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queersatanic · 5 months ago

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“The Church has been the best friend Satanism has ever had as it has certainly kept us in business all of these years!”

—Anton LaVey, probably

While, yes, if your background is the authoritarian, nationalist, slaver Christianity of the U.S. Republican Party and its power worship, saying, “I desire the opposite of that!” makes sense.

But if you’re attracted to Satanism for its negation of Christian Nationalism and power worship, you might be surprised to discover that modern Satanism springs from the power worship of one Howard Levey, better known as “Anton LaVey”, who plagiarized a substantial amount of his book The Satanic Bible from the proto-fascist work Might Is Right by Arthur “Ragnar Redbeard” Desmond. (Oh, that’s another reason not to become a Satanist: there is an awful lot of pressure to adopt a new silly name like “Damien Nightblade” or “Lilith Evenstar”). It may surprise you to find out that people who worship power chose to take the mantle of a guy whose defining characteristic is “losing a power struggle against omnipotence,” but here we are. Actually, Redbeard’s biggest issue with Christianity was the egalitarianism, kindness, and — no joke — Jewishness of it.

LaVey loved the bigoted book, though; he re-used whole passages from it without attribution or quotations and agreed with its fundamental criticism of Christianity as a weak and hypocritical ideology — that is, as insufficiently devoted to dominating others without guilt.

Anton LaVey’s Satanism even self-describes as a “law and order philosophy”; no matter how much LaVeyans try claim that his ideas were pro-queer, that rings a little hollow when, in 1966 and today, much of the law itself is animated by anti- queerness. When the advice is to stay in the closet out of “pragmatism”, that just sounds like what it is: bootlicking and cowardice. In opposing this, we don’t misunderstand LaVey’s Satanism; we understand it very well and dislike it.

Of course there are other Satanisms. LaVey’s Church of Satan is atheistic, but the breakaway group Temple of Set founded by Michael Aquino in 1975 believes in a literal supernatural deity they can invoke. So does the Joy of Satan and Order of Nine Angles. Also, all of those other satanic groups (and more!) are straight up Nazi orgs, or “esoteric fascists” if one wants to be most accurate.

For unaligned theistic Satanists / demonolaters / Gnostic Luciferians, etc. — it’s a crapshoot. There are many delightful antiracists / antifascists who will call upon literal supernatural entities. But when some people say, “I wish to invoke the name of the most evil and destructive forces in Christian imagination!” they don’t make their targets the existing social order; rather, they target those already most vulnerable and despised.

“But!” you may say, “Aren’t you forgetting The Satanic Temple? That’s the good one that does things like helping people get abortions, isn’t it?”

No, we are not forgetting “Scientology for Mall Goths.”

TST is owned by multigenerational landlord scion Cevin Soling (“Malcolm Jarry”), a failed cargo-cult messiah who also hates (integrated) public schools. The other owner is Doug Misicko (“Doug Mesner”, “Lucien Greaves”) who has been outright effusive about fascism and got along well with white nationalists but mostly just defends them now in the name of “free speech.” Misicko also has advocated for forcible sterilization based on IQ to prevent “dysgenics.”

Those men wholly own, jointly and separately, a half-dozen for-profit and tax-exempt corporations whose finances they keep hidden. There’s more, but no, we aren’t forgetting about The Satanic Temple.

In short, lots of people who were angry at Christianity — for completely valid reasons! — have called themselves “Satanists” over the years, but the ones actually in control of the largest explicitly Satanic organizations have been, at best, right-libertarians and classical liberals. Often the Satanic orgs are even worse and will tolerate much worse; their only virtue is their smallness and relative inability to harm others. There’s nothing “cool” about being a Satanist. You are surrounded by many absolute douchebags and pricks, as well as plenty of edgelord, “ironic” fascists who turn out to actually whole-heartedly believe all that shit. There is no benefit to being a Satanist and lots of downsides.

Satanism is cringe. It’s historically racist. It’s sad and awful.

Do not become a Satanist.

(A Case Against) Identifying with Satanism in the Modern World

First, let’s make sure there’s no misunderstanding.

Most Satanists do not worship or even believe in a literal, supernatural devil. It is absolutely not the norm for Satanists to abuse or ritually harm children or animals; if anything, less than the general population, even. Satanists do not have much institutional power or influence in the world; most of what you hear along those lines eventually ends up being thinly-veiled antisemitism, frankly.

So who are Satanists, really? Mostly we’re just regular folk with some religious trauma.

If you’ve been raised by Christian reactionaries and particularly if told that you personally are evil because you have typical intrusive thoughts and human feelings, it’s going to mess you up. Or maybe you have an understanding of your own body, gender identity, and/or sexuality that your Christian family and church disapprove of. It can be quite natural to abandon trying to live up the expectations of those who will always hate you. When you notice that family members can justify abuse, rooting for genocide, and calling rank cruelty the way of heaven, it’s not surprising if you are one of so many who echo Huck Finn in saying, “All right then. I’ll go to hell.”

When you have watched those who say they are of-God make for years a convincing case that Satan is the logical and compassionate choice, why would a thinking, caring person not say, “Yes, I am of the devil. Be Gay, Do Crime, Hail Satan”?

Yet you should resist this temptation.

#church of satan #the satanic temple #joy of satan #temple of set #order of nine angles #scientology for mall goths #satanism #satanists #Anton LaVey #Lucien Greaves #Ragnar Redbeard #Might Is Right #The Satanic Bible

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bestworstcase · 4 years ago

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what were the non-saporian Zhan Tiri cults' reactions to her disappearance and continued absence? is the role demanitus' played as well as like imprisoning scions wildly known across the continent or do other places have different understands of why this once super-hands-on god has been silent for so long?

it’s pretty widely known that demanitus, uh, yeeted zhan tiri out in part because he got her scions after he got her and they all were. not quiet about this and in part because the current epoch (the Peaceful Era [PE] in common parlance or Sīnghohār [SL] if you want to make a pointed anti-Demanitus statement when you’re dating something jkslf) began with zhan tiri’s banishment. so its like - gjklsjlkdf i hate making this comparison but - its similar to the BC/AD distinction where even if you’re not christian, you probably know BC is ‘before christ’ and AD is after the alleged birth of christ. in bitter snow land the sorchān calendar is very widespread and regardless of your personal feelings about the demanitus-zhan tiri conflict, if you come from a culture that uses the sorchān calendar, you know SE/CHL/SHL is the ~30,000 year period after dódhanē (which marked the end of the Lost Era/Cahērohār) and that 0 PE/SL is the year immediately following zhan tiri’s banishment.

