The Great Zodiac Race by Alyx Bui. Explore Chinese mythology and the origins of the Chinese Zodiac and Chinese Lunar calendar. Re-enact the Great Race to determine the Chinese Zodiac, bringing order to time within China. A D&D 5e module.
Lapis Lunaris wrote on twitter about why the phrase "homebrew" bothers her.
On the Bones of Bathala by Ar-Em Bañas. MÖRK BORG Compatible TTRPG inspired by Filipino Folklore
Eric Lang asks on twitter, Tell me about an Asian game designer, game artist or gaming professional you just recently discovered, and why they are awesome.
Rascals by Giles Pritchard. A sci-fi TTRPG of action and adventure. You thought you had escaped your old life... but something has pulled you back. Also available on itch.io, DTRPG, and as a Tabletop Simulator DLC on Steam.
@BESW I feel that! Sometimes it feels like there's never enough time to just finish everything off, or as soon as you do finish something, a new thing comes along. It's like the dishes and laundry haha
So I found out, that there is a curfew every night in the City of Brass on the Elemental Plane of Fire. This makes me wonder: How does a day/night cycle work on the Elemental Plane of Fire?
Is there a sun and if so, does it rise and set like a normal sun?
I'm looking for informations in any sourc...
@HotRPGQuestions <incredibly nerdy joke about a sodium sun>
(Sodium flames have the classic yellow color, but if illuminated by a sodium-gas light, they absorb the yellow of the gas light, and the flames appear black. It's really cool and I love the idea of a world where the sunless part of the cycle is illuminated by yellow flames, and when the yellow sun rises all the flames turn black.)
@bobble I remember one teacher got really carried away with Sodium Chloride and water. They had a big 20L container, and dropped a tiny little chunk (about as big as a pea) into the water. It fizzled and popped. was a bit exciting.
He then stepped it up to a marble... more fizz, a bigger pop... we were all getting worked up.
So at that point he decided to just put the entire chunk (about as big as a pear) into the water. WE went down to the football field, everyone stood back, then he chucked it in from about 5m away.
@Someone_Evil More than likely. It was 20 years ago now haha
It was a very big bang, acidic water went everywhere, burned tiny marks into the grass. Thankfully, he was an adult and made sure we would all be out of the splash zone
I remember in HS chem a demonstration of elephant toothpaste in a soda bottle. The potassium iodide (catalyst) forever stained the ceiling above that desk
We had a physics teacher that was into cool demonstrations like that. He ran a "science is fun" day once a year, did stuff like freezing a rose & a rubber ball in liquid nitrogen and smashing them, maybe the old breathing helium to make your voice squeaky, and also lay on a bed of nails with another on top, then had someone put a cinderblock on top of that & smash it with a sledgehammer...
This is the same teacher who, some years later, got arrested by US customs for a bomb hoax... he was having his luggage inspected at the airport & was asked to take off his moneybelt. He said "If I do that, a bloody big bomb will go off". Turns out, customs officers don't share his odd sense of humour...
@BESW Same samples which had been used with acid tests? A geology student friend told me about the sting you'd get if they'd get whenever it wasn't cleaned with alarming calmness
A lot of people will say that a rock your tongue sticks to means it's actually a fossil, but that's not strictly true. It's a useful test if you're working in places that have never had reef deposits, but out here every other rock is limestone.
@BESW I have a cousin who does that for a living! (Licking rocks, that is.) He's a well-regarded geologist who helps identify rock structures in areas where destructive testing is a no-no: historical sites, reserved lands, &c.
Another cousin from that family builds model ships. Mostly for museums, occasionally for a corporate lobby or wealthy show-off. He builds about one a year, and makes a living off of that. That branch of the family is my example for when I'm talking to students to say "look, you really can study *anything* and, if you reeeeeaally love it and go as far as you can with it, the living will follow."
(The building process includes things like tying knots and drilling holes in "planks" all while under a microscope.)
My dad was a SCUBA instructor / instructor trainer with a specialty in extreme situations like wreck diving, and custom one-on-one instruction for students with unique circumstances. Then he got into underwater/scenic/aerial/architectural photography, and he pivoted to that for his profession and got a reputation as the guy who took the shots everyone else said were impossible.
@Ben sheesh. My chem teacher did the fun “let’s drop alkali metals into water and see what happens” and broke the fume hood with sodium and the fire alarm went off with potassium
@BESW so noted! I like things that involve trying stuff
@BardicWizard Oh, a cool thing you can do with two different-color lights: if you use makeup in both colors, then using a light of one color hides the makeup of that color and reveals the makeup of the opposite color. Old black-and-white films used this to do transformation special effects.
Though, I suspect it was a different reason: the Hulk was originally supposed to be grey as a Frankenstein reference, but they changed it to green because it was too hard for the cheap printers to render the grey skin consistently.
