blaiveruse

[blaiveruse]

It's Elephants Foot Friday!!!!

RB to instantly receive 8000 roentgens of radiation

[blaiveruse]

tolkien fans are insufferable because you'll agree to watch the movies with them and then seven hours in they'll say "omg my favourite character is about to appear!" and it's a fucking siege weapon

[blaiveruse]

what a dogshit fucking year for the internet archive god damn

first finally losing that trial and then getting pwned that thoroughly

guhhh

[blaiveruse]

X

[blaiveruse]

commission for @nightrainsoldier :D

[blaiveruse]

[blaiveruse]

remembering that octopus brains are donut shaped cause their esophagus goes thru the middle of their head and sometimes they die from brain damage from meal too big, and saying a long prayer before bed every night that if something like that happens to me i will be able to handle it gracefully

[blaiveruse]

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

[blaiveruse]

are they real in other ways? could see stories about a powersuit clambering about with only the corpse of a pilot aboard, neural interface working when it shouldn't.

are there any old-world ghosts still around in amber skies? Or, if ghosts aren’t real in the universe, have any old-world ghost stories lasted the test of time? Could one still hypothetically summon Bloody Mary if they had a mirror?

Ghosts aren't real, not like that

[blaiveruse]

how to explain to non-americans that the better call saul ads aren’t exaggerated for comedic effect they are super normie

[blaiveruse]

energy policy would be much better if we still had a tradition of animal sacrifice I think. people would be way more chill about nuclear energy if they could see a large and proud bull being ritually sacrificed every month or so at the base of the cooling towers to keep the plant safe

[blaiveruse]

hey guys, what do you think of my dinner?

(choose your words carefully)

[blaiveruse]

A magnificent old beech tree surrounded by wild garlic in Wexford, Ireland. Hollow inside, it must be a couple of 100 years old

[blaiveruse]

Feeling the need to mention In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas, game system relying mostly on the "Unique Multiple" table for difficulty (pick the column according to your skill and the line according to the difficulty, and you got the roll to beat) and thematically appropriate d666 rolls.

Here's a tabletop RPG history question, and also an etymology question if your nerdery bends that way.

d66 tables – as in "roll a six-sided die twice, reading the first roll as the 'tens' place and the second roll as the 'ones' place, yielding a number in the range from 11 to 66" – have been around at least as early as 1977, when the Starships book for classic Traveller used them to randomly generate trade goods for players to buy. However, the term "d66" wasn't yet being used to describe them – the book's text simply describes in detail how to roll on them each time such a table appears.

Conversely, we know the term "d66" was being used to describe this type of random lookup table no later than 2004, because several popular Japanese indie RPGs which came out in that year use it. However, none of these games seem to have originated it – the way they're using it suggests they're dropping a piece of jargon that was already well established at the time.

So the question is: what's the earliest tabletop RPG that specifically uses the term "d66" or "d66 table" to describe this type of random lookup roll? i.e., not "d6/d6" or "d6,d6" or any alternative verbiage, but "d66" specifically? It has to have been published in or before 2004, and (probably) not earlier than 1977. No speculation about which games might have used it, please; if you're going to suggest a candidate, be prepared to cite a specific title and page number.

[blaiveruse]

whenever i see that post about swapping female characters with male ones in video games i always think about this

[blaiveruse]

sometimes I remember how on the last day of my high school latin class our teacher had us gather around his laptop to show us latin memes on tumblr and my best friend and I just gaped at each other in abject horror. we couldn’t figure out if our teacher was just showing us memes on a Fun Website He Had Found or if he was a tumblr user for real. but he knew how to navigate it. years have passed but it haunts me. he could still be out here

[blaiveruse]

ya'll who's up for group meowing