what IS uncertain however is exactly... what happened to zhan tiri. is she dead? is she trapped in another realm? is she imprisoned somewhere in this one that she can’t escape from? is she trying to come back while not being able to or did she just kind of fuck off after demanitus got rid of her? can we bring her back? is she actually still around but so shattered that she’s now unrecognizable as zhan tiri (ie did demanitus do to her something similar to what she did to ri ni’n)? no one has any idea exactly what he did or how he accomplished it. there’s been tons and tons of debate about this for centuries and of course it’s all happening against all this. just extreme grief and confusion and panic, and in the first few decades of the current era all that was exacerbated by demanitus waging essentially a war against zhan tiri’s scions and cults. i think there is still even seventeen hundred years later a very deep vein of trauma running through the cults that managed to survive, because it wasn’t just losing zhan tiri it was also the scions getting picked off one by one and the cults themselves, having been completely stripped of divine protection, being targeted both by demanitus himself and also by cults of other gods who were now looking to displace them.

(i mentioned in another post today that citrifola’s government is a joke and it’s a barely functioning country and a lot of that is because citrifola used to be the stronghold of the hrv and like saporia was a theocracy - like in saporia, when zhan tiri was banished, the establishment of the ternary endured and her ‘neighbors,’ ie char malách and cathay, more or less continued to be respectful of her spaces and didn’t try to like, take over her house so to speak. cathay did stop observing some of the tenets of their Arrangement that she didn’t like, but she didn’t attack the syconium or anything like that. whereas in citrifola the hrv was surrounded by cults of ikhydre and ferr and morskesh and the vaettir and so on, and it was a kind of blood in the water situation, a vicious free-for-all battle to carve up this newly unguarded real estate and the whole nation just got ripped apart and never really recovered.)

and of course the logical thing to do is ask other gods for their insight but... 1. most other gods don’t know any more than mortals do, with the semi-exception of huma and turul, who are old enough to have a vague understanding of the dark country gleaned from before zhan tiri fully adapted to being...not there, and 2. with zhan tiri being the cosmic bridge and suddenly not there anymore, communication with all the gods has gotten a lot more convoluted and difficult / reliant on comparatively small and fragile little threads put down by other gods. and then of course huma has zero interest in humanity and turul has been mostly going FIX THIS NOW at his cult for seventeen hundred years so they are not exactly good sources of clear information on the subject sjkldfk

anyways

a couple decades ago tromus got out of the jar demanitus was keeping him in and got in touch with the remnants of the host of the rotted vulture, which is zhan tiri’s oldest cult, and and her cult in antares, and kind of provided funding and some direction as to how to go about looking for zhan tiri. so there has in the last twenty or so years been this explosion of knowledge and just clarifying of details and theorizing with a lot more specificity than had been possible before about how to reverse what demanitus did, or if that was even possible. which sirin is about as plugged into as she can be when it’s happening half a continent away from her, but like - there is and always has been communication back and forth between the syconium and the hrv so all this research and these ideas are getting shared of course. (this is going to come up later actually but - in benighted chapter 1 when moira is so startled by the syconium suddenly having cash to burn on harebrained separatist schemes? that money came from the hrv)

#bitter snow #ancientriverbed

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evilelitest2 · 5 years ago

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Why do you think that Trump didn't get any approval for killing the leader of ISIS?

I assume you are referring to how the US military kills the leader of ISIS and yet Trump is getting booed at a baseball game?

This is actually a pretty complicated question but two disclaimers

Firstly, quite a few leftist/centrist cites have been like “ok you did one good thing

Secondly, Fox news didn’t exactly give Obama credit for killing Bin Laden

Ok but unto the actual reasons

1) While Abu Bakr al Baghdadi/ “Caliph Ibrahmin” as he liked to call himself was an absolute shit head and deserved to die, he didn’t really hold the same role in the US discourse as Bin Laden. Like I don’t know how many Americans even would know his name if you asked two weeks ago, while everybody knew who Bin Laden was. ISIS was a threat, more as a group than its specific leader. this is also partly because while Bin Laden was the scion of one of the most powerful families in the world, Baghdadi was just a random farmer religious nut who got lukcy. There isn’t much known about Baghdadid compared to Bin Laden honestly. I mean his nickname was “The invisible sheikh” which is an odd choice for a “Caliph”

2) ISIS was mostly horrific to people in the middle east, while Bin Laden actually organized 9/11. That isn’t really fair, but many Americans viewed Bin Laden as a sort of Devil Figure and Baghdadi can’t really compete with that

3) The news was undercut by our stabbing the Kurds in the back and in the process accidentally releasing several hundred ISIS prisoners. So killing the leader doesn’t….really pay off for the massive destabilizing blow Trump had just dealt to the whole region for….apparently no reason?

4) Because of Trump’s life style and work ethic, if you aren’t already part of the Trump Cult, nobody really believes Trump played any role in the killing of Baghdadi? Like lets be honest here, the only reason why this operation happened is because Trump likely didn’t even know it was happening and then took credit after he was clued in like 2 days before the killing. A side effect of constantly golfing and publicly not knowing anything about your own policies means that people who don’t already love you don’t feel inclined to give you any credit.

This is doubled by the fact that Trump constantly lies, steals credit for other people’s work, and can’t be trusted. So even if there is a slight chance that he actually helped in this operation, nobody will believe him because his rep is ruined.

5) Also this is a natural effect of Trump’s combative politics, everybody knows that if the situation was reversed he wouldn’t be nice to us so why bother? Trump has destroyed any good feeling he might ever have, and once you ruin your credibility, then this is what happens

6) Its not like this is gonna actually stop ISIS, just like AQ stayed around after Bin Laden died. Its not that this doesn’t make any difference, but presenting it as a slam dunk when it clearly isn’t going to make the problem of ISIS go away is typical trump stupidity

7) Trump fucked up the delivery. By making the whole thing show like, it undercuts his own credibility. He presents it like a TV announcement, he talks about it as if it were an action movie, and he clearly is relishing in the violence he wouldn’t be able to inflict himself, so nobody really feels inclined to take him seriously except for the Trumpers themselves. Obama presenting it as a serious solome occasion, so people took it seriously. Trump treated it like a joke so did everybody else.

