#A-4E

[usafphantom2]

A-4E-1154211-BA5 by Michel Klaveren

[ghostwarriorrrr]

A sunset view of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II

[looceyloo]

Been meaning to do a proper portrait of Dana for a while!

Dana was my very first D&D character who became my first Tav as well! She was a 4e Fey pact warlock whose patron was Sehanine Moonbow, so it was an easy switch to Selune.

Her mother was an Elven warrior who was sworn to protect sacred forests of Sehanine/Selune, but she was raised by her father, a wizard, in Baldur's Gate. Despite having no memories of her mother, and her father discouraging her from getting mixed up with deities and magic, Dana was naturally drawn to the moon. After her father's death, she set out to find herself.

She was the perfect Tav for a Shadowheart redemption/romance campaign!

[elven-butts]

it's her birthday 🥺

[wolfsnape]

Qu'on aime ou pas la nouvelle adaptation du Comte de Monte Cristo, la plus belle chose qui en soit ressorti, c'est l'excitation générale des ADOS autour du LIVRE ! J'ai jamais vu autant d'élèves venir me voir au collège pour me parler d'un "super classique qu'ils ont commencé pendant les vacances, je sais pas si vous connaissez madame, ça parle de VENGEANCE" avec des étoiles dans les yeux comme ça. Donc merci le cinéma français et merci Pierre Niney

[funkwitz]

Ermengard Helvithra, Bane of Serpents

[nauteno]

✒️Inktober2024 Day15 to 18 Guidebook/Grungy/Journal/Drive(I skipped day14🤪)

[makapatag]

despite it all, i still think a large contingent of ttrpg players would be served well by playing a skirmish wargame

[everybodyknows-everybodydies]

pacing the room. Orsimer using the suffix "-wife" as a gender-neutral community title indicating one's functional social position rather than an exclusively marital term. ex: "forgewife" meaning a master blacksmith, under whom aspiring blacksmiths train; these are the people overseeing your most important smithing jobs and making sure your up-and-coming smiths are just as well-versed in fine detailing as they are in practicality and function. a community wife is therefore an authority figure of a kind, yes, but also one who has chosen to give as much of themselves as they can to the community IRT their specific skills; community members who hold a level of authority necessarily have a corresponding responsibility to their people.

orcish communal living requires a level of bracing yourself against your neighbors/allowing your neighbors to brace themselves against you that differs from more individualistic societies, which necessitates that the nuclear family be less of a rigid structure. children are the responsibility of every adult - you get just as much instruction and discipline and love from your fifty not-blood-related aunts and uncles as you do from your mom and dad. who you go home to at night is your individual thread in the many-stranded rope that makes up the community; if someone in your household needs help, then, you're their most immediate line of support. taking on the role of a wife (again, used as a gender-neutral term) in the context of a marriage therefore is saying "I choose to share first responsibility for your wellbeing."

this distinction leads to some interesting intercultural miscommunication - an outsider unfamiliar with orcish culture hearing about the existence of a forgewife, huntwife, herdwife, etc., assumes the title is being used in the way they're familiar with and that the chieftain has several wives by marriage; an orc unfamiliar with outside cultures learns the word "housewife" and assumes the title is being used in the way they're familiar with.

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

Yeah this isn't part of the tournament this is just for my sake. IMPROMPTU BATTLE FOR MOST SEXY ORC

5e Gray

5e PC

5e Claw of Luthic

4e

3e

2e

1e

[usafphantom2]

A-4L-145128-VC2-OCEANA-APR76 by Michel Klaveren

[ghostwarriorrrr]

🇹🇷🔥 Turkish Air Force - F-4E 2020 Terminator

The F-4E 2020 Terminator represents a significant leap forward in the capabilities of the Turkish Air Force. This comprehensive upgrade enhances the venerable F-4E Phantom II with modern Turkish-made weapons systems, showcasing Türkiye’s commitment to self-reliance and advanced military technology.

Background

With a storied history dating back to the 1960s, the F-4E Phantom II has been a pivotal player on the global stage of air combat. Serving multiple nations and seeing numerous conflicts, the Phantom carved out its place in aviation history as a versatile and rugged aircraft. Türkiye’s decision to upgrade this aircraft stems from a strategic imperative to leverage existing assets while infusing them with cutting-edge technology to maintain relevance in modern aerial warfare. The 2020 Terminator program is the Turkish Air Force’s ambitious initiative to retrofit these fighters with state-of-the-art systems.

Strategic Importance

The ability to exert air superiority and conduct precision strikes is paramount in a region marked by dynamic security challenges. The F-4E 2020 Terminator’s enhanced capabilities contribute significantly to deterrence, and the demonstration of Türkiye’s advancing aerospace industry serves both a strategic and diplomatic purpose.

Upgrade Overview

The 2020 Terminator upgrade, realized by Turkish Aerospace Industries in collaboration with ASELSAN, constitutes a multifaceted improvement over the aircraft’s original design. It touches every aspect of the aircraft’s systems, bringing its avionics, armaments, and electronic warfare systems into the 21st century.

