And they're using any excess to build Magic Circuits
One of our party members is essentially a Myconid Sovreign with control over a Warforged and is raising a mushroom militia to protect it at the moment and we already have immigrants wanting to leave East Haven for it
@Trish I'd allow running across a waterfall. That seems sufficiently monk-like, and also there's generally a cliff face next to any given waterfall anyways, so I don't see it as that much of a difference from running up the cliff face next to it. Plus, waterfalls are generally in a set location, rather than everywhere on the surface of the plane
Our captain is a Werewolf Dragonborn and before anything else, he was possessed by a demon claiming to be his long-dead captain. So he has resilience against mental manipulation to an extent now
> Until the early 1370s DR, the rarity and fragility of chardalyns contributed to their high base value of 20,000 gp. Once techniques like gem magic became more widespread, the base value of chardalyns dropped to 8,000 gp for a large stone that could hold the most powerful magics, and even lower for smaller, more limited stones.
Cool, but there is now a high level Cleric whose build is specifically anti-the party right now, walking around Icewind Dale under the control of the Mindflayers, and it knows how to time travel.
Like, you can use some nice and safe Calcite. It breaks? You can grind up the crystal into chalk and repurpose it for drawing magic circles or keeping spirits out of rooms. But if you use Chardalyn? It doesn't break before you do.
And then you find out one of your party members is literally walking around with a BIG OL' CHUNK in his weapon
From what I can gather, chardalyn was still more useful for storing magic than gemstones, since it pretty much just worked automatically with no preparation required, but was also unrecyclable, while some gem magic gems may be able to be re-used
From what I gather, some descriptions of Rings of Spell Storing, for example, were studded with a number of rubies that sparkled or grew dull based on the number of spell levels stored within. But you couldn't use Chardalyn for a ring like that
I've never been super big into anime but I decided recently to give it a try. a friend recommended giving Cowboy Bebop a shot and I must say It's freakin great so far
I am now being informed that my alternate future self succeeded in finding the Time Conduit and we're now tying another player's arc to it.
This getting nuts but I love it.
The party member? His character? Unique across timelines. Our current timeline is unique in that the corpse he's hiding inside of him only ever died in this timeline.
So, as a result, he is now being given a quest by me from the future to save the current me from being a Mindflayer puppet.
And the way we're subverting the paradox? The corpse inside of him was actually always destined to save me, but in the current timeline he isn't alive. We'd actually be closer to convergence despite the hiccup of causality if he specifically saves me.
So he's being imparted a Blessing from Mystra herself, the Silver Fire.
Because otherwise, there's no way a Level 12 or lower party could cast Wish and there's no chance of finding a Luck Dagger or Genie out here.
If my party member dies, my future self gets cut off in all future timelines, because Evil Puppet me would get access to the Time Conduit and lock-in his success.
My last character's fate is literally in his hands now.
Yeah, I saw. It was supposed to say "of" another creature, not "on". Although it probably shouldn't have said "another" either. I do still think it should say semi-illusory or similar, but that's not significantly important.
I wonder: a) people find non DND games repulsive and downvote any non DND 5e question on principle. b) people don't understand that Sword and Fan breaks with the Table of contents of all other L5R 4E supplements by NOT listing everything they have up there, such as Book of Air...
@NautArch look at the table of contents photo - in any book but sword and fan those chapters would contain only new advantages like anchestors or kata, not alternate paths.
@Someone_Evil self answers happen. Heck, I thought it was a huge question where I might need to dig through like a dozen other schools till I stumbled about the answer in a chapter that shouldn't have contained that answer!
@Trish So my understanding now is that this chapter was titled differently from chapters with the same type of content in other books for the same edition, which would cause some confusion.
@RevanantBacon yes. Also, New advantages is a lvl 2 heading, the clans are lvl 3 headings, which is breaking the convention: for a school, it's usually clan as lvl 3 heading and then schools as (possibly unlisted lvl 4), and new advantages as a separate and different lvl 2 one.
@Trish I wonder if that may be the issue people have with it. Out of curiosity, did this book have a different lead editor than the other books? I don't know if it lists it in the credits at the front of the book, but if it does, that may also explain the source of the inconsistency, which might also be a good include.
