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Check in with your Jewish friends.

See how they're doing re: the recent antisemitic violence in Amsterdam, which happened on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and which I consider to be a pogrom.

Also, here's a FAQ about said violence. Please know this is not me flailing at strawmen. I have had to go through every one of these arguments with one of my best friends today, and I am tired.

This wasn't a pogrom. No one died.

Okay. No one died, that is correct. By some definitions this is technically not a pogrom. Could you please not argue about the technicalities of mass violence against my people? Do you think it will make Jewish people feel better if it's just an act of mass violence?

This violence wasn't antisemitic, it was a response to shitty football fans.

BBC reporting disproves this. Per the BBC, the attackers:

demanded to see the passports of the people they were attacking (national origin)

yelled 'Jewish' as they attacked them (religion)

attacked Jewish people who were British rather than Israeli (religion)

attacked those people because they "helped the Jew" (religion)

Not the shitty football fan. Not even the Israeli. The Jew. There could not be a more textbook "they were attacked for being Jewish". Also there is video of someone being attacked yelling 'I'm not Jewish!' which I am not linking here, but you can Google it if you really must.

But Israeli fans chanted racist things and destroyed Palestinian flags.

Yeah. Some of them did, and that is not OK, and people are right to be outraged about what they did. At least one person was right to fear for their life. That said:

the Dutch football club where this all happened, Ajax, is considered Jewish. For years, per the Atlantic, people have chanted absolutely vile antisemitic things at Ajax events, like "Hamas, Hamas, all the Jews to the gas". Has there been an organized group of Jewish people attacking football fans for this antisemitic chanting? No.

The majority of the pre-planning happened after a single violent incident. Calls for violence, complete with a suggested uniform that people are wearing in videos captured during the violence, were sent out before the game. Before most the racism and property damage.

Lastly: normalizing collective violence against the Bad Jews because they Did Wrong Things makes all of us less safe. It is the basis of antisemitism. It's not as far a step from 'those Jews are bad' to 'all Jews are bad' as you think. Please, PLEASE don't do this if you care the slightest bit about any Jewish person anywhere.

I promise you I really have actually had to address this last one.

This is nothing like Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was totally unprovoked.

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People always find a pretext for why the Jews are to blame. Always. ALWAYS. Kristallnacht is no exception. A 17-year-old Jewish boy killed a Nazi official, and the Nazis used that as a pretext for Kristallnacht. They were like, gawrsh, we didn't plan this (they did), it arose spontaneously because the Jews murdered that official.

As for why people are bringing up Kristallnacht (which I had not in this instance, but I have seen people do): this violence occurred literally on its anniversary. Please be kind to people who are mentally making comparisons.

Please also consider why people want you to give a shit about this before you jump in and argue, or before you decide this isn't as important as Gaza and choose not to reblog. Please consider we have millennia of experience of people doing violence against us that frequently starts just like this, with something plausibly justifiable to test the waters, while people either stand by and do nothing or agree that it's justified. Please consider we are scared. Please be kind.

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plz reblog for science

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Talkin' 'bout my girl, my girl, my girl...

drew a hot 90s punk rock tgirl vampire because nobody can stop me

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Loving this Frankenstein puzzle that I’ve come across which follows the original book storyline.

There’s also a Dracula one apparently

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A day late, but posting a story of when we first got married to celebrate our anniversary:

The thing about having an autistic husband, is as much as I love him, he just is not capable of picking up on behaviors or facial expressions and knowing what they mean. He needs me to speak the words I’m feeling.

Early on, this was a problem. When I was exhausted after work and didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with anything, I needed some time alone.

I would say “I’m tired,” get up and leave a room.

He’d follow.

I would shut a door.

He would open it, and keep talking to me.

I had to actually speak the words, “I would like a little bit of space for a while.”

And then he would say, “Oh.” In a sad voice.

And then I’d feel like an asshole, because he always seemed so sad when I did that. I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him, and I thought I was a bad wife for wanting time for myself. Things were not good.

One day, I came home, and on my desk was a card, laminated. It was simple, black text on white background, in 36-point font. It said:

I love you. Fuck off.

And he took my hands and said the reason he was sad wasn’t that I needed space— he needs his sometimes too, but I pick up the signals and leave him alone.

He felt bad that he couldn’t understand me, and I always looked so uncomfortable and guilty when I told him.

So now I have a card that I can hand to him, any time, and he will understand and go away for an hour and nobody feels guilty.

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Absolute perfection.

One night, you decide to put your phone under your pillow. When you wake up in the morning, your phone is replaced by cash totaling what you paid for your phone. Turns out the tooth fairy takes more than just teeth.

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i'm the guy who writes the books that the protagonist in supernatural horror movies frantically reads somewhere in act ii. job's pretty easy. lot of "legends of vampires have recurred all throughout human history" and "demonologists agree that the quickest way to un-summon a demon is to trap it in a cursed object". no citations of course; they don't pay me citation money. i had to learn html back in the early aughts when everyone started seeking their supernatural info on websites they found via top search engines like FINDLER and WEBSIGHT but that's died down now which is great because i didn't have it in me to pick up css. currently working on a new book about horses that are evil. it's called HORSES THAT ARE EVIL in all caps so the protagonist can find it quickly to yank off the library shelf. it will be published 35 years ago.

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At long last...

...I am designing a roleplaying game with “classist” as a damage keyword.

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Still fiddling with design, but this is the draft cover for my monthly Patreon game, Miserable Secrets. I call Miserable Secrets gothic noir -- it’s all about hardboiled detective stories in a feudal Europe ruled by vampires. @prokopetz also called it “Castlevania-punk,” which I rather adore.

The gorgeous art is by Enrique Meseguer.