Avionics:

The modernized multi-mode pulse Doppler radar extends the aircraft’s detection range, allowing it to lock onto and engage targets from greater distances. Integrating a Hands-On Throttle-And-Stick (HOTAS) system enhances pilot control, minimizing response time during high-stakes manoeuvres. Color Multifunctional Displays (MFDs) replace outdated gauges, providing pilots with real-time data visualization for improved situational awareness.

Armament:

The Terminator’s weapons suite has been revolutionized with a mixture of Western and indigenous munitions. Long-standing armaments like the AIM-9X Sidewinder are joined by Türkiye’s own precision-guided munitions, such as the SOM cruise missile, capable of striking strategic land and sea targets with formidable accuracy. The UAV-230, a domestic innovation, represents the pinnacle of Türkiye’s missile development, offering supersonic ballistic delivery of a range of warhead types over substantial distances. The BOZOK, MAM-C, MAM-L, and Cirit missiles exemplify Türkiye’s expertise in laser guidance and smart munition technology, enabling the Terminator to engage and defeat a broad spectrum of target profiles with unerring precision.

Electronic Warfare:

To contend with the contemporary battlefield’s electronic warfare environment, the F-4E 2020 Terminator incorporates an advanced Electronic Support Measures (ESM) system for rapid threat identification and an Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) suite to confound hostile tracking systems. Moreover, chaff and flare dispensers have been integrated to provide decoys against incoming missile threats, enhancing the aircraft’s survivability in hostile airspace.

Operational Capability:

The F-4E Phantom II, transformed by these integrated systems, emerges as a multirole platform capable of dominating beyond-visual-range air-to-air engagements and precision ground-attack missions. It can operate in complex electronic warfare environments and deliver various ordnances based on mission requirements, making it a flexible asset in the Türkiye Air Force’s inventory.

Significance:

The F-4E 2020 Terminator project is a hallmark of Türkiye’s aerospace ambition and its push toward defence autonomy. By retrofitting and modernizing its Phantoms, Türkiye maximizes the value of its existing fleet while also establishing a foundation for future indigenous aircraft development projects.

Munitions Details:

The advanced, indigenous Turkish weaponry integrated into the F-4E 2020 Terminator underlines a significant shift toward self-reliance in defence technologies. Each munition type brings unique capabilities that enhance the platform’s lethality:

UAV-230: A domestically-developed ballistic missile, this supersonic weapon delivers high-precision strikes at long ranges, challenging enemy defences with its speed and reduced radar cross-section.

BOZOK: The versatility of this laser-guided munition makes it ideal for engaging both stationary and moving targets with high precision, ideal for close air support.

MAM-C/L: These smart micro munitions are designed for tactical flexibility, allowing for precision targeting in complex engagement scenarios, from anti-armour operations to counter-insurgency roles.

Cirit: A highly accurate laser-guided missile system designed for low collateral damage, Cirit is adept at striking soft and lightly armoured targets with pinpoint accuracy.

SAGE Munitions: TUBITAK SAGE, Türkiye’s leading defence research and development institute, has contributed a range of munitions enhancing the Terminator’s operational capabilities across various domains.

Conclusion:

The upgraded F-4E 2020 Terminator is a testament to Türkiye’s determination to retain a competitive edge in aerospace and defence technologies. The integration of modern avionics, armaments, and electronic warfare capabilities ensures the aircraft’s continued relevance in modern air combat, and its presence in the skies serves as a deterrent in a strategically complex region.

[redwizardofgay]

I love this new age of d&d where wotc can't go three months without committing some new act of cartoonish, corporate evil.

Like WHAT is happening over there?

[wanderingnork]

I keep reminding myself that not everyone has read every possible githyanki/githzerai related source going back to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio. Not everyone has this level of Special Interest. Not everyone is actively trying to track down good hard copies of most of these books. Nor is anyone obligated to do so.

So here you go: I'm going to explain why "githzerai good/githyanki evil" is completely reductive, not in line with the lore, and would be ridiculous to add to BG3.

The githzerai are far, far, FAR from saints, and including them in BG3 would just muddy the waters further. They aren't just running around being the good to the githyanki's evil. And never have been. They've been chaotic neutral since the Fiend Folio, and they did not become Chaotic Good in the years since. In fact, I'd make the argument that, based on their canonical behavior right up to the present, "chaotic evil" would be an appropriate alignment.

Back in second-edition D&D, in the Planescape Book of Chaos, there's an entire section on a credible rumor that the githzerai are working on a ritual that will allow them to pull githyanki out of the Astral Plane into their city so they can "punish them for their evil." (Page 76, if you're curious.) Dragon magazine #306 (an official source), there's an article entitled "Killing Cousins." It details the gith-attala, or...cousin hunters, githzerai who specialize in hunting down and killing githyanki. They go after githyanki anywhere, but in particular strongholds on the Material Plane. As of Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (again, official source), it's explicitly stated on page 305 that the githzerai are "always on the lookout for githyanki plots to foil and creches to exterminate."

If we encountered githzerai in BG3, the most likely place to do so would be outside the creche, planning an attack that would have targeted eggs, hatchlings, and children.

