SEA Characters Pack (For RPG) by Charsiew Space. 30 (isometric) characters & 6 scenario images inspired by the history and legends of Southeast Asia. Use for: RPG tokens, visual references and representation, enrich gaming experience.
Bring Me the Head of the Earthling, Sigourney Weaver! by Unplaytested. Welcome to the very second Unplaytested game. Here, we were tasked to make a game about playing alien invaders, and we wanted to not be gross and colonialist about it, and somehow we got movie stars mixed in, and... yeah I have no idea. It got weird and wild.
The sky is super pretty tonight! We went out to go look at Saturn and Jupiter and it was so cool to see them touching and then looking through binoculars and they were actually separate and it was super interesting and now I have thoughts and ideas for my next RPG character!!!!!!!! But mostly itâs just really cool!!!!!!!!!
Now I want to make a character who is a star, a literal star as in a giant superheated ball of plasma and hydrogen, and takes a humanoid form to see how humans live, a little like Mrs Whatsit in a wrinkle in time!
I think there is a meta about how much time should pass before we act on a meta to give an opposing faction enough time to get in on the issue, does anybody recognise it?
Oh, Fantasy Free Me! Games of 2020 Sale A sale hosted by LynneMeyer. My refuge this year has been TTRPGs - playing them, and now, creating them. I truly don't know how I'd have coped without regularly losing myself in fantasy worlds. In case that's true for you, too, all the games I released in 2020 are on sale at a special price. Buy as a bundle or individually. Thanks for all the love this year, everyone.
And I don't expect that even you would have read more than the first of the Mary Poppins books.
(Although I think they DO go Christmas shopping with one of the Pleiades in the first book.)
The books are absolutely wild. They're super episodic, each chapter is "Mary endangers the kids by dragging them along on another of her supernatural errands so they can admire just how awesome she is."
And there's at least three episodes involving stars, including helping one with its Christmas shopping.
There's another where they visit the Circus in the Sky, where all the performers are constellations.
(Disclaimer: the books also have a lot of bigotry, especially exotic stereotypes of non-white cultures.)
@trogdor itâs gonna be a while since none of my groups are starting anything new rn but I added it to the list of character ideas I have
@BESW they do â I think they end up buying jump ropes or something for one of the Pleiades (I read the Mary poppins book a couple of times when I was younger, though I donât remember reading the sequels or rereading that one more than three times)
@BESW Oh yeah if anyone at the bus stop asked why I didn't have my license, I would give a similar response. The only people that I actually spoke to about it was friends and relatives.
@Shalvenay That was my same feeling. Had mine for 10 years before I decided to actually get a license
And it was mostly out of necessity- it currently takes me 1.5 hours to get to work via public transport, and shopping is a pain with 5 bags of groceries
Some Artifacts have Major/Minor Beneficial/Detrimental Properties, rolled from the appropriate table.
If I were to have two different attuned Artifacts, both with, say, the Minor Beneficial Property of "While attuned to the artifact, you gain a +1 bonus to Armor Class.", would I have a +2 or +1 A...
I was... 25 or 26 when I got my license, I think. For a variety of reasons. Up 'til then I mostly shared rides. Troggy was my "get to the TRPG house" ride for many years.
Unfortunate themes... certainly true in a way although I'd say fortune is probably not involved in this one for better or worse x)
I mean it portrays the player as agents of a Faith with clear parallels to real world religions and that has a totalitarian vibe to it. Not a bad thing in itself, but it's something one has to be careful with and it could be harmful in the wrong hands
if I recall correctly, it has weird things to say about anyone who isn't part of said religion, and also First Nations peoples and so forth
not to mention it is a game about being ready to murder a lot of people to get what you want, although now that I say that I guess that isn't necessarily thaaaaat weird considering the most popular questions on the site continue to be (insert newest edition of D&D here)
but I guess DitV is still like, even more focused on doing murder things
D&D has at least to some degree a pretense of not murdering quite literally everyone you run into who doesn't immediately agree with everything you say
Well, yes, it's definitely a game about playing Bad People
And yes, it doesn't (again by my quick observations) do a lot to minimize the harm of it. Maybe it's because I know the later works of Baker but it seems to me that it's at least trying to tell the players that what they're doing is not good or fair
Hence my observation that it probably will be harmful in the wrong hands, if the group actually, knowingly or subconsciously idolizes the themes of religiously motivated totalitarianism and shunning nonbelievers, it'll be capable of doing harm
So, I posted an answer to this question, which has now been closed, and when I logged on today, I saw that my answer was, for some reason, deleted.
The comment left by was "This doesn't provide useful, practical guidance, but rather propagates an unhealthy attitude towards others (see V2's comment).
@kviiri The fact that the game has chosen to obviously use the faith of Real People as a thinly concealed allegory for its Bad People, means that it isn't just failing to prevent harm being done "in the wrong hands." There is active harm, not just passive negligence, in its depiction.