Ultimately though, this is really a lesson in politics, specifically what happens when you are deeply unpopular. The fact of the matter is if somebody is widely disliked, people don’t want to give them credit. Lets pretend for the sake of argument that Trump worked really hard on military intelligence and played a critical role in the killing of Baghdadi, it doesn’t really matter because...he is massively unpopular and didn’t win the popular vote. And part of the reason why he is massively unpopular is because he always hits below the belt, so it really isn’t any surprise that he isn’t being given too much credit for this, most of the country doesn’t trust him or like him enough to believe that he really helped play a role in the killing so they don’t feel inclined to be nice to him. Trump can’t really fix this, because this is the direct result of how he treats his fellow countrymen for the last 5 years, it is no surprise nobody wants to be nice to him now.

#Ask EvilElitest #ISIS #Trump #US politics #abu bakr al-baghdadi #osama bin laden #fundementalism

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unionizedwizard · 4 months ago

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I'm actually obsessed with Minfilia because she's literally a HR manager, but like, considering the genre she's in, the rare and elusive Actually Good-Aligned HR manager. like:

• Typical HR manager hairstyle (and color), as well as fashion sense

• Weirdly close and yet markedly hierarchical relationship with her receptionist/bookkeeper (who wears a similar, but obviously less fancy, outfit)

• She's in charge here but mostly handles, well, human resources and inter-organization matters. Conducts job interviews, has her own personal office which holds The Organization's Statement, Historically Important Piece

• Definitely lied to the wol during their job interview about the workplace benefits they would be entitled to; as G'raha remarked in early endwalker, we *should* get our aetheryte fees reimbursed [of course it might simply be a gameplay feature (doylist explanation) but i find it funnier and also accurate to the way the Scions work wrt the wol]. Also whether or not we get paid *at all* remains debatable. All of this (plus the fact there are other candidates for the job when we first go to the Waking Sands, and that, at the time, we were merely a novice adventurer, not *the warrior of light*) hints at some suspect HR practices. Pretty sure Minfilia thought we'd be (cheap, abundant) workforce (as common adventurers), who had potential (due to our suspected Echo), but don't usually expect benefits or look too closely at the fine print (sidenote: we did not even sign a contract. In typical small business fashion, the Scions let their uninsured, non-salaried freelance worker bear the worse of the workload and deal with the worse and most dangerous parts of the job)

• We were hired *because* of Our Health Condition, which i still find hilarious (and mirrors that one time We Got Fired From Our Gig Job because of Our Health Condition), but not offered any medical attention or insurance or even benefits/accommodations (come on, we could get extra PTO after each "canonically makes you feel ill and unsafe" Narratively Meaningful Vision.)

• "We're all a family here :) come on what we do is for the greater good, surely you wouldn't let all those people die?" <- typical NGO/social work HR manager statement. If you know you know

• In a position of leadership and direct management, but not the actual boss (who is actually the founder's direct relative (no, it's not a cult, whatever made you think so?)). Since theyre a non-profit and can't afford to take bribes from the local gouvernements (lol) they have to do what all charities do: curry the favor of their wealthy patron and therefore submit to the whims of Little Lord Alphinaud. Meaning that Minfilia's leeway is strictly limited whenever she and Alphinaud disagree on something (see: moving headquarters to Revenant's Toll; founding the Crystal Braves)

• Established cliques. The Archons as senior/high-skilled members are clearly keeping to themselves while all the adventurers stay together (a social dynamic that we tend to forget considering that the massacre happened quite early in the story and we never saw much of j'moldva and cie, as the only surviving adventurers, afterwards). I am reminded of many, many a remark made by union spokespeople in my real-life labor relations meetings on this matter. The wol themselves is used as neutral party/pawn by both Minfilia and Alphinaud (remember that Alphinaud once asked if you had Minfilia's permission to be somewhere. They both are your bosses!)

• Her workplace promotion turned her into the literal "Word of the Mother", aka literally God's Spokesperson, The Ultimate HR Manager. Representing Hydaelyn in our dispute with Ardbert's gang in HW, and then acting on Her behalf to stop the Flood of Light on the First (so like, quite literally a "human resources manager". If you forgive the off-color joke here)

the second minfilia said 'in time, i hope you come to think of us as family', the wol shouldve demanded a contract that clearly states their expected responsibilities to the scions in writing because statements like that in what amounts to a job interview are a giant fucking red flag

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peachycalpis · 5 years ago

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A Tale of Two Teachers (BSD)

The Teacher AU nobody asked for, now with added extras guaranteed to put a smile on your face :)

Pairing: Dazai Osamu / Nakahara Chuuya Words: 8734; Rating: T Summary: Chuuya is a high school physics teacher and Dazai is a maths teacher. And me? Why, I'm just their student, watching my teachers fall in love right in front of my nose. Notes: Translated with permission from 不談戀愛談老師 -------- Hello. Thank you for coming to listen to the inconsequential story of two of my most beloved teachers. First, I’ll introduce to you the best teacher of my entire high school career, and my favourite teacher ever. I first met Nakahara-sensei when I was a first-year in high school. He was my physics teacher. Everything about him was simply amazing. He was superb, put-together, competent, and just generally all-around fantastic, both in and out of his capacity as a teacher. To be honest, I must have been a saint, or saved the world, or done something amazing in my last life to have gotten him as my teacher. I thank my lucky stars every day that I've managed to have the good fortune of having had him in my life, honestly. Although I’ve just talked him up like I was being paid to advertise him, I wasn’t like this at all when he first came to teach our class. This is not entirely my fault. Rather, the blame lies with Nakahara-sensei. Imagine this: if you saw a young man barely old enough to have graduated from university with the prettiest doll face (even prettier than most girls in our class, I daresay), wearing a three-piece suit that clung to him so seamlessly you knew it was tailored, with a formal-looking hat atop his head, and looking like the scion of British aristocracy who’d transferred here from his swanky boarding school, nobody would have believed he was here to teach, let alone taken him seriously as a teacher. Our class was still abuzz with the whispered speculations about this “new transfer student” when the bell rang and he strode into our classroom with a self-assured air, shrugged off his hat and his coat, and wrote the four characters 中 (naka) 原 (hara) 中 (chuu) 也 (ya) cleanly on the board. His kanji penmanship was impeccable, like everything else about him, and we were still reeling from the shock of the audacity of this “student” in seizing centre stage when he tossed his head back and turned away from the blackboard to give the class a small smile. In that single instant every girl in our class literally imploded and went to heaven. When asked to recount that experience, they’d all agreed that in that instant they had felt as if they had been impregnated by the sheer force of his charming bad boy grin. Yes, he was that fucking pretty. Oh, my previous description is a bit off, by the way. We couldn’t see him clearly at first hovering at our door, so he gave off the impression of being a hottie, what with that narrow tapered waist and those legs that went on forever (the envy of the entire class). But once he entered the classroom and smiled at us, we all fell into shocked silence, because this was not just a hottie. This young man was the hottie. One can never hope to truly count how many young innocent hearts had surrendered to that smile that besieged and disarmed their every defence. Even I, even though I consider myself with a mind of steel, even I had my heart in my throat when I saw him.

