#at least i have time to orient myself before pathfinder?

[dragongirlbunny]

hm.

[thewhiteboardofkanjisan]

Hmmm...how about 1-30? :-P ["I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer to ones you may not have an answer for yet, and so is guessing.]

Hi @prionailurus​!! :D

1. What’s the first game system ( __ Edition D&D, Rifts, GURPS, Shadowrun, etc.) you ever played?

5th edition D&D! I sat in on a Pathfinder campaign once but didn’t actually get to play.

2. What’s the most recent one you’ve played?

Also 5e!

3. What’s your favorite system?

5eeeeeee

4. Is there a system you’d like to play but haven’t?

I’d like to play Pathfinder so I can try the Oracle class out. I’m also interested in another RPG called In Nomine.

5. Are there any systems you’ve tried and did NOT like?

Haven’t had the chance to try any unsuccessfully!

6. Do you have any house rules for the system(s) you play?

Not really? Mostly we have house-handwaves of certain aspects we’re too nooby to enforce, like spell components and rations, and spell prep. That Pathfinder session I watched left me with a house rule I’d love to implement though, that Barbarians can redo a bad roll by punching the table to “pop” the dice.

7. Do you DM/GM for your group?

Occasionally! In my group, I and two others take turns being the DM. Comparing notes without spoilers is a real thorn in the side.

8. Do you say DM or GM?

DM for D&D. I imagine that GM is more fitting for other systems.

9. Do you have a go-to setting?

If I understand the question right, my group’s running campaign is in an ever-expanding homebrewed world of no name, which canonically has an Austria and a New Orleans. There’s a LOT of misty coastal towns, because that’s in the aesthetic of all three DMs.

10. Have you ever run a game, or do you prefer to just play?

I’ve run three campaigns, and there’s a special magic to running, but I do really like playing and being able to get into character. DMing carries a lot of pressure, too.

11. Do you play with game mats and/or minis?

We have a wet-erase mat we keep forgetting to erase and a small set of minis for the party. NPCs and small monsters are played by Monopoly pieces, big bads are amiibos and other kitsch owned by the DM who hosts at his house.

12. How old were you when you first started gaming?

25 c: I’m new

13. How often does your current gaming group meet up?

Weekly, usually, but sometimes we skip a week or two because of scheduling conflicts.

14. How often would you LIKE to meet up for gaming?

Ideally weekly as a minimum. Twice a week would be rad. A week can be a long time to wait!

15. How long do your gaming sessions tend to be?

4 hours min to 6 max. Anything past 5 and people start to disengage and get sleepy because we start in the evening, because scheduling.

16. How long would you LIKE your gaming sessions to be?

I would love to have all-day games, at least for Big Plot Occurrence sessions. With snacks.

17. Have you tried/had any luck with Roll20?

I’ve been trying to connect with a group on there with no luck thus far. I want to use it to playtest some other characters I’ve brewed up.

18. What’s your preferred gaming beverage?

Whatever beer the host is willing to part with, hehe.

19. What are your preferred gaming snacks?

I don’t really snack, we get dinner during our game sessions. Usually sandwiches or pizza.

20. What are your superstitions or rituals regarding dice?

I named a few of my d20s (Rocky, Misfit, Elf One), and I switch between d20s depending on the task at hand. (Rocky is for strength, Elf one is for charisma, Misfit is for attack rolls, etc) I also have a REALLY SHARP d4 from a high-quality set I bought on sale, which I’ve dubbed the 𝕯4 𝖔𝖋 𝕯𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍 and keep it out for poking people when they have bad gaming etiquette.

Other than that, I mostly just put misbehaving d20s away and switch to my first d20, which rarely lets me down.

21. Do you know anyone with really good/bad/weird dice luck?

Yes! My good friend has NEVER rolled well on initiative in all the times we’ve played. He always rolls 8 or lower.

22. What would you say is your alignment?

Chaotic good, I’d like to think.

23. What is the class you’d like to be?

I’d love to be a bard. Magic and music and charm out the wazoo.

24. What class do you think you’d actually be?

Probably a fighter. I’m good at music, but charming I’m not. Brute strength is where I excel irl. (I do play rugby, after all.)

25. What weapons would you wield? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan] (It me!)

Sword! I would love to wield any kind of sword.

