The political pundit class will always say "move right."
Game designer. Writer. World of Warcraft Classic developer. Original Fallout dev. Classic World of Darkness developer. Former Star Trek Online developer. He/Him. Account represents personal views.
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The political pundit class will always say "move right."
Axis is gonna have a fun time the day the ketamine runs out
Henryk drew his sword in response. "So this is what you wanted. To become the new emperor," Henryk grated as he brought his blade, "Ciao bella," into a guard. Chas smirked. "And when I burn the wizard's sanctum to the ground, with your corpse in it, there will be none to challenge me." (~Fin~)
Chas shouted suddenly, spittle flecking his mouth and spraying Henryk in the face. "He was a LIBERAL, Henryk! It meant EVERYTHING! He transed you!" Turning his bloody blade in his hand, Chas faced Henryk head-on. "And that makes you unworthy of the crown. You have been corrupted." +
Henryk recoiled as if struck. "What? Impossible!" he said. "You heard it as clearly as I," said Chas. "'It's not transactional.' The magic word. Trans. He said it. He transed you." Henryk scoffed. "But you just said it. It doesn't mean anything." +
Chas turned his head slowly and dramatically toward Henryk. "Kek," he said. Henryk tightened his grip on Chas' arm. "Without him, Jace may die!" Chas looked away and replied, "Too late. You already heard what he said. He transed you." +
Chas's blade, engraved with the ancient meme "Notices bulges OwO what’s this?", slid easily through the wizard's body, causing the old man to gasp. Chas pulled the blade back and the wizard fell to the floor, his blood gushing out across the room-wide rug in a dark stain. "Why?" shouted Henryk. +
... but it would be the best way to keep an eye on Jace. Chas stood slowly, then with a sudden lunge he ripped his sword from its sheath and ran the wizard through. "Your sorcery cannot match my steel, wizard," hissed the young knight as Henryk leaped to grab his arm. +
... and said, over his shoulder, "You can stay here with him, or come back for him in three days. I haven't had guests in a while but I can scare up some food and a couple blankets. Just being neighborly. It's not transactional." Henryk considered the offer. Risky to stay around the wizard... +
"Where did you learn such things?" asked Henryk. "I have never seen so many of the marvels in your sanctum." The wizard chuckled. "I went to college." That elicited another hiss from Chas. The wizard turned to disappear back into his chambers, then stopped... +
"Thank you," said Henryk. "I am in your debt. But... why would you do this? There is no love for wizards among my people, or any of the clans of the Trailer Parks." The wizard simply shrugged. "You came to me in need of help, one person to another. So I helped." +
"That will do for now," the wizard said. "His fever should come down in a day. It's up to you to change the dressing... uh, remove the bandage from the wound tomorrow, and put a new clean one on there. Do this again every day for the next three days. If he is awake by then, he'll live." +
Finally, he opened another bottle and produced from it a pill, which he fed to Jace carefully. From a third bottle he tipped a clear fluid into Jace's mouth. Henryk could not scent alcohol from it, but everyone knew water was not safe to drink... unless you were a wizard, apparently. +
... and produced a flat white square, put it to one side, and then tore part of Jace's tunic. He carefully placed the square against the wound. With deft hands he tore small strips from a roll of a strange fabric and placed them against the square, sealing it to the wound in Jace's side. +
"Can you help him?" asked Henryk urgently. The wizard nodded. He removed a lit from the bottle and poured a strange potion over the wound, which hissed and sizzled. Jace gasped and writhed in pain. "There there," the wizard said. "Have to get the infection out." He opened the parcel... +
"Yep. Your buddy has an infected wound. Knife, looks like," said the wizard. "Knife? I was told it was a dog bite," said Henryk, looking to Chas for confirmation. "He was involved in a scuffle with groypers from Chan Clan. It could have been anything in the... chaos," mumbled Chas. +
From beyond, Henryk could hear the wizard bustling around in his... laboratory? Kitchen? Impossible to tell. They might be one and the same. Soon the wizard returned with a small parcel and a bottle. He crouched down near Jace as Chas scrambled to move away from him with an angry glare. +
