends of mine in and around Washington DC. [shrug]


Male

Sorry for holding things up, guys. It’s been too damn hot to think around here for the last few days, and today seems to have decided it was ‘Let’s Specifically F%+& with Trace Coburn Day!’ >:(
My co-workers managed to lose three days’ worth of paperwork on Friday and not find it until 9pm tonight. My lunch decided I’d be better off wearing it than digesting it. The only time World of Warships hasn’t been killing my ship with the first handbag swung vaguely in its direction was when it was crashing to desktop, locking up so solidly I had to completely reboot, or just flat blue-screening — and always exactly when I’d reached attack position, AKA the perfect spot for the other team to kill me while I was stationary and helpless and frantically trying to reload. I just managed to spill peroxide all over my wallet and laptop and stab myself in the ear with a cotton-bud in one move. And I have an dental appointment tomorrow to get a filling in a broken tooth. :head-desk head-desk head-desk:

It’s s$&% like today that makes me understand the ‘F#~$ the World’ switch in Boatmurdered. [sigh]

Thankfully I’ve got all of tomorrow off, before and after the trip to the murderhouse. I might just be able to claw a couple of shreds of sanity back before I have to return to work and its ready supply of handy candidates for impulsive therapeutic homicide.
Give me a few minutes, and I’ll try to catch up with the gameplay thread and post Pavanna’s turn.


Male

Greetings from the future! Here's hoping 2016 is a bit better for all of us than 2015 was. :-S


Male

FWIW, I’ve PM’d Salsa a suggested rewrite that (I hope!) strikes a balance between his story-goals and my (macho?) need for Pavanna to get a couple of shots in before things really go sideways for her.
I got a little stroppy and obstinate about this — probably a little too much so. (My sense of social appropriateness is... shaky, even at the best of times.) I figured it behooved me to try to meet our GM half-way.


Male
Thirzin Bronzebeard wrote:

Just a thought here, on the Pavanna thing? Is it possible that what you did, though, IC, was the overcoming? It's not as blatant, but in my mind, Pavanna's faith is the cornerstone everyone has gotten to know her by. And even when she should have been cursing her deity, her life, and everything...she didn't. She put herself completely into Iomedae's hands.

I never expected to really say this, but I think your response is one of the most powerful nightmares, and an equally powerful response. Kind of reminds me of the burning Buddhist protester.

Olivius_Telraven wrote:

@Thirzin re:Pavanna

I was thinking the same thing. Sometimes the hardest thing to do isn't to rail and threaten bloody retribution, but to give up your right to that and just fall into the arms of your god. I thought pavanna's response was wonderful and powerful, especially coming from a personal background of deep faith.
Horatio A Aldebrandt wrote:
As for Pavanna, I enjoyed the post. The frantic need for survival, then the acceptance and prayer to be welcomed to Iomedae's side... It was powerful. On the flipside, I can understand the desire for more chance to do something. I'm not the one being affected here, so it isn't my place to make suggestions, but I do understand. I just hope this whole event isn't retconned out, because there's some real turning points here.

There’s probably a lot to that, you jokers. I’ll probably even see it that way once I get a chance to cool off and reflect. I just... like a lot of guys, I have a streak of control-freak to me, and I have a particular image of Pavanna, and seeing her actions taken from my hands so she could get chumped* like that was red-rag-to-a-bull time from both standpoints. :-S

Nonetheless, thank you all for the kind words. I’d hoped to invoke a “let go, and let God” kind of feeling, but you never know if it’s going to come off right. [shrug]

* Knee-jerk first-impression at the time. May not be accurate or well-considered, unlikely to bear close examination, probably subject to revision.


Male

Don’t get me wrong, Salsa: going through the characters’ traumas and worst nightmares like this is a magnificent RP idea. It’s just that there’s a writing-glitch in the execution of Pavanna’s scene that effectively cut my/her options down to zero.

long explanation, including spoilers for the nightmares of Noro, Thirzin, Horatio and Olivius:
Look at each scene as written. Thirzin, Horatio, Noro — they’ve all had openings in the scene where they could turn it around and interact with their tormentors in a meaningful fashion. Noro’s been able to call her attackers out for being the dickless wonders they are. Horatio’s screaming at ‘Flynn’ was phenomenal. Thirzin powered through his injuries to go rage-monster on ‘Bruthazmus’. Olivius’ scene so far is unnerving, but nothing irrevocable has happened yet, and he could still sidestep a Bad End or even turn his confrontation with his ‘father’ into a catharsis.