The “student” only waved his hand at us to quiet us down and call for our attention. He made a simple self-introduction, saying that he would be our physics teacher. Our class fell into shocked silence, before erupting into fifty different conversations at once. This hot young male supermodel would be teaching us physics? You had to be fucking kidding us. I’d sooner believe it if you had said he was a new transfer student, look at his clean-shaven face!

Our class fell into a sort of uneasy hush after that. We were originally elated to have a new hot classmate, but to have said hot classmate as your teacher was a little different. Yes, he was certainly off the charts attractive, but being hot didn’t magically pay bills or teach well. For a while there had even been rumours that he’d only managed to bag this teaching job this young by doing some dirty deal with the principal, and for some time we looked down on him. He must have gotten in through some back-door, or he’d must have known someone on the School Board. Or so we thought.

But the truth always prevails, and gives you a good knocking between the ears. The undeniable truth hit us like a sack of bricks. Nakahara-sensei was a brilliant teacher. When he taught our class for the first time, our jaws all hung slack with surprise. Who would have known such an elegant, refined man like him would have had such a lively temperament in him, and that temper and dry humour would in turn manifest in particularly interesting and engaging classes? He had none of the nervousness of a fresh-grad teacher, but was assertive, self-possessed and poised.

Who would have thought that crappy physics equations could have been embellished like so? A simple law on force and motion led to animated retellings of Newton’s life stories from centuries ago, as Nakahara-sensei poked fun at that “friendless nerd Issac who wrote all about the laws of attraction but couldn’t attract anybody.” Every lesson was not only a physics class but a history lecture, a stand-up comedy, and a trivia game show. He could explain the hardest questions without breaking a sweat and he didn’t even stutter when the high-achieving students in the class challenged him on his solutions. The students all called him a god of physics behind his back, because when students brought up hard questions they couldn’t do in class, Nakahara-sensei would have already uttered the answer in seconds while the bookworms and math nerds were still waiting for Wolfram Alpha to load and compute the photo of the question. He did not teach wrong concepts or terminologies and he could explain questions properly and simply, in a way that everyone understood.

It was at this point that our class realised exactly how brilliant he was. What a package! Not only did he have a face and brains like that, he even had a superb sense of humour and a great personality. Although he was quite strict and serious in class, he would always laugh at your jokes, no matter how cheesy, and return a few well-meaning jabs that made you feel appreciated, ensnaring you in his charm. He’d be smiling at you unbeknownst to himself when he did that, and it was this effortless magnetism that was the most lethal to the budding young hearts in our class. We were enraptured and spellbound by his scintillating wit; every class felt as exhilarating like a shot of a much-needed drug. We were transfixed to the point that the class next door saw him as some sort of evil cult leader.

Keep reading

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theonyxpath · 5 years ago

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Here we are at the end of the year with our last Monday Meeting Notes blog. Salut to you all!

A few things before we get to celebration preparation. First, the V5 Cults of the Blood Gods KS is doing fantastic, with over 1700 backers and a whole passel of Stretch Goals achieved – and we still have more than two weeks to go!

You can check it out here, if for some wacky reason you haven’t yet: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/cults-of-the-blood-gods-for-vampire-the-masquerade-5th-ed

But, if you’d like some more info before heading over to the KS page, well, do we have options for you! They are just the links for this week to interviews and reviews…there are even more out there!

(These links are also below in the Onyx Path Media section curated by the irrepressible Matthew Dawkins).

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast is a V5 Cults of the Blood Gods design diary! Check it out direct on Podbean, or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

Plus, Polyhedron Podcast interviewed Matthew Dawkins regarding V5 Cults of the Blood Gods right here on their show: http://metahedronstudios.com/polyhedron/2019/12/26/polyhedron-ep-101-who-are-the-hacata?

And Gehenna Gaming did the same thing just yesterday over on their Twitch channel twitch.tv/gehennagaming, and you can catch up with that interview by subscribing to them!

And circling back around to the Story Told Podcast, here’s their interview with Matthew Dawkins regarding V5 Cults of the Blood Gods: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/bonus-21-vampire-the-masquarade-5th-edition-cults-of-the-blood-gods-interview-with-matthew-dawkins

While Flames Rising interviews a whole bunch of the writers of V5 Cults of the Blood Gods right here: http://www.flamesrising.com/discussing-faith-among-the-dead-with-onyx-path/

And even more Matthew Dawkins interviews (if you haven’t had enough) over here on booknest.eu, in respect of (you guessed it) V5 Cults of the Blood Gods: http://booknest.eu/reviews/charles/1758-interviewwithmatthewdawkinsii

Lunars art by Priscilla Kim

End of the year “look-back” from the OP crew as to what could have gone better:

To sort of match and compliment our look back at the good stuff from 2019 that I put up in last week’s MMN blog, here are the thoughts from our Onyx Path crew as to what things in 2019 maybe weren’t so good – or at least are something we can look to improve.

Now this sort of retrospective can be seen as a downer, but for us, we want to be always looking for ways to improve what we do. In fact, a lot of the “Goods” from last week’s list were “Needs Improvement” in previous years! So in a lot of ways, these are snapshots of where are crew sees our issues right now, and are extremely useful for us:

Dixie:

For me personally, I hope to do a better job in 2020 than I did in 2019 of managing the stable of incredibly talented editors with whom we work. Personally, I love talking with each and every one of them, but anyone who watches the blog knows there have been weeks here and there when 12 projects were in editing at once, and that’s a lot! Anticipating a project’s needs weeks or months out is something we should all keep in mind so that no one department, be it art, approvals, development, or editing, ever gets bogged down for too long. I want to deliver books that are not only beautiful and well-done, but timely and efficient!