Henryk leaned against the interior doorjamb with one hand on the threshold. In the next room was the wizard's great scrying mirror, a massive flat crystal against the wall, showing scenes of other places, with a tiny symbol in the bottom looking like a cone with a diagonal line through it. 🔇 +
"If we can save Jace, we must, and the wizard, it's said, can do so," replied Henryk. Chas let out a low growl. "He'll poison Jace and us too! Just being here breathing his air risks infecting us. You know he'll make us liberals too! He might even give us the gay." +
The oozing wound in Jace's side bled fluid slowly onto the oddly swirl-patterned fabric of the couch, bringing with it the awful smell of pestilence. Chas knelt down to check Jace's fever and then whispered, "This is still a mistake! We should leave!" Henryk shook his head. +
The wizard looked the knights up and down, then said, "I'll get some things. Better put him down on the couch." The old man gestured to the longer sitting space and turned to disappear further into his sanctum. Henryk and Chas half-carried Jace to the couch and laid him upon it. +
From the back corner of the room a man emerged, with a thin rim of gray hair and a long blue robe bound by a sash. He wore some kind of slippers that flipped and flopped as he walked, and strange circular wires on his nose in front of his eyes, which glinted as he turned. +
The air seemed... unnatural. There was no scent of sweat, or dogs, or hard labor or sex. Nor the festering rot of a decrepit domicile where the owner had died, or the blood of battle. Merely the faint smell of fresh-baked bread and... flowers? +
The interior of the domicile was unlike any place he'd seen. Soft light emanated from thin staves placed in corners, and the entirety of the floor seemed to be one giant woven rug that stretched wall to wall. Sitting furniture was covered in fine colored fabrics, whole and unstained. +
There was a lengthy pause, then the clunking sound of a heavy latch. "Enter," said the voice cryptically. Henryk looked up and down at the heavy door, then pushed it hard. To his amazement, it opened smoothly and easily. He moved to aid Chas in carrying Jace once more and stepped inside. +
A strange, tinny voice spoke out of the air. "What do you want?" it called out. Chas tensed, while Henryk looked around but couldn't find anyone, only a small grill on one side. "Hello? We are knights of Excalibur Castle. My friend is wounded. We need your help," he called out to the air. +
"Yes," said Chas firmly. "At least he would die a virtuous man, not indebted to this wizard, this... liberal." Henryk sighed. "The burden is on me. I have decided, and I will pay the cost." He knocked on the door with his gauntleted fist. The booming echoed beyond. +
"I still think this is a mistake," said Chas as he hefted Jace and helped hold him up while leaning against the smooth front wall of the domicile, painted with some kind of deep green color. "We should not be asking this old wizard for help." Henryk shrugged. "You'd rather that Jace die." +
The front door was made all of a heavy wood, not the scavenged remnants used in Henryk and Chas's home at the Excalibur Castle Trailer Park. (Henryk once asked what the "trailer" referred to, and his father told him it was because knights spent so much time on the trail, then cuffed him.) +
... the young knight was barely present, his eyes closed, his legs limp, as his friends hauled him toward the domicile at the top of the switchback. The domicile that loomed before them hardly seemed a wizard's manse. Its peaked roof had shingles of a strange, black, glassy material. +
The path would've been an easy one for the two knights, had they not been carrying their wounded companion between them. Jace groaned occasionally, his hands draped over his companions' shoulders, as they dragged him up the uncanny path. A day ago he had been conscious, but delirious. Now... +
Henryk and Chas struggled up the switchback. The path was flat and smooth, with the occasional tiny windblown stone and thin seams here and there, unlike the rough, cobbled streets of their home. Much of the surface was an uncanny uniform gray. +
Feels like we are right on track for one of those fantasy fiction stories where civilization collapses back into a feudal age and the tiny isolated spots of technology are considered magic Like John Christopher's "Sword of Spirits" or Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" or... +
Great writing in CRPGs has central themes that resonate with the player, like: Planescape: What can change the nature of a man? Star Wars TOR: What defines your identity? CP2077: How do we deal with death? BG3: What if everyone fucks?