So I'm gonna guess that Frankenstein went green because of technical limitations of early color film.
(Like how Spock was originally supposed to be red, but on black and white TVs he looked like he was in blackface; early color filming techniques were often making black-and-white directed choices either because they didn't know how the final was going to be seen or just because the experts were used to doing it that way.)
> Not to mention, the adventure these 'appear' in actually states that they are theoretical. The players can recover the ritual to create them but it involves sacrificing not 1 but 3 people.
@MarkGiraffe I love adding adding story elements to non-rpg games
@AncientSwordRage Yeah, he was of the "the rented airplane is too heavy to do that? Can we take off the doors and remove the seats?" approach to problem-solving.
@AncientSwordRage Yeah, he spent more than a decade chasing a picture of the whole island on a perfectly clear day (not even haze, much less clouds), and that meant getting the plane up FAST when conditions looked right. So if he saw a clear-looking day, he'd get up on our roof, and if it still looked clear, he'd call the airport, and by the time he'd driven over to the strip they'd stripped the plane so it could rise faster because it weighed less.
@AncientSwordRage I do! He eventually got a near-perfect image, after a storm knocked down all the power plants (no smoke from them) and then a pressure front lifted the salt spray out of the air (no haze, took the clouds with it) and it was Sunday morning so there was minimal smog from traffic.
That's the sort of thing he'd do, spend fifteen years to get one shot. Or take a sunrise photo in the same place every day for a year, just to see which day he should go back for the best pictures every year afterward.
He wanted to take up-close-in-the-action photos of a traveling circus that sailed from island to island, and they said "Sure... you can photograph any act that you can perform." So he spent a month traveling with them and getting trained to do the bare minimum version of each act.
Sometimes he got overconfident though. He'd tease sharks with the camera flash to get them to come in closer, then he'd hide and pop out at them from a different angle to get the shot.
Handy tip: if you're going to tease sharks, wear an old-fashioned steel diving cylinder. The shark will lose a few teeth, rather than killing both of you to explosive decompression like it would if you wore an aluminum one.
If we didnt, I was thinking of asking and self answering with the first portion of my answer here, so that we had a canonical answer on the general case.
Trouble is, the search "area of effect target [dnd-5e]" turns up over 800 results.
Their creation requires 3 human sacrifices, and not just any human sacrifices, "a being of great intellect, a being of strong body, and a being of pure heart."
The secret to not hating exercise is to try different exercise until you find something you dont hate.
For example, I hate swimming. If given the choice between getting literally stabbed once a year for the rest of ,my life and having to do a swim workout every day for the rest of my life I would choose getting stabbed.
In my campaign (me being DM) one of my players entered an adventuring gear supplier, and they wanted to buy something. They asked “What does a tent do?” And the only thing I could think of was that it protects you from monsters in the night.
So what does a tent actually do? What benefits does it ...
@ThomasMarkov It's a legendary item. They all tend to do stuff that gets outside of bounded accuracy. Not seeing how that 'breaks monks' but it sure makes a monk so equipped pretty darned good, like a Paladin with a Holy Sword ... 😊
@doppelgreener + eleventy seven, thanks, you got it in one. 😎
What else could a 7th Level party want? Purchasable - 10 Silver Ammunition (100 gp) - Silvered Weapon (+100 gp) - +1 Weapon (+500 gp) - @Axoren Weapon of Warning {this is one of those 'man, I didn't realize how good this is until we got one} - Keoghtom's Ointment {Given no HP pots for sale, good call} - but the Mithral armor is really good if there is a party with decent stealth and One Loud Clunky Armor member.
@NautArch FWIW, have a DM friend who finds the DMG guidance on custom race building to be "half of a resource" since it only gets him the mechanical piece but the 'how they fit into the world' piece isn't addressed any where near enough. (Given that I think we have too many choices already, the chances that I create one for my world is zero).
So we have a lot of answers from a while ago that are only JC tweets, I'm think about editing them in batches to clarify that the rulings given are unofficial.
@NautArch I would say that about half of the monsters we've run into were home builts. (To include the mechanical man kinds from this last raid that were, of course, immune to charm and had resistance to all spells/spell attacks). My bard wasn't very effective beyond cutting words damage reduction and locking doors ...
@KorvinStarmast Right, I'm suggesting that adding that clarification to such answers is an improvement, something that is within our purview as users with edit privileges.
@ThomasMarkov That would be an improvement, yes: cut out the middleman, and I think I may have done that a time or two, not sure ... Sage Advice sourcing to me (and that's just me perhaps) is Sage Advice Compendium since it had time to be vetted with "is this worth updating the SAC for?" stuff.
Speaking of linking to sites... did lightning lure get errata'd to target self? I'm looking at SCAG and it's a range 15ft spell. Dndbeyond has it as "Self (15ft)"
I'm more leaning towards agreeing that we should just straight up cut links to sageadvice.eu and direct link to the original tweet. Also, probably adding the tweet as a quote block to the text if it isn't there already.