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It seems to me that if they’re looking for a non-violence-based solution, and they’ve got prophecy as one of their main areas of power, then, if I were them, I’d want to build on the power of knowing, of revealing, or of being able to warn. This leads to Doctor Who solutions, but also down the Vizzini rabbit hole.

Concept: the Chosen One fell off a cliff and died, and the Sacred Maidens of the Five Elements have decided to give up the whole “empower a sword-swinging meathead to kick ass on our behalf” plan as a bad job and deal with the universe-ending peril themselves. The problem: all of their powers revolve around blessing and prophecy and they don’t have a scrap of combat experience between them, so now they need to figure out how to true-pacifist-run the End of Days.

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Re: whether faith only does the damage you expect it to... it’s complicated.

The short version is that, in the Shadow of Golgotha setting, faith does not make things true. Nor is faith required for holiness to work...

...but what exactly is ���holy,” as a damage type? Because the Church and the state are both run by vampires. Who more or less believe the doctrine they’re peddling.

Okay, but it’s a roleplaying game. You need to know how much damage the skeleton takes. How do you do that?

Miserable Secrets is investigation-driven, and that feeds directly into the combat. So by the time you’re fighting skeletons in a cave, you (the gaming group) are going to have a very good idea what you think those skeletons represent, and so how to apply the damage.

I admit this is playing tricks with semantics and narrative boundaries. But we get to do that in RPGs, which is why I love them. :)

Skeletons are theologically controversial. Some clergy say that the skeleton represents the enduring part of humanity, which will be brought back to life on the day of judgment. After all, many relics are pieces of bone. But other theologians claim that the skeleton, as the innermost part of the body, hidden from all sight until death, represents original sin itself.

 - excerpt from Miserable Secrets, the upcoming bestiary supplement to Rose Bailey’s Castlevania-punk tabletop RPG The Shadow of Golgotha

(If you aren’t following Rose Bailey’s Pateron, you should be.)

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Thanks for mentioning Die For You! You can actually still get the game free at my Patreon without pledging anything. It’s sorta the Proof I Really Can Do The Thing. ;) And also, more people need to run Carmilla games.

The PWYW to fixed-price transition is an odd thing. I’ve found that my stuff gets more attention if it has a fixed price. Like, people talk to me about it more, more downloads, etc.

I agree that the most useful education for RPG design is to play tons of stuff, and read even more. Generally speaking, I find that I don’t usually learn something cool immediately from playing a game, aside from a few standouts like Wushu and Donjon.

But the play experience will float around my head for a long time, and then I’ll go hey, wait, that one moment in that one game is what I want this new game to do, and then it’s off to the races.

im trying to find what steps i should take education wise in becoming a writer or creator for table top games, and because-im-freaking-greed suggested i should ask you. ive considered taking creative writing classes next year at college, but would you have any other ideas on what i should look into?

In my experience, the biggest stumbling block for newbie tabletop RPG designers is insufficient breadth of experience.

There’s a phenomenon within the hobby called the “fantasy heartbreaker”, which is basically when someone who’s literally never played anything other than Dungeons & Dragons decides they’re going to revolutionise tabletop gaming by creating a game without classes or levels, genuinely unaware that games that aren’t D&D have been doing that for forty years. It rarely ends well.

I’m not suggesting you’re in that boat, but it’s a particularly stark illustration of a broader stumbling block: novice tabletop RPG designers struggling to reinvent the wheel because their narrow experience with the hobby has given them some funny ideas about how RPGs are supposed to work and what’s possible to do with them. The only way around it is to get out there and play, preferably as wide a range of games as possible.

So what I’m going to do is list a bunch of free/pay-what-you-want games to help expand your library; reading gamebooks is no substitute for actual play, but it’s a place to start! I make no claims that this list is particularly representative, as my primary criteria here are “I think it’s worth checking out and it’s free”.

Among the Beautiful Creatures (warning: direct PDF link)

Anima Prime

Atomic Highway

Beat to Quarters

Brave Sparrow

Clover

Danger Patrol

Engine Heart

Fate Accelerated Edition

Fate Core

Genius: The Transgression

Hackmaster Basic

Lady Blackbird

Lasers & Feelings

Mutant Future

Mythender

Oculus v2 (warning: direct PDF link)

Perfect Unrevised

Pokéthulhu

Risus

Sea Dracula (not actually free, but only costs $1)

Sufficiently Advanced 2nd Edition

Under My Skin

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (warning: direct PDF link)

WitchCraft

Wushu

I was also going to list Die For You, as it formerly had a pay-what-you-want price model, but I see that it’s now gone to a fixed price and thus no longer qualifies. Worth checking out if you have a few bucks to spare, though. Speaking of technically unqualifying entries, you might also grab a copy of Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack, which is a tabletop wargame, not an RPG, but it’s a great example of squeezing a lot of tactical nuance out of a relatively minimal set of rules. (Also, you build minifigs from Lego - what’s not to love?)

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Dear Creampuff… Happy Valentine’s day. :)

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The most useless thing you can do when cutting off a toxic person is try to convince everyone else that they’re toxic. The toxic person will likely go out of their way to make you look crazy or invalidate you…and it may often work. Just cut the ties and deal with things as they come. Don’t hold it against mutual friends; they may not see it yet, and they may never see it. In the end, you have to do what’s best for you.

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HAVE SOME PENGUINS CHASING A BUTTERFLY

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H.R. Giger’s concept art for “The Tourist,” an early 1980s screenplay by Clair Noto that may be one of the greatest unmade scifi scripts of all time. It’s about a sexy female human-looking alien who is stranded on earth and has to interact with the alien communities that exist on earth in secret. It’s kind of like a darker, weirder, sexier version of Men in Black told from the alien point of view.