By positioning himself as the reformer who was going to topple the corrupt emperor, Kirk became a threat to the true believers, and they prove their total loyalty by being willing to do anything to protect the emperor. These power moves play out further as the court (and emperor) disintegrates.
In the case of Kirk vs. Fuentes, Fuentes' side is the True Believers, the total loyalists. But to the mad emperor, the total loyalist is only good because he needs to kill or be killed at the emperor's command, for any reason or no reason at all. +
This feels to me like it's part of the balkanization of the unraveling of the Court of the Mad Emperor. bsky.app/profile/jess... Various factional groups vie for the musical chairs and the role of Heir Apparent, and the knives come out as they fight for legitimacy. +
"Political violence has no place in our country" Ok but have you tried existing here as a person who is queer, or Black, or a woman, or indigenous, or an immigrant, or neurodivergent, or disabled, or
As long as you don't throw it at an ICE agent
Forget it, Jake. It's Microsoft. (MSoft has, like many big international corporations, a very rote "you must work in the office" policy, and some degree of that trickles down)
It ain't great!
I commute to an office 180 miles away, and stay in town during the week, coming home for the weekend. I guess this is kinda how Rocket Man feels.
Modern corporations want to minimize friction: They want the use of their product to be effortless, fast, easy; satisfaction guaranteed and instantaneous. So the illusionist winds up... slowly fading into obscurity until it's just a wizard with a different hat. ~Fin~
The illusionist offers us an insight into one of the design problems that crops up in modern game design. Some old-school designs have a fair amount of friction. It takes some work to make them function. They require a concentrated level of play. +
If you can't play the illusionist at its difficult level, you don't have as much fun, so of course the class winds up bent until it's just a variant wizards that otherwise plays the same. If your DM isn't prepared to play that mode, you also feel useless when your spells don't work. +
Part of it is a change in philosophy of play. Using illusionist spells effectively is hard. You have to figure out the motivations of your targets and then essentially run a con on them, in real time, on your feet, using only some trickery and fake images and sounds. +
In modern fantasy gaming, the illusionist rarely leans into this. Usually they're just wizards with a tendency to make illusionary rocks and monsters. Part of this is streamlining of rules, so the illusionist just works like other wizards. +
The early illusionist is a product of a different style of gaming, in which your class is not just a slight variant with one or two bonus powers, but a different way of approaching your adventuring. Your class determines the kinds of problems that you solve for the party, and how. +
When 2nd edition rolls around, everything from the illusionist spell list is rolled into the mage list. Any mage can do what illusionists can do... and illusionists have access to a subset of the mage list. Suddenly, the illusionist really is just a restricted mage. +
The 1st edition illusionist also had access to spells that magic-users never did in that time, spells like 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 (attack without negating the invisibility!) and 𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 (a great buff/debuff area spell). 𝐵𝑙𝑢𝑟. 𝐻𝑦𝑝𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑝𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛. These are potent spells! +
Illusion spells assume that someone is watching and interacting with you. This could be a hostile interaction, but it could be something else, too. False disguises. Misdirects to make people respond the wrong way. Fake treasures and fake traps. +
In essence, the illusionist is a con man. 𝑃ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑙 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑐𝑒, available to first-level illusionists while for magic-users it doesn't appear until the same level that they get their big area damage spells (level 5), is just the tip of this iceberg. +
While the illusionist has access to staples like 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 and 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑝𝑟𝑎𝑦 for combat, their real strength is in presuppositions—in spells that convince the audience of something they are already primed to see, so that they modify their behavior based on your desires. +
This means that the illusionist fills a different role. The illusionist isn't in your dungeoneering party to deal with annoying dungeon traversal problems with a side of damage-dealing. They are there to alter how encounters progress. +
Magic-users can force a door shut to keep monsters from pursuit, unlock things, fly over terrain and hazards, and of course put enemies to sleep or engulf them in fire and lighting. The illusionist has little of the utility or battle magic: Many spells are tricks and misdirection. +
For some, the illusionist just seems like a low-grade magic-user: A lower level cap of spells with effects that can be disbelieved and avoided. The trick is that the illusionist is playing a different game. The magic-user is a versatile toolbox with a wide range of spells. +
Thinkin' about old-school fantasy gaming, let's ruminate a little on the illusionist. The illusionist is part of the oldest of old school: It appears in The Strategic Review #4 in 1975, with an expansion in Dragons #1 & #12 before appearing in 1st edition AD&D in the Player's Handbook. +
Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice In Chains
You know stuff's messed up when the Holocaust Museum is forced to retract an anti-holocaust message.