Monica:

There’s so many channels we have to communicate, it’s difficult to sync up and get the same message. On some of our convos, we’ll have three people posting almost the same thing. I’d like to see better coordination so we’re not either jumping the gun or over-responding to what’s already been addressed.

Ian:

I don’t know how to do this effectively, but we need to try to do a better job of shaping conversation so it’s more productive. During the Aberrant Kickstarter, a lot of forum discussions got pretty heated and just went around and around in circles even after a given topic had already been addressed. I want people to be able to consider concerns so we can make a better game, but the way the conversation took place made me want to avoid it instead.

Mighty Matt:

This is mostly on me, but we could have been a lot more proactive in explaining how our expansion into local game stores rolled out this past year. We could have had more tools for retail stores to communicate with us and our distribution partners. Something of a personal goal of mine to do more outreach to stores and work with distributors in more ways.

Deviant art by Michael Gaydos

Mirthful Mike:

Even though we have been doing the “put the books into stores” thing with out KSs since the Cavs KS, I’m still not seeing a lot of our product out in the wild. While I’ve seen Pugmire and Mau every now and then… I’ve seen nothing of CtL2 or Scion. I don’t know if that is a shortcoming on our end… or maybe stores are hesitant to order anything other than OGL and 5e titles.

Matthew:

Travel and conventions. It’s becoming a running joke / curse that whenever I travel internationally to attend a convention, I suffer flight delays, lost luggage, missed connections, and other such mishaps. This year saw everything bar an actual plane crash, so here’s hoping for an exemption from that when I fly to Milwaukee for Midwinter in January! I’m staying at a hotel near the London airport I’m flying from the night before I depart, I’m building more time in for my connections, and I’m taking everything as carry-on luggage, just to try to alleviate some of this travel hell!

Eddy:

One thing that we could have done better: Focus on the positive. It’s understandable that we get derailed by a shitty vocal element or focus on a project that’s on fire, but sometimes that ends up dominating our discussions, and making things seem like they’re worse than they really are. V5 is a good example — it’s been a slog to deal with all the problems with that property, so much that I was genuinely surprised with how good Chicago by Night turned out to be.

Lisa:

The bad for me is being at PAXU and having a freelancer have to tell me who they are or worse be there and not know they are present at all. Many fans enjoy being able to tell writers, artists and developers how much they enjoy their work on our games and even get an autograph. It would be nice to be able to introduce them at the booth if I know they are there. Some sort of communication to let us know who may be in attendance and find out if they want any sort of recognition would be great.

Dark Eras 2 art by Luis Sanz

RichT:

Most importantly, these and other thoughts on how we can better do what we love to do are going to be part of our Onyx Path Summit in just a week – right before we attend Mid-Winter. So, part of my job is to get discussions going there as to our team’s concerns, and believe me – these are just the first ones they sent me, as well as other changes we might be positioned now to implement.

We’re also doing a panel there in the intimate surroundings of the Hilton’s Founders Room, so if you have questions and/or concerns, praise or problems, please feel free to add them in the Comments for this blog and I’ll pass them along!

Talk to you all next year, as we prep for all that and continue to create our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

V5 Cults of the Blood Gods has passed $100,000 and 1700 backers, and has trumpeted forward passing through Stretch Goal after Stretch Goal despite the holidays!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast is a V5 Cults of the Blood Gods design diary! Check it out direct on Podbean, or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

Today we give special focus to the Story Told Podcast‘s recent review of Book of Oblivion for Wraith: The Oblivion. It’s a glowing review (four ghosts out of five, or eight oboli out of ten), and you can listen to it right here: https://thestorytold.libsyn.com/episode-43-book-of-oblivion-review-for-wraith-20th-anniversary-edition

And Gehenna Gaming did the same thing just yesterday over on their Twitch channel twitch.tv/gehennagaming, and you can catch up with that interview by subscribing to them!

Our Twitch channel continues with its streams of fantastic content, including a behind-the-screen special for Scion, a new year’s special for Scarred Lands, and regular games of Changelign: The Lost, Hunter: The Vigil, Mage: The Awakening, and more Scarred Lands!

Likewise, continue to tune in to us on YouTube for actual plays of Changeling: The Lost, Pugmire, Vampire: The Masquerade, and much much more!

Subscribe to us on youtube.com/user/theonyxpath

And of course the Gentleman Gamer, Matthew Dawkins, continues his Gentleman’s Guide to Scion over on his channel, youtube.com/user/clackclickbang

Here’s the ever-increasing trove of Occultists Anonymous actual plays of Mage: The Awakening, expanded even further!

Episode 68: Who Are You? Wyrd the Seer takes stock of her cult and Labyrinth, calling on Stephen Klein to get to know more about him… and to begin instructing him in the higher mysteries.https://youtu.be/gke84fsDxuo

Episode 69: What Have I Done? Wyrd the Seer calls upon Shodel, the Consilium’s Herald, to speak about her work at the theater and then returns to her search for the Other World.https://youtu.be/jDOsgHmGWLI

While Flames Rising interviews a whole bunch of the writers of V5 Cults of the Blood Gods right here: http://www.flamesrising.com/discussing-faith-among-the-dead-with-onyx-path/

Discussing Faith Among the Dead with Onyx Path

Don’t forget Red Moon Roleplaying have two actual plays of Vampire: The Masquerade and one of Changeling: The Lost going, with all locatable on redmoonroleplaying.com

Drop Matthew a message via the contact button on matthewdawkins.com if you have actual plays, reviews, or game overviews you want us to profile on the blog!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we will be releasing the PDF and physical book PoD versions of Tales of Good Dogs, the Pugmire Fiction Anthology on DTRPG!

Conventions!

2020: Midwinter: January 9th – 12th, in Milwaukee, WI. Check out David Fuller’s Athens, Ohio Scion actual play tie-in adventure (soon to be coming to the Storypath Nexus community content site) that will be running at Midwinter. The event url is below: https://tabletop.events/conventions/midwinter-gaming-convention-2020/schedule/402

More talk about this next week!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Duke Rollo fiction (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

RUST (Scarred Lands)

Redlines

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Second Draft

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Development

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

Manuscript Approval

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Buried Bones: Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Post-Approval Development

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Editing

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Mythical Denizens (Creatures of the World Bestiary) (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Post-Editing Development

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle – Finals coming in.