26. If you could cast one spell, what would it be? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan​]

Probably Fly, or maybe Polymorph.

27. What school of magic would you specialize in?

Either Divination or Evocation! 

28. If you could have any creature - real or fictional - as a familiar, what would it be? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan​]

Gonna agree with you, pseudodragon is the WAY TO GO! For a real animal, though, I’d pick a klipspringer antelope or a Honduran white fruit bat.

29. What was your favorite character to play? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan​]

My currently-only character, Mariya, a CG half-elf ex-acolyte bard loosely based on Maria from The Sound of Music. Over time she’s grown away from the source material in a lot of ways. Depending on what the DM does with Mariya’s backstory, I might give her an alignment shift to LN and heavily multiclass in warlock for the second half of the levels.

30. Do you tend/prefer to play characters of your own gender/orientation?

I’ll shake it up with gender, but my group’s world tends to operate under the rule that Everyone Is Bi Always. One time a plot-hook NPC swapped genders mid-session with no in-world explanation just to make it a little gayer (Landon the lighthouse widower. Poor fellow. That’s a story for another day.)

31(Which I’m adding because I think you sent me the ask before this one got added).   What do you, primarily, get out of roleplaying? That is, is it for fun with your friends, to experiment with being people who you are not, or something else? [@aetherspoon​]

For me, D&D is both freeing and gives me validation I can sometimes miss in real life. I can be things the real world doesn’t allow, but I can also remind myself that Real World Daisy is talented, a good team member, has ideas worth sharing. D&D helped me make it through my final semester of grad school when a really bad semester-long group project was giving me hella anxiety. (I actually wrote an article for the student newspaper about why business students should play D&D. I’ll share it if anyone wants, though my name’s attached to it, but I’ve totes shared that info on here before so it’s nbd!)

[gmcryptkeeper]

Campaign Grimoire #1

With all things, there is a beginning, especially the campaigns we run.  How we start is often extremely important to how smoothly the campaign ends up running.  So, with that said, I will take a little bit of time discussing my role in the beginning of the campaign I’m currently running.  In this entry I want to go over what made me interested in running the campaign that I am, speak a little on the campaign itself, talk about my recruitment process, talk about my players and the discussion of their characters.  That being said, since this does include information about a Pathfinder Adventure Path (AP), I will do my best to not spoil overly much about the campaign but you should be warned that reading this may give you hints to the AP that (if you’re a player) you should not otherwise have.

Why GM Again?

So, I should start by stating that it has been a little bit since I’ve GM’d last, specifically before I started my venture into graduate school.  I decided that I wanted to make my own campaign after being on a hiatus and would eventually bring people into the world after I felt comfortable with the product.  Even so, I wanted to be able to do something in the mean time, so I chose to pick an Adventure Path from Pathfinder since my group endorsed interest in playing in it.  So, knowing what kind of games I love, I ventured into selecting the Strange Aeons AP.  After all, it couldn’t hurt to dust off the ol’ skills every now and then, right?

Strange Aeons, indeed.

Let’s look at the top down.  Pathfinder is a system that I’m very comfortable with running and playing in.  It has a lot of customizing options for both players and GMs (much of these things can be ported to other systems with a little bit of knowledge, confidence, and the hopes and dreams of small children).  Strange Aeons is a story that is very involved with the Cthulhu Mythos.  Now, if you remember from my introduction, this is something that I’m very interested in myself, something I’m a little more practiced with.  Also, considering the people I was going to be running with, not many of them have played in a horror setting, particularly.  Upon reading into the AP, there is definitely some difficulty there and ways to introduce horror in combat, in social settings, but also atmospherically.  Plus, the more I thought about it, different aspects of the late game make this AP able to be tied into my larger campaign once it’s finished, despite not being on the same world, technically.  I wanted to pick something that would give me hooks into my world later on but something that may not be entirely (initially) connected to my world.

So, important notes: I looked at setting, interconnections into my larger work, confidence, and difficulty.  These were important to me but this may be wildly different for you.