Pavanna was actively looking around for her attackers, readying to defend herself. She’s spent the major part of her entire life since that day learning how to fight, so she’ll never be that helpless ever again*...
... and yet, the scene you wrote completely bypassed any possible defensive action on her part. She went straight from anticipating an attack, to manhandled and head-under-water, without any chance to do anything. No chance to cast spells, or invoke Iomedae’s assistance, or even remember the basics of CQC employ hand-to-hand combat techniques. You basically wrote my character — a well-trained and experienced fighter — taking a dive to further the plot. (Hell, even people who take a dive do it knowingly and wilfully, and this was neither.)

As I said in my PM, I can see how that exact helplessness is entirely the point of hitting her with this particular nightmare — this is supposed to be one of her worst fears made manifest — it’s great fodder for later RP, and it’s probably how things would play out if the situation ever occurred to Pavanna in ‘real life’. It’s just that the scene currently reads and feels like a “rocks fall” moment. :-S

* In all fairness to you, I didn’t make this clear from the outset... mostly because I only just realised myself how key a formative moment her near-drowning was to Pavanna. I’d always intended for her to be the (relatively) well-adjusted and sane one of this team, the one who didn’t have mental scars anywhere near this deep.

That said, scrubbing this whole sequence would be overkill, especially with the RP gold the others have produced from their ‘nightmares’. It’d be enough to ret-con Pavanna’s scene so she spots her attackers in time to do something before they overwhelm her. I’m not asking you to let me write an unarmed 5’ 4” woman in civvies murderising three larger men in Hellknight-plate, and I’d most-likely refuse to do that even if you offered. I’d just like the chance to insert a bit where she can put up some resistance before things move on to the waterboarding portion of the programme.

And a final thought on the matter: of course you do realise that after this, if Pavanna ever encounters any of these three bastards again, in anything even resembling an adversarial context, she’ll happily dash their brains all over the cobbles and step over their corpse(s) without a second thought? ‘I will give honor to worthy enemies, and contempt to the rest,’ and all that.... >:)


Male

... Salsa, you have a PM inbound. (Short version? Finding a way to narrate my character’s utter helplessness and ignominious ‘death throes’ is proving pretty g&~~~*n difficult. >:( )

I’m trying to put together a workable RP post now, but I doubt it’ll be anywhere near my best material. <.< >.>


Male

Yeah, Sky News is all over that. Thankfully, my Dad’s way up in Queensland, far away from all that, but still, Ronnie, I offer hugs and best wishes to you, yours, and all those who are affected by the flames.

On a more game-related note, I’m still coming up next-to-blank for where to take Pavanna’s dream-sequence. I mean, I’ve got a vague outline for how I could write her breaking out of her predicament and taking the fight back to these scum, but it feels like a wish-fulfillment ass-pull. If I read it in someone else’s fanfic or RP, I’d make disgusted noises about ‘waif-fu’ and ‘deus ex machina’ and ‘g@!#&*n blatant power fantasies flying in the face of all plausibility!’ :-S


Male

Indeed.
And all the hugs to you, Ronnie. ;-;


Male

» Personally, I’d have been greatly interested and quite happy to try out Spheres of Power in-play, since I bought it myself several months ago and would really like to see it in action, but I can understand that the ‘options paralysis’ involved might be off-putting. (I’d already sketched out a rough model of Pavanna under SoP casting (see spoiler), but as always GM sign-off would have been the sine qua non.)
» I agree that Wound Thresholds, while a great touch of realism, probably wouldn’t be worth the added book-keeping or headaches. Especially if the ‘death spiral’ kicked in. :-S
» Background Skills? Yes, please! In all likelihood Pavanna would promptly plunk all six skill points into Artistry (literature), Lore (Iomedae), Lore (Parego Regicona district of Westcrown), Lore (Naos district of Magnimar), Lore (Thassilonian ruins of Magnimar) and Lore (magic of ancient Thassilon), like Ronnie suggested. ;-)
» Fractional bonuses? Hrmmm... a little more book-keeping, but the added granularity is nice. /me does maths It hurts Pavanna’s Will save a little, but her Ref save and BAB do get a slight bump. I can work with it. ;-)

Working Notes for Pavanna as a Spheres caster:

» Spheres Caster: Mid-Caster, CHA-based (both as per Spheres Bard)
» Tradition: (based on Spheres Cleric) Divine Petitioner (Drawbacks: Focus Casting, Verbal Casting, Skilled Casting (chanting or singing), Aligned Combatant (Destruction), Aligned Protection (Protection))
» Spell Pool: 6 spell points — 2 (Mid-Caster level 3) + 2 CHA + 2 (bonus from casting class levels/drawbacks)
» Number of Talents: 2 (initial) + 2 (3 levels as a Mid-caster) + Life Sphere (Bonus, as Spheres cleric) + Light Sphere (Bonus for Sun Domain, as Spheres Cleric)
» Spheres and Talents:
— Life [Bonus Sphere] (Talent: Restore Health)
— Light [Bonus Sphere]
— Talent: Destruction Sphere (Force Blast*, Rebuff//Drawbacks: Aligned Combatant, Energy Focus (Force))
— Protection Sphere (Repel Evil//Drawback: Aligned Protection)
— Creation Sphere (Expanded Materials//Drawback: Limited Creation (alter only))
* Salsa, Force Blast was something I was intending to use very, very sparingly, not least because Pavanna’s far more of a buffer/healer than a blaster. I was kind’a hoping you’d rule that Force Blast doesn’t cost a spell-point per use, despite the wording in the talent description. However, I’d fully understand if you did enforce the RAW, and given said intentions for very light use, it probably wouldn’t cramp my/Pavanna’s style. ;-)

I’m afraid I’m still getting my notes sorted on that matter from your PM, Salsa, but I hope to get it back to you in the next day or two. :-S


Male

Yeah, your Kermit the Frog impression was little surprise, Ronnie — although it remains as impressive and adorable as ever. :D


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To be fair, magnuskn, when they bought the licence to restart the main BattleTech product-line, FanPro (and then their successor, Catalyst Games Labs) were only permitted to publish material and continue the timeline as long as they carried through on the Jihad and built towards the ‘Dark Age’. Whether or not you consider the creative decisions that went into MechWarrior: Dark Age ‘questionable’, the BattleTech team were legally contracted and required to make the very best out of it that they could. IMO, they did a pretty solid job.

On the novels front, I’ll second magnuskn on one particular recommendation: if you can find a copy of Wolves on the Border, DO IT. It’s arguably the old-school BattleTech novel. The tone, atmosphere, and character dynamics are a perfect representation of the Inner Sphere — most especially the Draconis Combine — in the years leading up to the Fourth Succession War.


Male
Trace Coburn wrote:
Late last night I saw a TV ad that was, in all sincerity, trying to sell a humanoid robot to the viewers as an au pair.

... and now it turns out that this ‘ad’ was actually for a sci-fi series called Humans, based on that very premise: robotic servants that can almost pass for flesh-and-blood. So once again I’ve made a great deal of fuss over a misunderstanding. :blush:

That said, I do stand by my proclamation of ‘future shock’. When I was a toddler, I used to read from a printed encyclopedia. For learning, partly, but mostly for fun.
These days, my two-year-old niece spends her days with her head buried in her iPad. Will she ever learn a proper appreciation for information that comes from ink on paper, or the feats of imagination that hardcopy requires and inspires? And if she doesn’t, will she realise what she missed? <.< >.>


Male

All the best for your web-comic endeavours, Adam! We all look forward to seeing it go live.
When you want to come back to this game (or if you ever find you need to, as a way to recharge your creative batteries), we’ll be waiting here. ;-)


Male

Late last night I saw a TV ad that was, in all sincerity, trying to sell a humanoid robot to the viewers as an au pair.
This afternoon, I saw a pair of Youtube clips wherein MegaBots Inc. called out Suidobachi Heavy Industries, challenging them to pit their Kuratas against the MegaBot Mk.II in the world’s first-ever duel between commercially-built giant robots. And Suidobachi said “You’re challenging the Japanese to a mecha fight? Bring it, baby!
A third Youtube clip showed teenagers reacting to encountering dead-trees encyclopedias for the first (and possibly last) time.

... can somebody tell me precisely when the exact hell I got teleported into the future? :-X


Male

Okay, today brought me one unadulterated ‘woo-hoo!’, one ‘oh, that’s nice’, and one ‘woo-hoo!’ with a ‘d’oh!’ corollary.

‘Oh, that’s nice’: yesterday’s outage of my home DSL was fixed before midnight. Here’s hoping it stays fixed. (Getting my phone/fax-line would be nice, too. The insurance company should have something to say about the claims on my rental property by now....)

Unadulterated ‘woo-hoo!’: my little brother Luke made it to Sweden okay and is getting settled in at Motala. He’ll be one of the competitors representing our country in the World Triathlon Championships on Saturday. (I didn’t mention it earlier partly because I didn’t want to jinx it and maybe get his plane MH17’d.... :-()

Second ‘woo-hoo!’: that No.6 plane I raised such a fuss about a couple of weeks ago? Has been located safe and sound! :-D
‘D’oh’ corollary: ... because it never went anywhere. All the power-tools and chisels and such it should have been amongst are still missing, much to my vexation. However, the plane itself was never in that box, and just got uncovered at the bottom of another bin hidden under some plumbing gear. So now I feel kind’a like a dumbass. :-S


Male
El Ronza wrote:
Oooh boy. That sounds rough. =( Glad you're not flooded out, though!