@RevanantBacon Todd Rowland was not there as editor... (but Robert Hobart with whom he was in the Book of and Imperial Histories was) and the layout was not by Hal Mangold (Book of Air & IH) but Robert Denton (S&F)
@Medix2 I want clearer titles, and I want people to write their question, and then, when they have finished the question, create a title. That way, title and question text are in harmony. But as I discovered during that meta, I can't have what I want. So it goes.
@RevanantBacon Yeah that's what I'm getting here. I guess my confusion is that even if the header is wrong there are subheadings with the content names that seem relevant in what someone is looking for. So even if they glance at only headers they would have had to have completely ignored the rest of what their eyes saw with the rest of the content on the table of contents which is totally reasonable, but I don't know
@KorvinStarmast Yeah, I do wish you had to submit question text and then a title field appeared, but that could also be confusing and make for double-titles and all sorts of other things
@NautArch it's the New Advantages header on lvl 2 that throws it off: Advantages are stuff like "Giant" or "Retainer", not schools in the game mechanics. There are clan specific advantages.
Do downvotes even do anything with respect to changing individuals' site practices? Most people seem not to make many adjustments, and there seem to frequently be one or two mysterious downvotes on Qs or As which could be about anything
@Trish Oh me too. But I've long since given up on the idea that I can extract any useful information from one on a post I've written, except in the rare case that the downvoter explained why they voted that way
And even in this case the immediate thought seemed to be that the downvoters had cast those votes for illegitimate reasons (which is not a bad guess, but just illustrates that downvotes themselves don't convey much information)
I don't explicitly explain my votes (not "+1 <reason>" or "-1 <reason>"), but I'll explain why I think a post is bad or good without bringing up voting.
@KorvinStarmast I suppose I... may have observed something similar in myself...
Unrelatedly, if you have a minute @Trish do you think you could summarize the play experience of Legend of the Five Rings, and your favorite elements of that system? I've been intrigued for a long time but my knowledge of the game is essentially zero
@Upper_Case A big part of L5R is, that you have a lot of status play. You have about 3 or 4 layers of social status you need to keep in mind, which makes play very interesting: you actively talk different to a peasant than to the one member of the imperial family than to the local samurai or even the minor-clan-daimyo. Flavor-like it's like 85% Japanese stereotypes, with dashes of imperial China, Mongols and Korea...
@Trish That sounds pretty cool. In your experience, has that promoted more roleplay elements than some other franchises or is it a more strongly mechanical aspect of the game?
(Sorry for the I-don't-know-anything-at-all questions, but I'm questing out for a new game to pick up in the future)
How do you feel the game handles the cultural set dressing? Do you feel like it leans too heavily on cultural stereotypes or misunderstandings, or do you think it handles its cultural context well?
@G.Moylan Kinda-sorta. It's feudal Japan themed, but it doesn't use any actual named elementas from Japan besides names for things like Samurai, Shugenja, and Ninja (not that ninjas exist)
@Trish That wasn't the question. L5R very obviously borrows many themes from historical Japanese culture. The question being asked is: are these themes used in an appropriate manner
Unfortunately, it's been a while since I read much L5R stuff, so my memory is a little bit hazy, but from what I do remember, it's mostly handled fairly well. There are a few things that are played for laughs, like the aforementioned "ninjas don't exist", but most other things are handled in a reasonable manner IMO
@RevanantBacon I had that discussion with a cultural anthropologist recently. in parts, it is clearly showing a very flawed understanding of a 1990s American looking at heian to sengoku era Japan and not understanding a dang about the implications. The whole "Samurai eat no meat" thing? HUGE misunderstanding.
@Trish Yeah, that just shows that it really has been a long time since I've ready any of the stuff. I definitely don't remember the "Samurai eat no meat" bit.
i feel like that's less a dietary restriction and more a result of japan being an island archipelago and thus not having much in the way of indigenous cattle species for livestock before contact with other asian nations
iirc, a meat restriction most likely comes from buddhism and while many samurai may have been buddhist, i don't think samurai had a dietary restriction in and of themselves
as far as i know, shinto doesn't have any dietary restrictions but some syncretism with buddhism may have resulted in certain sects having a code against meat consumption
@Upper_Case horses also likely came from contact with other asian nations
@Yuuki Rokugan in size and landscape is more China. the diet of a typical Japanese Daimyo has had a lot of chicken, some pork, occasionally cow, and fish was something only the coastal daimyo would eat in larger quantities. Some areas known for freshwater carp ponds would enrich the plates with those.