The Pitch

I’ve been discussing getting back into the saddle as GM for a while with my playgroup.  At the time of the pitch, two of our group’s members were running games of their own (one 5th edition, one Pathfinder).  So I cast a wide net among the group and asked who would be interested.  Keep in mind, I had selected what I wanted to run for the campaign.  Now, does that always work?  Not particularly, but I do believe that in order for a good campaign to get rolling, the GM needs to actually be interested in running the campaign.  Additionally, I’ve played with many of these people many times.  After all, we call our group (affectionately) 2′s and 20′s.  I’m sure you can figure out why.

I consider myself very lucky to have this group.  There are many different styles of players that bring different things to the table.  We have a couple of members that formed the core of the group (the forerunners, you could say) and we have inducted more into the group as different campaigns have fired.  I had a pool of about 7 to pull from in the beginning when I needed 4 players.  Fortunately, 4 was not a hard number to accomplish.

Had the situation been different, there are numerous other styles I could have used.  For one, the game store I work at has a lovely posting board for gamers to connect.  I could have sought help through Meetup or other such sites.  Or I could have spent time at the store physically recruiting people if necessary.  This could be an anxiety inducing situation to be in if you’re not overwhelmingly extroverted like myself.  With that said, we could discuss this as another topic entirely in another entry.

The Players

I managed to get 4 hapless fools wonderful associates to play in this AP.  So let’s do a quick run down of my people.  None of these judgments that I’m putting forth are meant to be critical but to show what I know about these people (and often love).

The Polymath: This is a player who I, as a GM, have to be very alert for because more often than not, they are prepared for just about any natural or unnatural disaster that I could throw at them.  This is someone who has a ridiculous knowledge of the game on an integral level and is subtle about it.  He’s very interested in building characters that work almost seamlessly into the plot but with abilities that seem strange, at first, but will ultimately be used to devastating effect.  How often does this happen?  Roughly every game I’ve run or been in with this player.  As a GM, I’m excited to run for him.  He’s very engaged, will come up with an intricate backstory and is someone that I’m very prepared to take the gloves off for.

The Would-Be Hero: This character is, as the title implies, someone who often will step into the heroic role.  This is someone who, in real life, very much believes in being a good guy and generally believes in being honorable.  He’s definitely someone that I’m used to counting on for wanting to be in melee, blazing in a path of glory.  He likes to integrate his character into the plot of the story and responds well to being important to the overall story.

The Synthesist: This player is rarely a player and often a GM.  That informs his ability and desire to make different types of characters that are generally very unique and often either obscure or a couple of mixed classes.  He is someone that is innovative and actively engages with his environment which really pushes me to either prepare a lot of interactable situations in my setting or pushes my improv to accomplish this.

The Green: This title exists for two reasons.  One reason being that she is fairly new to tabletop roleplaying, hence, Greenhorn.  The second reason is that she has a knack for playing nature focused characters.  See, I’m occasionally clever.  She has become so much more confident in interacting with the overarching stories of games and coming up with something she connects to meaningfully with her characters.  Once she’s invested, she can become a major pilot for the party if she feels strongly about what her character cares about.

The Characters

I find it is only natural to talk about the characters following my short description of the players.

Poly/The Occultist: The Occultist character is designed to be a little unhinged.  This character is missing much of his past, only coming in on wisps of insight, only to be consumed by nonsense.  That was the essential feeling the player gave me.  Poly wanted to play a character that had occult origins that would fit well into the game.  The Occultist is an elf who, between some work between me and the player, has a tragic backstory that is marked by trauma that he currently cannot remember.  Lack of memories is a theme to building a character for this AP.  This character specializes in Necromancy and Divination, starting out.

Hero/The Fighter: The Fighter is someone of noble bearing.  He remembers being associated with a noble house and having a noble cause, but cannot remember who were his enemies or what happened to him or his estate.  He is a harsh character who believes that his order, his rules are the ones to be followed.  Hero wanted to play a character that was within his type but he wanted to venture out a little and picked up the Loremaster Fighter.  Someone who is more knowledgeable and inquisitive while still being a fearsome foe.  He chose to become a switch-hitter and definitely capitalized on the “Rich Parents” trait in Pathfinder.

Synth/The Bloodrager: The Bloodrager could be believed to be more beast than man at times, someone who is tempestuous and wild.  However, underneath that frightening exterior lies someone who was created to be this way and utterly broken.  Experiments dot his hazy memories, especially ones of pain, injections, and a laboratory.  Synth has an entire build that he wishes to see how it turns out for this character and made a horrific backstory to back it.  This character will end up having multiple bloodlines but how he originally got them is locked in his mind and something that may be better left hidden.

