111 posts
Zudz - Zudz - Tumblr Blog
So, Trump was the subject of a second assassination attempt. There's much to be said about that, but I'm just miffed that I found out about it from Tumblr... but not a Destiel meme. C'mon, Tumblr. Step up your game.
I like the Inevitables as beings that enforce the way the cosmos should be. Much like the Time Variance Authority in Loki, or any flavor of time cop you like. I also liken them the expressions of paradox in Dr. Who. It not that someone gave the Inevitable a badge and set them to task. Something deeply wrong happened, and the happening spawned them. The Inevitable are the equal, yet opposite, of casualty failure.
Of course, when your setting by its very nature includes wizards, the bar for spawning and Inevitable has to be pretty high. If you can violate thermodynamics as a standard action, you're either up to your eyeballs in the Universe's ire, or the Universe has developed a sense of chill about these things.
I once toyed with a kind of Paradox tracker, stolen from WOD, for D&D spell casters. Mid-to-high level casters would track big upsets on it. Wish would earn an Inevitable point, for sure. And eventually you would rack up enough points that an Inevitable would form and come after you for being enough of a dick to physics. It never materialized, but I still think there could be some fun there.
3e: Winners and Losers In Lawful Space
Planescape is a silly place.
Dungeons & Dragons is a wholeheartedly silly game, and it’s important to remember that what makes it silly is an expansive growth out of a particular root. It is a tree of many branches but thanks to the way that it encourages people to build their own things on top of it, it has become a sprawling kind of folk narrative and generally accepted consensus material that then a company comes along and tries to augment and supplement. Still, as much as a corporate mind is at the head of what gets published, what gets handed to that corporation is going to derive from the mind of a dork who likes D&D. To that end, D&D’s lore is a constant push-pull between the kinds of nerds who like organising lists and the kind of nerds who like to invent new types of dragons they want to have sex with and they’re all trying to integrate one another’s material because that’s how nerds demonstrate mastery over a topic.
The result is that D&D lore is composed of parts that neatly and smoothly fit together and parts that should be airbrushed on the side of a van, and all subjects exist in a space between those two points, on a spectrum. And nowhere is this more evident than in the way that 2e’s setting Planescape introduced elements that 3rd edition tried to hide.
Planescape, as a setting, exists very close to the ‘airbrushed on a Van’ side of things, and it’s extremely obvious when you look at its roots in 2nd Edition. In this space, much of what makes Planescape Planescape was codified. For those of you unfamiliar, Planescape is a setting made up of the idea of ‘planes’ as distinct, discrete universes with their own rules separated not by time and space, but just by barriers or magical boundaries. You know how Narnia is supposed to work, with the wardrobe? It’s like that, but there are a lot more wardrobes and they all go to different places. Think a sort of multi-level Isekai scheme.
Anyway, it’s a setting with like, multiple whole universe-sized worlds, that may or may not have planets inside them, some of which follow a very narrow set of identifying rules, like the elemental plane of Fire, which is full of Fire, or are just like ‘here, but a bit weird,’ like Bitopia, which is a whole plane that is mirrored vertically at a certain height. If you look up in Bitopia, you see another whole country up there – that’s why it’s called that. Also everyone there is bisexual.
Planescape sought to build out more of that structured universe and then in each structured space, fill it with interesting notions. But the structure is a little odd, in that it’s hard to make an infinite number of chairs organise neatly, someone is always putting out one more where they shouldn’t. That means there are tidy diagrams of the Planar cosmology, and then you look inside any of the bubbles in that diagram and find it’s full of gibberish.
It was in 2e that, as far as I know, we were introduced world-wise, to the characters of the Modrons.
There’s a whole writing form that involves referring to Modrons in deliberately obtuse ways, with Modrons being the individual, plural, categorical, and utility terms for this people, but what you need to know about them is that Modrons are weird lil guys that are made out of a basic geometric shape – pyramid, cube, dodecahedron, all the way up to sphere (or down to sphere, depending on who you ask). They are truly perfect Lil Guys, a byproduct of a plane of true law and order which doesn’t in any way cohere to what humans (the people playing the game) necessarily assume about law.
They make a lot of sense in a storybook kind of way where you don’t need to have big answers for what they are or how they work or even how their philosophical bias towards pure lawfulness works. In the world of 2ed, where sometimes things that sound like they should be well explained, clear rules are kinda yada-yada-yada’d in a space that you might imagine is flavour text, the Modrons left a bunch of questions unanswered and seemingly, that was good. It was good that they were heavily ambiguous because what was the life cycle of ‘an orb?’ Any answer made them less mysterious and pushed them away from the oddness that they represented.
Anyway, 3e was an attempt by a serious company to do serious things and that’s why when they went back to talk about the Creatures That Lived In The Lawful Planes, they came up with the Inevitables.