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Ex3 Lunars – Art is in.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers – Working on finals.

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed – Contracted.

Cults of the Blood God (KS)

Mummy 2

City of the Towered Tombs

Let the Streets Run Red – Art notes and contracts finishing going out this week.

CtL Oak Ash and Thorn

Scion Mythical Denizens – Need sketches for fulls.

Deviant

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad – Sketches coming in, should see some finals soon.

Vigil Watch

Legendlore (KS)

Technocracy Reloaded (KS) – Got notes out to artists for halfs and splats.

Scion Companion – Working on art notes for that.

In Layout

Chicago Folio – Halfway through layout.

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds

Pirates of Pugmire – With Aileen.

Proofing

Dark Eras 2 – At WW for approval and they will be back after the New Year.

Trinity Continuum Aeon Jumpstart

They Came from Beneath the Sea!

VtR Spilled Blood

At Press

V5: Chicago – Shipping to the KS fulfillment shippers. PoD proofs ordered.

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) – Being printed.

Geist 2e Screen – Being printed.

DR:E – Being printed.

DRE Screen – Being printed.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties – PoD proof on the way.

Trinity RMCs

Tales of Good Dogs – PDF and PoD versions on sale Wednesday!

Memento Mori – Gathering errata.

M20 Book of the Fallen – PoD proof on the way.

Trinity Continuum Storypath Nexus Community Content – Getting it set up.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today in 1920, Jack Lord – of Hawaii 5-0 fame – was born. He was “a groovy lady-killer”.

#Onyx Path Publishing

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swingbeard · 5 years ago

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Matt Reviews... Shadowbringers

Tossing a review of the Shadowbringers MSQ below the cut.

I ended up writing a lot more than I ever thought I would.

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

I’m not exactly honest where to kick things off here, as I have a lot of thoughts.

WoW has been the MMO I solely dabbled in and played for the longest time before hopping into FFXIV in late 2017. I had tried it out before, but hadn’t really committed in the way I wanted to. When I finally got into Stormblood, something clicked there for me. A large part of it was finding the character I wanted to play finally, and another was being engrossed in this story centered areas of the lore that always had me interested.

I found Heavensward and Stormblood to be rather intriguing stories that continued to push the narrative along between expansion and building out the world, and expected more of the same from Shadowbringers.

But I had some worries too. The last time an MMO tried to pull off the “alternate dimension/universe” idea? It didn’t go the way a lot of folks wanted, and much was left on the cutting room floor.

Of course, that was a different game and company but I still had my concerns. My quibbles with previous FFXIV expansions also came into play; the story of Stormblood, which I liked, was uneven due to moving between two different locales and there have been examples over the years of some expansion events dragging a little bit*.

* I’m looking at you, post-A Realm Reborn MSQ content.

Nonetheless, I headed into the expansion with reasonably high expectations. Said expectations were not only met, but shattered. Shadowbringers is legitimately the best story I’ve ever seen implemented in an MMO, and it’s also one of my favorite stories in video games in a long time.

Shadowbringers is a story of sequences, of tension and release that pays off not only threads and plot points introduced early on in the expansion but from previous expansions as well. SE has always focused on long-term storytelling as part of their MSQ, but it’s more evident now than ever with this expansion.

For folks unfamiliar with the premise, your character - the Warrior of Light - is teleported to a world similar to their own but essentially on the precipice of total destruction and tasked with saving it alongside your companions from previous games. In the FFXIV universe, light and darkness are palpable concepts and balance is important. One without the other can lead to total destruction. In the player character’s world, the threat of world-ending calamity comes from the forces of darkness but in this alternate universe the threat comes instead from the Light.

In this world, your counterparts defeated the forces of darkness and disrupted the balance. This led to an apocalypse by way of The Flood, a wave of Light that engulfed the planet and destroyed everything except for a small section that you explore throughout the expansion.

Those who remain are scraping by and praying for a “warrior of darkness” to arrive while attempting to avoid the wrath of the Sin Eaters, the Light’s army of monsters that seek to eliminate and convert the remaining people. For a near century, the sky above is hidden under a layer of Light, a constant oppressive reminder.

The expansion does a fantastic job not only telling a tight and cohesive story that moves throughout the land, but it also succeeds in building out the world and making you give a damn. Sidequests that appear simple have a depth you usually don’t see in MMOs, and I’ve already had conversations with friends about certain side characters that most people would just meme at.

In a way, the MSQ works off a familiar premise that you see in most Final Fantasy games: you’re the big gods damned hero who’s arrived just in the nick of time to push back the big bad and save the world. It’s simple. It’s easy. But what Shadowbringers does differently is the emotional twists and turns throughout.

Long-standing characters like the Scions have new motivations, new things to care about, and new characters are given simple yet effective backstories and personalities that make you care in a matter of moments.

The latter makes me think of the Hrothgar character Runar, who has been living in the forests; even in a cult centered around the idea of darkness and bringing that back, he proves a warm and friendly character who cares about the people around him.

There’s also a Miqo’te couple in the opulent city of Eulmore that could have been the butt of so many bad jokes, but instead they’re woven into the main narrative with thought and care; they’re given a character arc and prove to be one of the more heartwarming stories of the whole expansion.

It’s these smaller interactions woven into the fabric of the narrative at large that make it so good. An attention to detail you don’t see in MMOs often is showcased throughout, and you have the ability to chat with numerous NPCs about events, both past and present.

While Shadowbringers has plenty of hope within its narrative, there’s so much heartache and tragedy too. There’s terrifying moments, pure body horror on display - yes, no joke. There’s a scene in the expansion that made me get out of my chair and have to stop for a moment. In fact, this happens on multiple occasions.

The moment of body horror I refer to surrounds a character named Tesleen, a young woman living in the Ahm Araeng desert. She is a healer who looks after the terminally wounded and dying, those who will become Sin Eaters post-death; she seeks to ease their pain in any way possible, including poison in their last meal that will carry them off to an endless sleep. It’s their way of life, what they do.

She becomes close with Alisaie, but unfortunately… things take a turn for the worse. Tesleen goes into the desert to seek out a child from the encampment and protects him from a Sin Eater, who converts her into one. What occurs is a terrifying scene, body horror on display as she is transformed into one. It is a raw and emotional display, one of many throughout the expansion.

It’s a tough watch, but it’s also how the expansion hits you in the heart. Some characters are lucky enough to escape from some tragic events, but they’re changed for the experience. When you think something might be happening, it often ends up getting worse.