Green/The Druid: The Druid is someone who is solid and stable, much like the Earth she worships.  She was brought up in a Circle but set out on her own to fight at the corruption that sought to taint the land she defended.  But who are her true enemies and what horror did she hope to vanquish?  Green wanted to stick with a nature oriented class but this is her debut into 9th level casting.  She has a quality as a player that is reflected a bit in this character (based on the creation) that will very much help with this AP.  She is someone level-headed and stable (at least, the Druid believes she is such) and will be a solid anchor for the rest of the party.

The Session Zero

Every game should have a solid session zero in my opinion.  Doesn’t mean that good games cannot come without it but it eases parties and GMs into the game.  It gives the GM more to prepare (the hooks for the characters) and the players to figure out how they’re going to work together.  All of the information I just provided you was provided and developed in this Session Zero.

Here’s the but.  I would have loved to have a formal session zero with a couple of hours dedicated to everyone sitting at the table and focused on this character creation process and plot building.  Despite it being an AP, much of it is determined by the characters background and how I inject that into the larger plot.  The party has a good dynamic of mix a classes and should be adaptable to the encounters that they run into.  However, there isn’t a bunch of communication among party members as to what they were planning to do.

Now, Strange Aeons starts everyone off with the classic “Amnesia Backstory”.  As in, they don’t remember much about themselves except maybe some of their older memories, so they don’t need to figure out how they know each other.  They are thrown together awfully fast in the very beginning of the first book.  However, there could have been other discussions, such as expectations.  This is a big concept for any group.  I did seed that the path would be difficult and that they should be aware that death is something that can come quite swiftly if they’re not careful.  However, not much else was stated globally about expectations, which was a mistake on my behalf.

Why did this happen?  Well, at the time, I didn’t push for it as much as I wanted and I believe my desire to run the game outweighed my patience.  It happens sometimes.  The other thing to consider is that many of us had particularly chaotic schedules leading up to this point (this is an issue that became resolved fairly quickly).  As I previously mentioned, I’m finishing grad school, I’m in an internship, and I work part time at a fantastic game store.  There’s a lot on that plate but I went into this setting aside some time to be able to run this and pull this off.

We were able to handle the major things: 

-How often do we play?

-What time/day of the week?

-How fast should we progress?

-How we will communicate about status of attendance and whatnot for the game?

-Where will game be? (This is easy, it’s always my place).

-A reminder of limitations, what to do about cancellations, etc.

Next Steps

From here, we move on into the campaign itself.  At the time of this writing, we have moved through 4 sessions.  When I post the next campaign grimoire, it will likely address general things of session 1 and 2, followed by an entry on 3, and an entry on 4.  I plan on discussing a little bit about what the party did/how they interacted given the circumstances of their situation but I don’t want to give too much about the game as it may spoil some of you.  I will note the changes I’ve made/improvisations that came about and what was important about the sessions in terms of me as a GM.  But that is a sample of the things to come.  For now, traveler, I bid you farewell.

-GM Crypt Keeper

[thenatedamnz-blog]

“I’m Supergirl!”

So in my ramblings about Bayley the Hugger of WWE fame, I mentioned that I tend to gravitate toward the female versions of various things. I imagine there are several reasons for this.

One is that I do try to be an ally. I want more & better female representation in media. The same goes for minorities, trans-people, various sexual orientations, everyone. Everyone deserves to see themselves in the media the enjoy.

And yeah, I’m not going to lie, there’s  probably a sexual component too. I’m a straight male, and as such, it does make more sense that I’d want to watch more women than men. (And going with the Bayley example, yeah, I think she’s freaking gorgeous.)

But I’m pretty sure I’ve always been like this. Ever since I was a kid, before I had any concept of feminism or sexuality.

The first time I remember this “phenomenon” was when I was about 6 or 7 and saw the Helen Slater “Supergirl” movie for the first time. The memories are fuzzy at best, obviously, but I recall this feeling of just being enthralled. To the point I would flip through the storybook we had of the movie pretty regularly.