@GcL We used to have to spread stupidity at the speed of 'word of mouth' back when we had to walk up hill both ways into a sandstorm to get to school ...
Just watched Eric Idle and John Cleese on a talk - Eric described a few of the "we had it tough" bits and how it got there. For a Python fan, it was an ejoyable hour spent on a youtube while we waited for our grand daughter to arrive ...
@GcL She tends to sleep on long drives (they live in Dallas, I don't) but now that she's a year and a half old, our Golden Retriever now has a new best friend. Those two really hit it off.
@GcL in oldest geezer-y, ancient eldritch chainsmoker-y, born before the dawn of time-y voice I can muster, while hoisting up my three sets of suspenders Dang flabbin kids these days, with their Plane Shift spells and Greater Teleports, back in my day, we had to go through Pandemonium, walking backwards to go forwards, while rain fired from the sky, just to get to The Academy every day!
@ThomasMarkov You already have two answers to one that do as you desire, and I have up voted them both (Thorn Whip Attack) so thanks for highlighting their doing the good thing.
@RevenantBacon But you had an Academy. Luxury! All we had was a sacrificial altar with broken straps and two bits of chalk to write with ...
@KorvinStarmast Well, they called themselves The Academy, but it was really just The Master and us in the middle of a field with Beelzebub acting as teachers aid.
@bobble As a kid I had to travel through a suburb called Jindalee to get to school. It's the aboriginal land owners' name for the area and it means "many hills" and it's the right name for the place.
One of the hills is called Mt Ommaney. It's not a mountain (not even close) but it's the closest thing to it in the vicinity, and we had to go right from the bottom and over the crest to the other side to reach the school.
For a couple of years a friend and I decided to stop taking the bus and instead bike to school, and I still remember how amazing it felt the first day I actually managed to reach the top without getting off my bike to walk.
@Xirema When I last was navigating SO with a screen reader, I found consecutive H2s that belong to different answers a bit of a pain. I couldn't sort out when one post started and stopped by heading navigation.
Oops, "bare hills", not "many hills". They're not so bare nowadays but you get the idea: there's hills.
(although as I've just learned digging into it, "Jindalee" doesn't actually come from the local Turrbal language, but from the language of another tribe elsewhere in Australia.)
@bobble we tend to mostly create new tags when there's a new system people are asking about, or a new topic in that system, but that tends to only come up every so often
@RevenantBacon Yeah. Some people have floated remapping, on SE, L1→<h2> instead of how it currently does L1→<h1>, so whether or not <h2> actually fixes the problem is pertinent.
@KorvinStarmast :57411832 The party will be going into a dimensional shard that a hag coven has split off from the Feywilds to retrieve a relic taken from the Abyss. A follow-up one-shot will be to return that relic to the Abyss where it belongs, and the Abyss really doesn't want it.
I liked H1 titles for each post. Also made it easier to navigate posts by heading. In my experience, I could easily get Orca to bark out a list of headings. So I could get all the H1s or H2s in a page in a easy-ish to listen to list.
Literature has 2013 tags (excluding synonyms), of which 1116 are single-use. We have 4518 questions. I think we're probably the worse SE in this regard :)
I have played with this same group of friends for over 20 years. However due to COVID we have had to play virtually using Roll20.
This has had the surprising and revealing effect of letting us see that one of the player cheats a lot. The other players and the GM don't seem to care. If I public...
@bobble Oh, there's a lot of new works here, @BESW alone will keep you passively aware of that. It's just that nobody shows up to ask questions about, say, Speeding Bullets, a Lasers and Feelings drift that uses the canonical names of the 336 paths through the Shadow the Hedgehog video game as an oracle. (princess.software/leaks/speedingbullets.pdf)
Lit gets a wide variety of books. The most-used author tag ([william-shakespeare], unsurprisingly) doesn't even have 200 questions, and the most-used work tag ([the-lord-of-the-rings]) hasn't cracked 70. This site has a very strong D&D bias, as far as I can see.
@ThomasMarkov DnD 5e is not very vocal about being the fifth edition of anything, though
If you just heard there is a DnD and grabbed it from a bookstore without any idea on what you were getting into? Probably would take a while to figure out what this "5e" is.
@Glazius This is probably why I don't disagree with calling it a bias. I'm pretty convinced DnD 5e's vast representation in site content is not simply a consequence of its popularity, but also an outcome of the game's unclear writing in several key issues, as well as the overall DnD culture of theorycrafting and the way the rules work.
I have played with this same group of friends for over 20 years. However due to COVID we have had to play virtually using Roll20.
This has had the surprising and revealing effect of letting us see that one of the player cheats a lot. The other players and the GM don't seem to care. If I public...