... and after all that fuss and drama, they got the system fixed less than a day after I made that post. :blush:

Still, I’ve got it pretty good compared to many: my house is dry, warm, powered, and now ’netting again; similarly, my town isn’t full of mud and silt, and I can drive to work and back (and so can the supply-trucks). Much better than those poor beggars in Whanganui, where the final clean-up may not be done for months, or the folks still blocked in by slips or wash-outs clobbering their access-roads.

Huh; for a ‘there but for the Grace of Deity’, that was remarkably gloomy. :-S

==============================

On the game front: the Rising Phoenix, do you want Pavanna to chip in on Asuriel’s little problem with Pennae, or are you happy to play that one out on your own?


Male
Trace Coburn wrote:
Weather here has knocked out my home DSL for now. Currently reliant on free public wifi. May be slow in responding to updates. :-(

Just to amplify on this, now that I can use a landline at the library: my region of NZ has been having 'some' heavy rainfall in the last few days. My town is not one of those flooded, but the region's fibre-optics have been damaged and the ISP for my home is one of those that needs to wait for the repairs. The timeline for getting it fixed is currently unclear, and the library's computers are not available at the times when I'm usually free to post. :-S


Male

Weather here has knocked out my home DSL for now. Currently reliant on free public wifi. May be slow in responding to updates. :-(


Male

Ain’t technology grand? :-S


Male

I’ll spare everyone the full recap. In the relevant scene, two petty crooks hold up a diner where, as it happens, a pair of mob gunmen are having breakfast before completing an errand that has seen their day get off to a really trying start. One of them was shaken up by the morning’s events and in a fey mood, so when he intervenes in the robbery, he chooses to start this conversation rather than any bloodshed. (Warning: F-bombs dropped freely and often.)
(For the record, it’s also where I picked up a certain piece of scripture Horatio might remember Pavanna quoting to him a while back....)


Male

Looked to me like you hit the RP for six again, Ronnie. [shrug] It paints a picture of Horatio as a man very much in transition, and coming to grips with that fact. Rambling would’ve been Horatio walking into a Sczarni hideout and recapping the whole ‘Pulp Fiction diner scene’ while he was being contemplative. What you actually posted? Works much better for the Horatio we’ve gotten to know than a Tarantino pastiche. ;-)


Male

/actually reads the whole last page of the thread and gets to ShadowyFox’s issues....
That’s what I get for not refreshing the page before posting, [Jack Nicholson]and don’t I feel like a f*++in’ a#*%~#+.[/Nicholson] :shame-faced blush: All the best, mate.


Male

/sends ALL the hugs to Ronnie


Male

Short version: some of the support characters in Girl Genius are JägerMonsters, basically mildly werewolf-looking super-soldiers with thick Transylvanian accents. Hats are a big deal to Jägers: the bigger and fancier his hat, the higher-ranked the Jäger. As a general rule, Jägers are big, tough, and mean, but not all that bright. ;-)

Salsa, I was an avid reader of Schlock Mercenary a long, LONG time ago, but I kind’a drifted away from it during the ‘reality TV/Petey-the-Fleetmind’ arc.


Male

More accurate to say I’ve encountered certain Girl Genius memes. The strip itself has so much of a back-catalogue that I didn’t dare try to catch up. (Order of the Stick I got in on from the start....)

And Ronnie, why does that answer not surprise me in the least? Considering that Horatio has been flirting with virtually every woman in sight since the game started, and all. :-D


Male

Congratulations and the best of luck, Choon!


Male

Okay, venting some anger here:

I don’t recall if I mentioned it here at the time, but just before Christmas 2013 my car was stolen. Well, the g+!!#%ned s~#!-sucking mother-f%~#ing suppurating a%+%+%@s came back this morning, and this time they made off with most of a box full of power-tools and other carpentry kit stored in my shed. About a grand’s worth, all told, including a biscuit-jointer (for doing skirting and edging bits) and a battery-powered drill with charger and battery. The fact that he took the drill but not the drill-bits tells me he wasn’t after the gear for use, but purely to sell it off for cash, probably for his next fix. The only thing he left in the box was a skill-saw that my parents bought back in the early ’70s, before I was born, and that was probably a simple matter of weight and encumbrance.