The First is not a kind world. Yes, there are moments of hope but there’s an oppressive feeling throughout the expansion that the next moment could be your character’s last, that any of this could go wrong at any point.

But you have your friends. It’s here again I mention the Scions, your group of companions dating back even to the original release of FFXIV. Some have been on the First for years, and have been tasked by the Crystal Exarch (who we’ll get to later) with trying to help the people, to save them from the Sin Eaters and push back the Light. They have their own character arcs, their own development; some have changed for the worse, and others have changed for the better.

The new Minfilia stands out to mind here. She’s a character who is aware of her heritage, where she comes from, given the tales that have been relayed to her but she isn’t sure how to handle it, what to do with the information. She struggles as she learns about the world around her, but her character development is so fantastic to see.

Near the end of the story, she decides to become her own person and even takes on a new name where I thought she would embrace the role of “new Minfilia” and continue along that same path, which probably would have upset some folks.

Instead, it’s an idea of the twists and turns of the expansion. You think they’re headed one direction, and totally turn the other way. I can legitimately only cover a handful here because there are so many without feeling like being too overbearing.

I think it’s here where I talk about the villains of the expansion, as there’s a full array. Vauthry, the larger-than-life leader of Eulmore, regards himself as a leader free of sin when really he’s perhaps the worst of all. He is callous, cruel, vain, and has aspirations of becoming a god, of controlling the Sin Eaters.

His general Ran’jit is a great foil, an older man who fights with fists and feet. While Vauthry has been corrupted from consuming the flesh of Sin Eaters (yes, this happens), he truly believes in the righteous causes of his leader. There’s more than meets the eye with both characters; they are fascinating studies in how righteous causes can go so horribly wrong.

Then there’s Emet-Selch, an Ascian who has taken on the body of the previous Garlean emperor Solus. He was introduced in the post-Stormblood content, coming across as a wicked madman who appeared to have deeper motives. There wasn’t much to work off of then in terms of who he was.

There’s very good reason.

At some point in Shadowbringers, as you have begun to establish your resistance against the forces of the Light, he decides to accompany your party, to see just what drives you, keeps you going. He helps with reviving Y’shtola, as she decides to sacrifice herself during the story, as a way of gaining your trust.

Then he drops a bomb, a revelation. He does this time after time. In a way, Emet-Selch reminds me of a favorite character in Kreia from KOTOR 2.

They are liars and destroyers, but they also will lay the truth of their world out for you to clearly see, giving their own rational reasons for why they’re doing what they’re doing. Whereas Zenos was a fantastic villain in his own right, as he was an unapologetic villain, Emet-Selch is a different sort.

He’s a tragic villain.

He reveals the Ascians, this group of villains that didn’t really have much inspiration or any context outside of “we want to summon our dark god and take over the universe” before this expansion, as a tragic force. They were once a utopia, a society of thinkers and bureaucrats with unlimited power in the form of creation magicks that ended up destroying their world.

It’s here Shadowbringers really dives into the cosmology of the FFXIV universe in unapologetic fashion. It reveals insane truths about how the First, the Source, and other worlds are connected, how when worlds are “rejoined”, it causes cataclysmic events and thus leads further to the endgame of the Ascians.

They just want to go home and bring their people back, the majority of which were sacrificed in an effort to try and salvage their utopian home. As you get into the endgame of the Shadowbringers MSQ, you learn more about what exactly happened, what led to this, and how Emet-Selch is truly a tragic villain, someone who just wants to go home, wants to bring their people back. You see it in the way he walks, in how he talks; he is burdened by the hundreds of thousands of souls he considered his friends, his family.

They are gone. Only he and a few others remain, steadfast and committed to their cataclysm task of death leading to new life, a new chance.

This is only the surface of his arc and the backstory surrounding the Ascians. SE went ahead and made a group of villains I didn’t find particularly interesting into one of the most fascinating parts of their lore and universe.

It is because of this the ending of the MSQ is so tragic, so devastating, but also it’s a release. The sequence leading up to the final trial (boss) of the expansion is parts inspiring and heartbreaking, as your character - who has taken on the overpowering Light of the world into their body - nearly succumbs and becomes a Sin Eater.

But then you’re saved by another soul, a former Warrior of Light-turned-Warrior of Darkness named Ardbert. If you’ve played through the post-Heavensward MSQ, you know of him as a more antagonistic force-turned-tragic-villain but in Shadowbringers, he is a spirit, your guiding light. The reason why he eventually joins forces with you is an absolutely insane one, but it’s earned by the story at that point because they explain it. They show it.

It’s here where I find it difficult to really explain just what happens in this MSQ at times because I truly believe you have to see it and play through it. So many moments are earned, tragic or heartbreaking, and to explain it by way of a review in text would do it a disservice. You know a game’s story is good when I haven’t even really touched upon the zones you explore or the gameplay.

When the Shadowbringers MSQ finally ended, I just kind of sat there. Just thought upon everything I had seen, had played through, had watched. There’s some post-credits content that gives information on just what is happening back on the player character’s homeworld and it’s… interesting.

In a way I wondered just how they’d play up the threat back home because the threats on the First are so cosmic-spanning that it would be tough to go back to Eorzea and deal with the Garleans, but SE as always looks long-term and sets up some interesting pieces and plot threads that I feel like will be handled in the post-MSQ patches.

While I know some folks aren’t a huge fan of FFXIV’s gameplay, the main differentiation comes down to story and character development. SE gives a damn about keeping a consistent lore and storyline that covers multiple expansions, not at all letting up on the gas pedal especially in Shadowbringers. It is in this expansion that they completely triumph in all aspects: worldbuilding, tension and release, character development, and numerous revelations that fit so well within the lore they’ve established.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing more I can say or do than this:

Go play Shadowbringers.

#shadowbringers #matt plays ffxiv #shadowbringers spoilers #patch 5.0 spoilers #sometimes i write things

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greyias · 7 years ago

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Hop on the Crazy Train Guys! Spoilers and Rampant Speculation, Ahoy!

Hey guys, are you ready to hop on the Crazy Train? Find your tinfoil hats as I leap from the “Oh, that might make sense” discovery decrypted from the 5.4 Datamining into full on Conpsiracy Theorist mode. Full disclosure, I realize A) how ridiculous all this sounds; B) the extreme unlikliehood of this being the ACTUAL storyline is… low. But if it were. It would be a-MAZ-ing!