Inevitables are the demons of small minds, writ large. Literally, the point of an Inevitable is to be a Lawful Neutral version of a Demon, an entity that exists purely based on rules, coalesced out of a world made of rules, and with nothing holding them back from expressing that. Each of the Inevitables is meant to respond to a rule in the universe and then enforce it. They are self-appointed near-immortal construct cops, and they’re meant to oppose things and people that break the rules that they, specifically, are meant to care about.
These rules are completely out of whack, though, because one of them is meant to enforce say, justice, another the inevitability of death and another, the way the desert is a fixed ecosystem that nobody should try and change or interact with. And in that case, there are a bunch of plants that the Inevitables are going to have issues with, that don’t seem to be capable of forming complex political allegiances.
There’s a really interesting distinction between Inevitables and Modrons, to me. Modrons are weird and interesting but also, there’s nothing they can do that answers a question. Inevitables are a fun challenge that’s supposed to be present to oppose players or potentially be recruited into an adventure, but not for too long. But Inevitables, the 3e attempt to populate Lawful Planes with A Kind of Guy, sort of fell apart and are now more of a trivia question while Modrons have endured into 4th and 5th edition.
I don’t think there’s some greater, better reason for it or anything. I don’t think that Inevitables failed because they were Bad Design or something. But I do think that for me, the way that Modrons represented Weirdness was much more interesting than the ways the Inevitables sucked weirdness away with their simple, clear consideration of certain things as being part of natural reality.
After all: Inevitables would hunt down people who extended their lifespans because ‘everyone must die.’ But Inevitables were immortal. That’s a pretty interesting thing to juxtapose and maybe a character could struggle with that.
Or maybe they could make a big speaking trumpet and demand that everyone else refer to them as a Spokesmodron which is, in my opinion, much funnier.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
Hell yeah!
I finally built the led circuit today that I intend to use for Pokemon Blue. The difference between this circuit and the one I did for Red is that this one uses 6 leds total as opposed to 9 total. It will also be brighter once installed on the actual pcb (power source here is 3v, final will be 5v). I also, again, love these flexible and easily trimmable pcbs.
Better pics coming soon once this project is complete!
This still isn't a reason to allow Int(Arcana) to be used to detect magic. Which is the initial posts assertion. In fact, it's a very good illustration of the difference between Arcana and Detect Magic. So I'm not really sure what point it is you think you're making, or what you think you're disagreeing with.
No, you can't "do an Arcana check" to see if there's magic around. There's an actual way in the rules to see if magic is afoot, it's called the detect magic spell.
Also, ask me if you can do any kind of check again and I will bite your head off in real life.
Itoi is a weird dude, living his best life. I'm glad he shared part of it with us.
✨The Camera Man takes a picture of a very important memory…✨
Please enjoy my very humble tribute to MOTHER 2/Earthbound, an RPG that impacted people inside & outside of this series, including me.
This game is extremely important to Nintendo history, and I’m very happy it exists!
Thank you MOTHER team for making such a beautiful game!
This week I learned that Chipotle for one (delivered to my office) is about the same cost as tacos and enchiladas for two (picked up on my may home) from a local chain. I'm pretty sure the local place has won some awards. It's forking LEAGUES better than Chipotle. And I get to have tacos with my wife instead of alone in the cafe at work.
Why would I settle for the mediocre option?
I dunno man. I found out today that a subway sandwich is $14 now. A shitty subway footlong sandwich that isn't actually 12 inches long and is occasionally made with expired ingredients and was never a great option to start with. I ate those in high school because I was broke and at the mall a lot.
There are poke bowls in my city from a local place for $16. Super fresh fish and veg, warm rice, more than I can eat in one sitting, for the price of a sandwich and a drink at america's most mid-tier sandwich shop.
Someone in another post said (paraphrased) you used to be able to get something mediocre for cheap, but now the mediocre things cost as much as the nice things so why would you?
I mean, those are words. But they don't really address the rule in question. That doesn't make Int(Arcana) rolls detect magic. > Arcana
>Your Intelligence (Arcana) check measures your ability to recall lore about spells, magic items, eldritch symbols, magical traditions, the planes of existence, and the inhabitants of those planes. https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/basic-rules-2014/using-ability-scores#Arcana > Detect Magic >For the duration, you sense the presence of magic within 30 feet of you. https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/2065-detect-magic It feels weird that OOP's assertion is in any way controversial. It's right there, in the PHB.
No, you can't "do an Arcana check" to see if there's magic around. There's an actual way in the rules to see if magic is afoot, it's called the detect magic spell.
Also, ask me if you can do any kind of check again and I will bite your head off in real life.
I'm sorry, but I need to ask: Why? I'm not aware of any meaningful difference in this context.
No, you can't "do an Arcana check" to see if there's magic around. There's an actual way in the rules to see if magic is afoot, it's called the detect magic spell.