It's telling that The Princes' Kingdom is a perfect encapsulation of all the things Dogs in the Vineyard wants the players to explore and experience... without exploiting anybody's faith to do so. (It's got its own problems with cultural exotification and the way its introduction of child endangerment interferes with the intended themes.)
TPK changes nothing significant (barely anything at all) about DitV's mechanics. It's just a setting reskin that removes the manifest destiny, normalized Indigenous exploitation, and... anti-Mormonism.
(And replaces it with Orientalism and child endangerment but that's not this rant.)
Even setting aside that, DitV is more focused on proving that a TRPG can produce bleed than in doing anything with that bleed. Its GM advice is basically "make your players as uncomfortable as possible by presenting increasingly contrived ethical scenarios until they're forced to make choices which viscerally upset them."
@BESW that's understandable, and I agree on reflecting the points brought up now. The mechanic of escalating conflicts and certain parts in the setting are ones that struck me fancy but no, I don't think I would like to play it
Or, for that matter, muster up the willpower to actually penetrate the endless walls of texts the rulebook is x_x
@BESW Here's the problem with that though, some people will have issues at the very first choice you present them, and some people will never have an issue, regardless of the choice presented, because some people immerse themselves fully into their character or basically play as themselves, and other people don't immerse themselves nearly as much into their character and only view it as a game, and won't ever be personally affected by a choice, no matter how dark the moral implications are
@ThomasMarkov At the absolute minimum I'd want it to be (a) accompanied by some robust safety tools specifically designed for managing bleed, (b) in service of something other than deconstructing the ethical foundations of one's friends, and (c) operating at a level of nuance higher than the contrived nonsense of the trolley problem.
Again, it exists to create bleed and doesn't really care that the form of bleed is to try and find the breaking point of players' moral constructs.
It's very much the kind of irresponsible noodling that I'd expect from a philosophy undergrad who hasn't yet figured out that ethics are more than just a series of logics problems.
It's a game that utterly fails to rise above "interesting thought experiment" and consider that its audience might have more personal investment than that in the questions it's posing.
So it's trying to force that investment through exaggeration and shock value, which... isn't a great way to engage with ethical thinking under the best of circumstances, much less in a situation like this with no consideration for the real-life fallout.
That's why I left Curse of Strahd on the shelf for one of my groups. I was working on picking an adventure to run them through, and Strahd has great reviews, but as I was reading the adventure, I realized that this particular group of players weren't going to be able to relate to some of the material in a healthy way.
@Someone_Evil If today you feel like you have a moment to talk about something pretty unimportant, let me know, Ive got a question about a declined flag.
Oh, I know which you're talking about (I think). It's a comment on an answer so is really a suggested addition to the answer. If the answerer doesn't want to take it on, or there are other comments which more distinctly deserve the light, it'll be NLN then
Okay. I've always seen suggested improvements as suggestions that provide additional support to the existing answer, that comment seemed to be a different answer all together. It just annoys me that after 500 helpful flags the system still has to tell me "one of your recent flags was declined".
Do you think itâs appropriate to post an answer to that meta question explaining why especially for high school students that was not a good answer? Iâm debating writing something because I think the meta author is wrong that high school friendships are âephemeralâ at least with regards to people in high school
@Bardic Wizard I think there are more flagrant problems involved. But you're of course right that even if those friendships are not for life that does not make them unimportant while they last. That seems to be, as I said above, a minor issue in the whole context.
I think whether the answer is helpful can only be evaluated a decade after school ends. I wouldn't agree with some parts of the answer, but I would also (in 20/20 hindsight!) point out just how correct other parts turned out to be. Specifically, I didn't have the wisdom during school or university to see how flimsy the relationships were at the time, and that they wouldn't last beyond a year or two afterwards.
@BardicWizard I wouldn't suggest making that post for the OP, they seem a bit entrenched and argumentative. If you write the post, write it for the other people who see it but know that you'll also get defensive engagement from OP.
(Personally I think I'd just let the whole thing die rather than feed it with more engagement; the person's clearly had some miserable experiences they're assuming are universal and I'd feel bad having them talk about it more, which any further posting is liable to do.)
I will say for you, @BardicWizard, that seven or eight years after we'd all graduated, a dozen of my high school peers, most of whom hadn't kept in close touch, came back together and spent a month supporting a friend when her mom died. We met her at the airport, bunked her in our houses, drove her everywhere, made sure she was never alone, arranged everything we could for her. When she left island again, we mostly went back to our separate lives, but we all know we'll do it again the next time someone needs us.
Some kinds of relationships don't require regular maintance or upkeep; absence doesn't accrue debt that needs to be paid off.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica There are two parts to that answer. 1) is the ephemeral relationships we have, and many from high school. 2) is using certain members of society as examples of 'bad' things. If the answer was solely about (1), it'd be fine. But (2) is a big part of it and doesn't need to be there.
@NautArch I feel like "don't care about people that you'll be with for a few years because you won't be with them after that" is still a really toxic answer.