I found it quite engaging.
Code for "We're turning everything over to SpaceX to blow up as many rockets as they like"
I really enjoy the feeling that you are experiencing this world, this space, where you have the opportunity to make friendships, a place where you can cross paths with people and come together for a task and then turn that into a connection that lasts.
What's something you enjoy about World of Warcraft? I really like taking the archetypal, classic stories—quest for revenge, duty vs. compassion, family turned to foes, joy of discovery, quest for knowledge, clash of ideologies—and sharing the journey through them with my friends.
Bsky doesn't really have an algo in the same way that Tw/X does. It's kinda hit or miss, it's just completely dependent upon people in your friend circle seeing your posts; they don't seem to push posts to people, it's just the luck of happening to see it when it's posted.
(See also Earth, Air, Fire, and Water)
In the long line of "Every accusation is a confession," the conservative Reagan line of "Government is bad, can never do anything right, and only hurts people" is a conservative policy prescription.
All of these anti-homeless policies always come with "They're homeless because they're drug abusers, lazy, mentally disturbed, violent, antisocial," because of course that's easier than "Homelessness is a policy failure." +
Very normal, definitely not terminally online
I got a mailer from a local rep (and I live in a conservative county so I knew it would be junk) saying that he wasn't afraid to confront the real issue facing our community, ABANDONED SHOPPING CARTS. Which of course is code for homeless people in public view.
That appears in the original version in The Strategic Review, and is retained in the 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook. In 2nd edition it's stripped out and turned into a d10 like other warriors.
You might also roll into the tracking ability a wilderness survival bonus on outdoor exploration checks for things like foraging and getting lost. Just a flat 1-point modifier on those rolls. Anyway, just a random retroclone rumination. ~Fin~
And that's it! The Basic fork really peels classes down to their bare essentials. This all predates two weapon fighting as a ranger feature. This ranger also retains the ability to use heavy armor, because it has to model Aragorn at the Battle of Helm's Deep. Animal companion? Use a spell. +
Like the paladin, the ranger retains some limitations on hirelings and gear. Can't own more than you and one mount can carry. Can't have hirelings at all until you become a ranger lord. No fortress with a value above 200,000 gp, and it must be in a rural wilderness area. +
Then, the ranger has the ability to cast druid spells, at 1/3 of the ranger's level, if they have a Wisdom of 13 or above. This fills in for things like animal handling and survival bonuses, because you can identify plants and purify water and whatnot. +
So the Basic ranger is a fighter subclass that works as a wandering fighter (like the paladin), but you gain the ability to track. While in modern design I'd use some kind of ability check, if you're going old-school, this is a % roll with a table of modifiers. +
So the salient feature of the ranger is their tracking ability. This gets a lot of space in the various early versions, and it's not something you can easily replicate with spells until you get the Locate spells, which have some limitations. +
The Basic paladin retains spellcasting (with a high enough Wisdom), and turning, and the ability to detect evil, and that's about it. Everything else is rolled into the spellcasting. Healing? Cast cure spells. Same for disease. Or bonuses to saves. +
The challenge here is, how do you "Basic-ify" the ranger? The ranger has more than just a bonus on attack rolls (as noted in Chainmail p. 30, where it appears as a line entry under the Hero). Looking at the paladin, you have a couple of things, the retained salient features. +
So with this in mind... what might the ranger class have looked like in the Basic D&D fork? Some retroclones have done this by going back to the old original implementations, like the one that appeared in Strategic Review #2, by Joe Fischer, or the version in the AD&D 1st edition handbook. +
This version of the paladin is very streamlined for the Basic fork of rules. No disease curing or immunity, no laying on of hands, no saving throw bonuses. Presumably you just replicate those by using your cleric spells, if your Wisdom score is high enough. And no Charisma requirement! +
In the D&D Companion set of 1984, from the fork with the Basic and Expert rules, the paladin appears again, this time in a streamlined form. It retains the ability to detect evil, and it casts spells as a fractional-level cleric if Wisdom is high enough, and can turn undead. That's about it! +
The paladin appears in the 1st edition Player's Handbook in a similar form, with the addition of cleric spells, some additional ability score requirements, and some extra text organization. Before the paladin appears again in 2nd edition, it does show up in another place... +
Way back in the ancient days of gaming yore, the GREYHAWK supplement introduced the paladin character class, proudly inspired by Holger Carlsen from "Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson. The paladin appears with its save bonus, detect evil ability, etc., which reappears in 1st ed. +
I figured you would roll your own, since you are after all an expert in that field of gaming
The company that started as Facebook, a collection of pictures of women that Zuckerberg wanted to Zucc, is collecting pictures of women for sexy ideation without their consent? Who could have seen this coming?