Also, ask me if you can do any kind of check again and I will bite your head off in real life.
I am BEGGING for an open-world game with a functioning train or tram.
Like, you actually have to wait for it in real-time, physically step on, then wait for your stop with the ability to actually explore it and chat with the other riders
No loading screens
And when you aren’t on it, you can look over and see it doing its route without you, picking up and dropping off patrons whether you’re there or not
please i need a video game that captures the joy of free public transit
I think Tumblr will love this
Some people are calmed by thinking of the little infuriating inconveniences of life as trials from god. Like I don't know how serious they really are, but I can see how it could be soothing to think "the lord is testing me" when everyone's in your way and you just want to go apeshit, grab somebody by the ankles and then beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker. I am not one of those people, but I can see the logic in that.
I am, however, infuriatingly stupid. People who know me and have seen how I literally could not help being like this to save my life still admit that sometimes it's hard to believe that I genuinely do not do that on purpose. And now that I think about it, maybe I can just think of myself as the vehicle of these trials for others. Walking up to someone's front desk knowing damn well that they're not going to like what I'm about to say like
"Hello, my name is [redacted] and I am your divinely appointed trial from god for today. Anyway the thing that you've got out there at the front for customers has recently been fucked to smithereens because I didn't realise that this thing that I thought was a handle actually comes off, and the whole thing exploded. Thank you for your patience."
Mario Paintings made by Dave Pollot
Low-level Dungeons & Dragons adventure where one of those big goofy skywhale things has died and crash-landed in the middle of town, and what initially appears to be a simple cleanup assignment abruptly takes a combat-heavy turn when the party gets to find out what feeds on skywhalefalls.
Coming this November: Pokémon Pink Diamond™ and Pokémon Renegade Pearl™
The duality of man is thinking “children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public” and also “damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/“
My guilty pleasure right now is watching luxury hotel reviews and I found this british guy who keeps accidentally clipping into the backrooms.
He's unintentionally making the best liminal horror content on youtube
Based on a submission from @sananaryon
Check out Your D&D Stories on Tiktok and Youtube!
If you can't be bothered to learn the difference between a rock and a mineral, well...
Based on a submission from stubeardsly.
Want me to doodle your D&D party? Commissions are open! Check out my profile for the posting, or e-mail yourdndstories at gmail subject 'Doodles' for more information.
we need to bring an end to the nostalgia industrial complex
A master to his action-hero trainee says, "Your movements are sloppy. You lack awareness of your body when you fight. Your hands move and yet you do not hold them in your mind's eye. Come. We will remedy this."
And then the master paints his trainee's fingernails and orders the trainee to complete a series of complicated tasks without smudging the nail polish.
Now one thing I find really stylistically interesting about Batman Beyond, is that a lot of the mechanisms by which the supervillians do their thing come part-and-parcel with the cyberpunk setting, rather than being an aberration resulting purely from the superheroic genre elements. This is the future of a quote-unquote "present-day" DCU, meaning that they've superficially addressed the question of why all the cutting-edge supertech used in the cape scene never seems to see mass adoption by the civilian sector- forty years later, it has. This means that It's never hard to grok where any given villain is getting the resources necessary to execute their gimmick; these people are flashy by our standards, but they live in a world where everyone has access to flying cars and antigravity drones. Half these people are doing the cyberpunk equivalent of going killdozer with repurposed industrial equipment, or kludging together something with off-the-shelf stuff from radio shack, or mounting a machine gun on a technical truck, and literally in the middle of typing this sentence I started the episode where there's mass-market off-the-shelf animal gene-splicing that would have been a whole-ass individualized origin story in the time of Batman: The Animated Series. Even one-off mutants like Inque and Blight are well-understood within the context of the setting, to the extent of Inque being able to make a knockoff of herself on the go.
This is dystopic. Beyond the genre-typical surface-level megacorp domination of society it's dystopic. On the meta-level it's the same dynamic as Superman: The Animated Series, where the reason there's a sudden uptick in weird costumed crime concurrent with the protagonist's debut is purely Doylistic- the hero needs punching bags. But within the logic of the setting, there's nothing special about Willy Watt's decision to go full Carrie using a hijacked construction robot besides the fact that he had somewhat easier access to the thing than the average school-shooter. Spellbinder being able to put together functional illusion-and-mind-control tech on a high-school counselor's salary- when his entire complaint is that he isn't being paid enough- implies that the main barrier to anyone else pulling the same brainwashing stunt is that nobody else thought to. Shriek's sound suit might be more a more roundabout demolition tool than dynamite, but it's still powerful enough to bring down buildings and he created it as a fly-by-night contractor. The consumer tech base is evolved to the point that regardless of when Batman shows up, shit like this should literally never not be happening- they're past an inflection point. I remember Syndrome from The Incredibles having some kind of line about this