Even IF it were less region/culture/class specific than I think it is.
@NautArch I did comment that I wouldn't agree with some parts of the answer. Yet others would be useful. I'm not OP of course, but then again most readers of a question on SE are not OP.
Like, straight up, the people I knew in high school are now senators, radio personalities, store owners. They work at my bank and make my music. Not because I went to a highschool for achievers--my high school was often the school of last resort for people who'd been kicked out of the other schools. But I live in a community that's small enough and connected enough that people don't just disappear never to be seen again when you lose your immediate context for seeing them everyday.
Even if I never contact them socially again (and I do, we got back together a couple years ago for a high school reunion and now my whole class has a WhatsApp chat. Sometimes I help them with how to explain homework to their kids), we're members of the same community.
There's only one person from high school that I've got a burned bridge with, and that happened after spending ten years staying in touch post-high school.
@BESW Iâm not gonna write it. I have no desire for engagement today and I know Iâm gonna get argumentative and disagree vehemently with them then itâs gonna bleed over into real life and momâs gonna not be happy
Although, I went to a regional tech school, rather than my local highschool, so that probably didn't help
My experience is probably pretty irregular, actually, cuz my dad still sees his two best friends from highschool on an almost weekly basis, and their kids I view as literally my brothers and sisters
And two other guys he knows from highschool he sees pretty regular as well
Plus, one of the girls my mom went to highschool with works as the receptionist in my dentists office, and that's why we go to that specific dentist
conversely I'm basically completely out of touch with the friends I had in school and even the only person from university I'm still close to is the one I married
@NautArch Yeah, burning bridges deliberately is silly. But I'm not so sure 'clinging' (not sure if the right word) to certain people despite not being very compatible, just because you happened to fall into the same class/school is such a good idea either.
My university friends are halfway across the world and we don't talk much, but the ones who are still in that area are in touch and the last time I visited, people used it as an excuse for a massive gathering that brought in friends from hundreds of miles away.
actually that's a little bit of a lie there are a handful of people I know from university I still interact socially with. I think I just forgot that was how I knew them for a moment
Can people randomly placed together turn out to be real friends? Certainly. Does being placed together into a class mean one should default to the assumption this will turn into a real friendship, even if there is indication to the contrary? That doesn't seem right.
I still talk to my kindergarten best friend even though she and I havenât met in person for two and a bit years and that was brief, and thatâs a long time for a high schooler â though we call every couple of weeks and swap book recommendations over text
Wow... I don't think I've ever read something that clashed so wholly with things that are fundamental to my person until that recent Meta question... might turn that into an answer
I'm actually just fuming now, thank you for editing that
I think the big thing for me is that "stop caring what others think" is like telling a depressed person "stop being depressed" or an anxious person "stop being anxious"
I have plenty of first-hand experience wishing it were that easy
I'm gonna just go play video games and breathe... maybe a video game where you have to actively tell your character to breathe and then start to subconsciously breathe in time with the game... Though I only know two games that do that, gotta find more somday
@Medix2 After I posted my answer I thought, "Was that too aggressive?" Then decided it was less aggressive that what I said in my head, so it was probably fine.
@RevenantBacon I'd say the main advantage of [non-handheld] consoles is that you get a gaming setup for minimal effort. No need to think about hardware limits or stuff like that, if it says it runs on your console it runs.
Argh! I dislike when I import a map into Foundry, but the system grid doesn't line up with the image grid. And can't because it seems to shift over the space of the map.
@kviiri Probably, but I think that's mostly been influenced by the fact that a physical copy isn't really a physical copy, since 99% of games on disc still require a massive download for the game to run
A seasonally appropriate example: if I didn't get any presents this Christmas, I would probably be nothing but happy about not having junk to lug around. Twenty years younger me would probably be devastated.
it's not a matter of either of "us" being wrong, it's about us living in totally different frameworks. I wouldn't call the younger me's framework wrong or meaningless just because we have different points-of-view.
My parents are very silly; they just said âby the way, last night we ate all the Christmas...â and then me and my siblings interrupted with a chorus of âWHAT? We made those cookies for us to eat, not just you!!!â, then my parents finished their sentence with âthe Christmas Brussels sproutsâ instead of the expected âChristmas cookiesâ
@BardicWizard Good news then, I have homework a fun project for you for Christmas break. I want you to watch a few episodes. Most of them are available on the Rooster Teeth YouTube channel, and they're all about 10 minutes long.
@ThomasMarkov no, my top 3 things i like about break is 1, sleep, 2, time to read/crochet, 3, not having to get up at 6 in the freaking morning every day (see point 1)
So one of the guys at my work just handed me some kind of candy he was sent from family in India. It's basically taffy, but the texture is a bit different, and it's coconut flavored. It's amazing
Exactly what it says on the tin; is there any possible way to permanently bring an Astral Dreadnought to the Material Plane, willingly or not?