Supergirl is pretty much the figurehead for this entire thing, actually. I never really cared one way or another about SuperMAN until I was an adult (even went through a phase in my teenage years where I was “too cool” to like him), but any time Supergirl was involved, you immediately had my attention. When my dad let me read the “Death Of Superman” trade paperback, I first flipped through and looked at any scene that had Supergirl in it (and was very confused when Doomsday punched her into a person made out of purple goo, but you’ll have to google that on your own).

Here’s some more examples:

--He-Man fell under my dad’s “I think it’s stupid, so you’re not allowed to watch it” rule, but I didn’t really care about that one. However, I would watch She-Ra any chance I got.

--My memories of the 80s Ghostbusters cartoon are practically nil, except for the one with the dream monster where Jeanine helped defeat it by dreaming she was a Ghostbuster.

--Like most people, I loved Star Wars as a kid, but some point I got burnt out on it and stopped caring. Then upon reading on a trading card that the original script was going to follow a female character named Leia Starkiller, I spent years thinking to myself “why couldn’t we have gotten THAT movie?”

--As you may have guessed, I enjoyed the HELL out of “The Force Awakens,” and just love Rey to bits. It is one of the few times I have pre-ordered the home release of a movie.

--Speaking of pre-ordering movies, Ghostbusters 2016 instantly became one of my all time favorites. I saw it three times in the theater. That said, if you recast it with all men like the sexists would have wanted, I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as into it.

--At this point, probably 60% of my Pathfinder characters have been female.

--Whenever I play a Pokemon game, again, I’m almost more likely to pick the girl avatar over the boy one. In fact, as a kid, I was SO MAD that my brother was the one to get Crystal as that was the first of the series to give you the option. (My parents forbade duplicate copies of video games. We had to explain the differences between the various versions of Pokemon before they allowed me and my brothers to each have one.)

Heck, even in my relationships, I’d wager that about 55% of the people I consider “best/closest friends” are women.

I’m sure there are a ton more examples of this (such as the fact that I am also a pretty big brony), but it’s late and I’m drawing blanks.I just wanted to write about this, probably at least in part because the Wonder Woman movie is finally out.

Incidentally: GO SEE “WONDER WOMAN”! HOLY CRAP IT’S AWESOME!

Another reason is that I think this whole thing has helped me at least get a small glimpse at what it’s like to struggle with gender identity. While, yes, I’m a man and feel no real desire to change that, the “toxic masculinity” of our society/culture had often had me wondering if there was something wrong with me. One of my Xs even told me that “you’re not really a man,” though that was apparently because I cried when she told me she was going to die within 2 years. (It’s been 2 years and she’s still alive, but that’s neither here nor there, I just still have some bitterness about it.)

Honestly, sometimes I still find myself wondering about this, but almost never in a “something’s clearly wrong with me” kind of way anymore. I just find it kind of fascinating. :)

[mwritesink]

I’ve been on a nostalgia kick and looking back into series that I really really got into and enjoyed in high school (Gundam, Saiyuki, Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac, Ruroken, etc). and that’s also rounded me back to Exalted, which I also started to get into back when I was in high school, which then links up Exalted with the other series and exalting the characters. 

I’ve been having Gundam Wing on the brain lately. I’ve done an exalting of the main Gundam five in the past, casteing them all as Dragon-Blooded (seen here!!), but pre-tumblr I’ve also tried to caste them into the other Exalt Types. my old casting for them as solars was something like Heero = Dawn, Duo = night, Quatre = eclipse, Wu Fei = another dawn, and Trowa being an enigma. I’ve had an epiphany though that brings in all the Solar castes for them recently: that I’ve been overlooking alternate ways to caste them.

Heero: 

This guy is still undoubtedly a Dawn. He’s true soldier/assassin amongst a group of child soldiers. His skills are put into play when he’s fighting, his first instincts are to attack attack attack (See when he accidentally killed a plane full of folks wanting peace becuase the bad guys claimed/Heero believed that it was full of upper echelon OZ warhawks). And even in going around giving restitution to others he thought in terms of attacking: He gave the family of his victims the option to kill him themselves. 

His largest character development, the thing that takes him all 49 episodes and an OVA movie to come to terms with is that he has the option to no fight. That he can put down his guns and live in peace, not just fight for it to come about, or fight to preserve it. That journey would also be an interesting one for a Dawn Solar to go through, becuase they were chosen to be an ultimate warrior amongst ultimate warriors and then the only way they can truly defeat what haunts them is to not fight at all, 

Quatre: 

my first instinct is still to place him as an Eclipse, but thinking hard on him makes him an equal, and perhaps better, candidate for the Zenith caste.