"The City on the Edge of Forever" nailed this understanding. If fascists take global power, they are incapable of rising to the challenge of the problems posed by maintaining a global population, and they will self-destruct, potentially taking everyone else with them. ~Fin~
Fashies are congenitally incapable of solving the kinds of difficult problems necessary to handle space exploration. They can barely run a country as an oppressive, corrupt regime of exploitation. Best they can do is suppress a populace for a couple generations. +
Deep space travel, not to mention combat, has a difficulty profile not unlike going to visit the Titanic. You are trying to live in a tiny metal can with an artificial life support system and if anything goes wrong, you all die. One rubber O-ring freezes, your engine explodes and you all die. +
Billionaires concerned with saving money, fashies concerned with shaving time, and sycophants looking for quick approval without understanding the problem cut corners, take the wrong approach, and convince themselves of their invincibility right up until they are crushed in a cheap submarine. +
Fashies, billionaires, and fashy billionaires are convinced that they know better than everyone else. They don't care about "facts," because they believe they are remaking the world according to their whims through some "will to power." Facts tend to disagree. +
Solving these problems requires expertise. You must understand the nature of the problem and devise a solution based on principles grounded in real, actionable, possible technology and organization. If you lack competence, you cannot solve these problems, and people die. +
As human population grows, so too does the complexity of the problems that must be solved for people to survive. You have to clothe, house, feed masses via scaled-up processes. You have to deal with crises like natural disasters and diseases and power usage. Your material problems escalate. +
A signature weakness of fascism is that the people in charge are toadies and sycophants, chosen for their ability to please the leader rather than for any expertise. This means that they don't understand the problems they face and couldn't solve them if they did. Actual competence doesn't matter. +
Thing is, fascists are incapable of building something like that. They always make grandiose plans for how they're going to build a postwar Berlin or geoengineer the Sahara or colonize Mars, but fascism is incapable of doing that, most especially in space. +
It's really common in sci-fi to portray militaristic fascist space empires. They do it in Star Trek: Picard season 2, with the jingoistic, xenophobic, expansionistic fascist future Earth. Pops up in Starship Troopers, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate all in some measure. +
While trying to suss out what happened to history, the Enterprise crew determines that in the altered timeline, Nazis managed to triumph in WW2, and this eventually led to a nuclear war that exterminated all life on Earth. +
Star Trek enjoyers have a lot of reasons to like the classic episode "The City on the Edge of Forever," but there's one tiny bit in it that bears examination in the context of today's events. +
The saying "The dying empire is bringing back what it does in the colonies to the imperial core" is really relevant to this. An attempt to set up a functioning state apparatus will, and must be, smashed by the Feds. They cannot allow people to survive without having to give up money and adulation.
I keep thinking about how we just need parallel institutions, with all the people shed by FedGov moved into doing what they used to do but in a new architecture. Of course the FedGov regulates a lot of this and would never allow it.
@jachilli.bsky.social I was watching The Wire, S1 E9, and Omar walks into a guy's office and hands him a garbage bag full of drugs, and I suddenly remembered the time you told me to use something other than "a bag of drugs" in a piece of Vampire fiction because it was too humdrum