But what really cooks my heat-sinks is that he also took most of my grandfather’s woodworking tools, including his chisels and his No.6 hand-plane. The biggest plane most handyman chains carry these days is a No.4, and that costs ~$200 or so; with the trend towards mass-production crud, I don’t even know if I could find a No.6 anywhere, much less afford it. But even if I could get a physical replacement, it won’t carry the karma and mana that Granddad, Dad, and Mum all put into the thing since World War Two. Granddad George used that plane thoroughly and well: you could tell by the battering and dents in the metal and wood, the cracked handle on the main grip, the wear on the main- and fore-grips, the ageing of all the wood, the nicks and tiny burrs on the blade....

Hell, I even have a fair idea of who might be responsible. >:( I’d love to meet up with him, retrieve that No.6, and give him a little demonstration of how a hand-plane is used. Of course, I’d have to a] get my hands on him and b] get in line; he’s been doing this for a while, and he’s currently hiding out from patched members of the Mongrel Mob who’d also like to catch up with this individual and break discuss his overly light fingers. >:(

I only ever did high-school woodwork, and I know I never had the craft to be worthy of heirloom tools like that plane, but at least I had respect for the history and service it represented.
And now some random yobbo in a pub who can’t tell a screwdriver from a hole-punch is going to buy the thing for $5 just so some light-fingering f~*&wit can score his next tinnie of weed. >:(

“U MAD, BRO?” B%$#&, right now, I’m ALL THE MAD EVER. >:(

Not in a great RP mood, sorry. Maybe when I calm down in a few days. >:(


How are people handling races/monsters that have innate spellcasting abilities? For two examples:

—» The notorious Lamia Matriarch, whose racial HD are treated as Sorcerer levels (with bonus access to the Cleric spell-list) and stack with any actual Sorcerer levels they take. My first inclination for taking this into the SoP system is to treat their racial HD as Sphere Sorcerer levels for caster-progression, then tack on the appropriate class-levels. Other opinions?
—» Racial spell-like abilities (drow, gnome, etc.). Simply leave them as they stand and treat them as racial perks? Or treat the race as gaining the Basic Magical Training feat and the attendant talent for the spehre most closely matching the desired effect? (E.g. a drow with the darkness SLA would instead gain the ‘Dark’ Base Sphere with 1 spell-point per day.)

The combination of racial SLA and HD spell-casting might get messy, so I’ll leave it alone right now. :-S


AFAIK, all previous versions were taken down so the legal aspects of the compilation could be set right. We'll have to wait until the new version comes up.


Patience is a virtue. :D


You’ll have to wait a few hours yet. From my previous experience with similar tenterhooks waits, I’m fairly certain that Paizo doesn’t release its .pdfs until around the open of business-hours in Seattle. :-(
/me keeps jonesing for the book himself....


Yoink!


Male

My sympathies, ShadowyFox. I know that when I had to have my dog put down, it basically destroyed me for the next couple of days, so I fully understand; take as much time as you need.


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I actually own the DVD of Dragons of Autumn Twilight*. The NPC nailed pretty much everything I could have said about it, though if anything his tone was somewhat kinder than I would have been. :-(

Of the voice-actors, I do agree Kiefer did a good job, probably the best he could with the material he had, but that might’ve been because reading the character-summary for Raistlin let him cheat by channeling Jack Bauer at his most nihilistic. The others... I can’t speak to the pro VAs, since I’m not that familiar with their other work, but Lucy Lawless and Michelle Trachtenburg (as Tika) are great actors who were clearly working in an environment that didn’t play to their skills, and just as clearly they didn’t get nearly as much advice or help from their pro-VA fellows as they needed.

@ Mikaze & co.: you jokers realise that you’re making me imagine an animated or even live-action retelling of Burnt Offerings and/or the whole Rise of the Runelords AP, right? I’m thinking Rinko Kikuchi might channel a little Mako Mori into her portrayal of Ameiko....

* I’d heard the movie was of, erm, dubious quality and loyalty to the original material, so I spared myself some financial pain by getting it from a bargain-bin for less than ten bucks. I only watched it once, because like The NPC I just couldn’t face that pain again, and the only reason I didn’t try to get my money back from the store was because they have a strict no-return policy. :-S


Male

What Choon said. Lord knows I love my soon-to-be-four-year-old nephew, but a stronger sense that “actions have consequences” would not go amiss. :-S His father (my brother) does try, but... honestly, there are a lot of kids in the current generation who need to learn the meaning of the word “NO.”


Male

Ooh-rah! Congratulations, Ronnie. Knock 'em dead!

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