Of the Gundam 5, Quatre comes to the fold with the least amount of experience with combat, war, and violence in general (compare to Heero who was raised by his hitman father and trained from a young age to be an assassin and saboteur, Trowa who was raised by a mercenary troop, Duo who grew up in a slum in active revolt, Wufei who was trained in martial arts from his youth) but he comes out of the war as their leader and primer tactician. this fact in general puts him in the direction of both Eclipse and Zenith, but that’s not a defining reason. The defining reasons is that Quatre’s strengths the whole while is his ability to reach out to people and make them allies.

That core strength could be from someone who ends up as a Zenith or as an Eclipse, what tips Quatre more in favor is how he then expresses it. He puts his faith in people, and inspires them to place their faith in him. He put his faith in Rashid, the leader of the Maganac Corps, tried to defend him. That faith was returned by Rashid giving Quatre temporary command of the corps so they could turn back and attack by the Alliance. Quatre extended faith to Trowa, stepping out of his Gundam to speak with another pilot not even knowing what Trowa would do. Trowa returned that faith, both then in coming out without planning to harm Quatre, and later when he tried to talk to Quatre during the later’s break-down. 

This faith, this compassion, this inspiration, is what marks him more strongly for Zenith than Eclipse, but Quatre would still be baller in either role. 

Trowa: 

Trowa was a trouble for me in the past, but I firmly believe that Trowa would be a Night Caste, if he was a Solar. (Granted I think he’d be a better Lunar, but I’m dealing just with Solar castes for this exercise) He is a master of subterfuge, using constantly evolving disguises of himself in new roles and new places. On top of it, he is also a first rate acrobat. With Night Caste, only second to dawn, many of the ideas that accompany it are combat oriented, which also fits with Trowa and his background with his childhood in the mercenaries, and his teen years as a gundam pilot where one of his most notable contributions was to be a double agent, joining OZ for a brief time to help his captured allies.

Its fairly interesting to me, and my own thinking, that once I hit on the notion of Night Caste Trowa, I wonder to myself how I could have had such trouble with placing him as a Solar. It’s so obvious in hindsight. 

Duo:

On the surface Duo seems an obvious placement; Night caste, stealth master, done and done. But, I have taken to explaining with Solar Castes is as much, perhaps more, HOW you do something, not WHAT you’re able to do. Take two characters modeled after D&D’s Bladesingers/Pathfinder’s Magus class. You could make a facsimile of that class using either a Dawn or a Twilight. But your Dawn Magus is more concentrated on the destructive potential of mixing sorcery and swordplay, where the Twilight Magus would be more concentrated on the mechanics and intellectual whys of mixing the two disciplines. 

Back to Duo. Putting the Easy casting aside, the caste that best suits him is Eclipse. Becuase, yes, Duo is a thief, and a saboteur, and sealthed death on rockets, but what makes up Duo’s character is vows. His first name, comes from his vow to Solo to not forget him. His last name comes from Father Maxwell and a vow not to forget him. His braid is for Sister Helen. Every time Duo introduces himself he makes a vow; “My name is Duo Maxwell, and I never tell a lie.” Perhaps it is an off the wall casteing, to make him an Eclipse, counterintuitive, but the more that I think on it the more I think it fits to him. 

Wu Fei:

Now the last caste left is Twilight. Fortunately, Wu Fei fits that caste rather well, especially with Integrity as his supernal ability. In the Episode Zero manga, it’s revealed that he was a scholar martial artists, not originally trained to be a pilot. The MS pilot was his wife, Meilan. Wufei took on being the Shenlong’s pilot in her honor, to avenge her and to carry on her ideals of justice. 

Wu Fei also tends to over think things, obsess over things. We can see that in his constant focus on Treize, but he takes no delight in accomplishing the rebels’ mission. Operation Meteor is a means to an end, and his end is getting at Treize. This results in a few honor before reason moments for him in the series, such as when he got out of his gundam to attack Treize with his sword. Placing that trait in a Twilight, a caste not well known for participating in combat in a grand way, makes this an interesting combination.