@Yuuki japanese horses were... mre pony size and have records of them being used back since the heian time 700 AD
@Yuuki That would still leave plenty of other meats, such as the other two I mentioned. And there are regional specialty dishes based in each of those, at least some of which date back to the Sengoku Jidai and earlier
regional specialty dishes don't imply antiquity. many authentic (and i don't mean chinese-american, i mean chinese people consider them authentic) chinese dishes were invented in the last two centuries. heck, many in the last 80-ish years?
@Yuuki What I'm not grasping is your position on indigenous availability of livestock; a setting with samurai in it is very, very likely to be drawing from Sengoku Jidai references, at which point pigs and horses were available (and cattle, though I'm less sure of that)
@Yuuki There was no single bushido. Anything we call Bushido now was invented in modernity and the oldest idea of such was the Hagakure - written by a retired samurai-monk of the tokugawa time.
@Devils_Spawn It's some data-wrangling report preparation in SQL. I was just kidding about having you do it though; if I even tried that, I'd be fired, fined, and (in this particular case) probably spend some time in prison. It's a close thing, but I'd rather just do the work
@Yuuki actually... you had a chance of Zen-Budhist, Shinto and both in a samurai, as well as neither. after the arrival of the jesuits, you also had a good chance to have Kirishitan Samurai - till Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa banned christianity.
however open-land-budhism (ikko ikki) was a rather rare among samurai
My latest adventures in SQL have been working with sp_MSforeachdb and looping through dynamic queries to look at info on each DB in a given server instance
Also dabbling with CTE, though I don't understand that one very much
CTE meaning Common Table Expressions? It's not the SQL that's the big issue on this project, it's more that I have to update legacy code for a pretty fundamental database architecture change. There are a lot of hard-to-find "t"s that need crossing and "i"s that need dotting
@Upper_Case I think that's what it is. Like I said, I don't understand it very well. Guidance I followed on part of it had me write a query beginning with "; WITH CTE AS (SELECT etc etc)" and then select from CTE later
and I've seen it around in other guides discussing ways to shuffle data around
but I have zero clue what is actually happening with that particular interaction
In light of the problems with a certain popular worldbuilding publication, I feel like mentioning an alternative.
A Land Once Magic by Viditya Voleti is a Post-Fantasy worldbuilding game to help create unique worlds based around deconstructing and evolving fantasy tropes and creating unique magic systems that are built from the ground up. Using only random tables and a deck of cards you'll be able to create a wholly original post-fantasy world!
Oh, and I need to re-up this because (a) it's awesome and (b) I got the author wrong the first time; it's by Jamila R. Nedjadi, but they aren't geoeconomically Kickstarter-compatible so the campaign is hosted by Jason Pitre:
Kickstarter: Once More Into The Void by Jamila R. Nedjadi. A science-fiction roleplaying game of bringing the family back together for one last job.
Sale: Month Of May-hem by Ray Cox. For the entire month of May I've put some of my favourite projects on sale.
I'll point out that the doubling down I assume you're referring to is two new questions being posted with the tag. And the votes on the meta appear to have shifted. Fascinating
Shifted in this case meaning the exist answer has one less downvote than the not exist answer
Looking at this one "I am looking primarily for RAW answers, but should this not be possible, I am willing to accept some speculation as to the intent of the designers (any tweets, or Sage Advice?)." Would you remove the designer intent part to make it stackable, or would you tag as designer reasons and vtc?
Anyone got ideas for explaining why "notifications that my old off-topic question was closed" is not a good reason to stop closing old off-topic questions?
@ThomasMarkov a disgruntled user posted two meta posts and got a few upvotes, so some people would disagree with you
> Leave them be. As you say there are 147 of them, and while it would be optimal for them to be closed, closing them has the unfortunate side-effect of sending an irrelevant and unwelcoming message to someone who asked a perfectly on-topic question years ago.