The githyanki aren't coming from a place of moral good. But neither are the githzerai. Simplifying it down to good vs evil does the entire story of the species a disservice.

[talenlee]

4e: I Like the Ardent

One of the elements of Dungeons and Dragons as a game system that I hold fast to as one of its greatest strengths is the nature of the class-species based system where a player is immediately invited to create a character the second they hear about the basics of the system. To this end, there is a design space in D&D where the classes in that class system regard the potential power carried in a name that meaningfully explicates what they do. Class systems, broadly, recognise the value of names for what a class is, because that conveys tone for what a class does. A Barbarian and a Fighter aren’t meaningfully useful classes but when positioned as game systems, one of them is immediately more technical than the other.

Even if, yes, I’m sure, Berserker is the more proper term.

Anyway, to this end, a D&D character class cares about what I think of as ‘name space’ – the kinds of things you can name classes in order to make those classes compelling, interesting and memorable, the handles that players can get a grip on. This means that some titles, like Wizard, Bard, Rogue, Sorcerer, the 90s idiot’s allure of The Ninja, have value and weight to them and you can almost always directly tie the quality of a class to the name it gets, as that’s a sign that someone had a real clear idea and wanted to do something. If the weird is generic (the Seeker) or completely obscure (the Factotum), then you were odds on dealing with something that was not designed with a strong class fantasy and were about to be in for A Bad Time that was maybe interestingly broken.

And then there’s the Ardent.

Ardents are a type of support character, a Leader in the context of D&D 4th edition. While by no means their first appearance in the game, 4th is the place where they got good. 3rd edition Ardents worked in a way that I will generously call weird, and were positioned as a psionic healer and therefore in direct competition with the Cleric, one of the best classes in the game that could always manage healing as an afterthought. Not a good look there at the best of times, especially with the strongest virtue of the psionic system of 3.5 being ‘guess what rules oversight I get to dance in.’

The simplest description for the Ardent is that they’re a melee psionic supporter that leads by example and expresses emotions hard. It’s a bit of a hard class fantasy to put into a single word, right? You’re a feeler. Wait no that’s bad. You’re an emotive? Nope, that won’t do it, either. You can tell Ardent is a rough word to use since it shows up in the flavour text of dozens of other things and the Paladin even gets a starting power called Ardent Vow.

Thing is once this idea is set aside, the actual mechanical package of the Ardent absolutely rules. For a start, it’s a melee weapon based Leader whose primary attacking stat is Charisma, and whose skills back that Charisma up. You can play a skulking streetwise Ardent or a sincere politician Ardent or even just a walking threat Ardent, they all have the compatibilities. They also rely on a big weapon, meaning you get some of that anime hero vibes of a character with a huge weapon leaping into combat to have a big impact.

Because their primary focus was how things feel they could put a lot of different emotional impacts on the kinds of moves they had. That could be something like leading your friends in a direct charge against an enemy or sometimes it could be about psychically dragging your enemy towards you so every friend you have gets to make an attack on them along the way like it’s an Assist Strikers spice reel from the attract mode on an arcade.

Ardents had a special ability that fired off when they got bloodied, which was rarely worth worrying about. They had another ability that change how you related to opportunity attacks, too – either you were better defended against them (prompting you to be more reckless about how you moved), you were better at dealing damage with them (and therefore became more mindful about forcing opponents into positions to deal with them) or you got to deal more damage when you got hit by them (in which case you were suddenly an immense idiot trying to get whacked on the snout all the time in combat just so you could retaliate with nova spikes).

They also grew well. See, they were a psionic class, which meant early on you picked some at-will powers and then instead of getting encounter attacks, you swapped those at-wills for other at-wills and got instead power points to choose how to fine-tune your powers for points in combat. This could lead to things like a slow burning opening turn setting up a late-combat nova, or vice versa, or maybe you’d find you had one power you loved to use all the time and focused on using it, with your other powers as niche, sometimes fooders. As an example, Demoralising Strike is a power you start with and, using no power points, just gives enemies a -2 to defenses when you hit with it. If you augmented it though, it would impose a penalty of -X, where X is 1+ your con mod, so in some cases, -5, or -6. This is a big swing and makes things very easy to hit and paints a very broad target.

On the note of painting a target, they also get the power Forward Thinking Cut, one of my favourite 4th edition powers ever. Used just on its own it’s a solid melee attack that gives everyone adjacent to you +1 to hit. That’s a perfectly reasonable power on its own. It can be augmented once to allow a higgledy-piggle side-step charge, but then it can be augmented a second time to instead allow two other characters to come with you on the charge. This kind of flexibility delights me, where it goes from a serviceable every-time power and then upgrades into a power for transporting people into the fray at the very start of combat.

It’s such a cool class about creating cool feeling moments.

Shame about the name.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[dragonkid11]

Heavy Gear, the 4th edition RPG book, by Dream Pod 9, is set on the world of Terra Nova and beyond where mini-mek known as Gears roam the battlefield, play as an inhabitant of Terra Nova, or as members of the Invaders from Earth and its subjugated worlds, and decide the fate of Terra Nova itself!