This my new pet Master Theory of the (SWTOR) Universe. And the answer, is not 42, as Douglas Adams might have us believe, but in fact 7-18-1-22-5-19-20-15-14-5. You can pry this ridiculous headcanon from my cold dead hands.

Spoilers, and wild speculation that grasps at the thinnest and most fragile of canonical straws, below the “Read More”. Leave your suspension of disbelief behind, because it’ll just drag you down.

So at the end of the revised letter discovered in the 5.4 datamining, in each of the variations on the letter that Theron sends, there’s an error message with a string of what appears to be random numbers. If you apply an alphanumeric cipher to them, it looks like he’s trying to say “It’s Zildrog” and gets cut off, hinting that perhaps everything is not as it seems. (Seeing as how we have to wait until next Tuesday to see if we do indeed receive this letter, well…)

So, anyway, let’s leap onto the crazy train guys. Starting where this whole traitor nonsense first cropped up, which was RageBot Tyth’s CAPSLOCKKKK speech at the end where he’s revealing that, *GASP* there’s a traitor in our midst. (This was pretty heavily hinted at from the first cut scene, that something was up). Let’s look at that speech, in all its Shifty, Capslocky glory:

YOU HAD NO CHOICE. YOU WERE LURED HERE. BLINDED BY DUTY. DISTRACTED BY TRUST. YOU DID NOT SEE THE BLADE TO YOUR NECK THE RAGE IN YOUR SHADOW. THE TRAITOR. YOU ARE BETRAYED.

There’s a dialogue option here that gives you three branched answers (if I’ve pulled from the proper datamining spot on TorCommunity), where you can be all “Bzuh? Why?” Or “You’re trying to trick me” or “I KNEW SOME MOFO WAS UP TO NO GOOD”: ONE MARKED BY ANGER. PAIN. HOPE ERODING. // RAGE FEEDS ON TRUTH // SUSPICION CORRODES

The first one… is interesting.

THE BETRAYER LURED YOU TO IOKATH. IGNITED WAR. SPARKED THE ENGINES OF RAGE, ENVY, PASSION, HATE, SORROW. THE BETRAYER NOW OFFERS YOU: SACRIFICE PRIME. FUEL FOR THE SIX GODS!

There’s an extra bit he says at the beginning too that’s interesting, but I’ll circle back around to that later, because it’s a bit of a tangent.

So, he specifically mentions that we’re blinded by our duty (doesn’t say to what), and we’re distracted by “trust”. There’s a “rage in (our) shadow”. They’ve lured us into this death trap with the specific intention of waking the old Zakuulan gods, in theory, to bring about the end of all organic life in the galaxy.

And if you’re thinking “Well, minus the genocide of the entire galaxy that sounds like it could be Theron! I mean, unless we’re like dating him and trying to rebuild everything and doing exactly what he has indicated that he wants up to this point”–hold on! Stop wallowing in despair, because I’ve got a better idea! It’s the Order of Zildrog!

Actually, I’ll do one even BETTER. It’s not just the Order of Zildrog. It’s Zildrog. As in, the old Zakuulan serpent demon who likes to sleep in the Endless Swamp, test warriors, and eventually wants to bring about the destruction of all life. Because that’s what crazy serpents of death do in their spare time. I mean sure, I could be 100% off base, being played by my own hopes, expectations, and cipher substitutions and grasping at the thinnest of straws here, but hear my crazy butt out!

After that speech, we all assumed that the traitor he was referring to, one who’s been at our side from “the beginning of it all” was person in the Alliance. But what if it wasn’t… a person? But still a member of the Alliance. An in fact, vital member of the Alliance.

What if it’s the Gravestone?

Okay, whoever hasn’t slowly backed out of this post at this point and unfollowed me, I assume you had picked “sentient warship of death and destruction” in the “Who is the Traitor?” betting pool as a joke, and are suddenly sweating and looking nervous. (“Am *I* a Scion? Can *I* see the future? That was a joke! I thought the theory of several jawas standing on each others’ backs wearing a robe made more sense!”)

And in a strange sort of way, this makes… a tiny bit of sense? There have been some things that have been nagging at me since we started KotFE/KOTET, but I had brushed them off as dues ex machinas and just weird plot holes. (I mean, they might still be. Sometimes things in SWTOR can be subtle as an anvil landing on your head) While this speech was going on, there was a tiny voice in me asking: What does this giant raging metal god of death care about me? How does he know this about some random person in my Alliance?

But a fellow mighty war machine from Iokath? Tyth just might know a thing or two about that.

“But Grey,” you say as you reach for a sedative as my ramblings start to reach a fever pitch, “you said this was about Zildrog. What does that have to do with the Gravestone? My lovingly loyal warship that I rescued from a swamp and has followed me into battle ever since?”

Well, what I’m saying (as I dodge that sedative to get out the rest of this wild hair that is likely unmoored in reality) is that the Gravestone IS Zildrog. And he’s finally making his move after pretending to be a loyal, stupid spaceship after all this time.

Hold on, let me put on my tinfoil hat and explain my insanity more. Because there are hints peppered throughout KotFE and KOTET that actually back this up. Ambient dialogue on Zakuul with both the Heralds of Zildrog and just random Zakuulans allude that Zildrog is like kind of the rebel of the God Pantheon (some don’t even consider him one of the Gods), hinting that maybe he fought with the other Gods. After the Iokath storyline, we find out that the Gods are actually Giant Mechas intended to play war games all over the galaxy, and Zakuul was one of their favorite worlds to destroy over and over, decimating that population constantly.

If you run about the place there’s all sorts of strange bits of lore about Zildrog that don’t seem to connect to the KotFE/KOTET storyline. Forgive me for I’m stuck at work and can’t go find all of the actual pieces of dialogue verbatim, but I just heard a lot of them this weekend running KotFE Chapter 7 (for unrelated reasons) and it goes something like this: Zildrog is a mythical “dragon” who is “sleeping” out in the Endless Swamp. Waiting to be awakened so he will one day return and “raze the world” and bring “death to all who did not believe”. He’s even got his own Death Cult! Cool! They’re just as insane as this theory, and fervently believe the Apocalypse is an Awesome Thing™. If only there was a way…

So, here we are, Outlander Extraordinaire, and we find this ancient warship out in the swamps. It’s called the GRAVEstone. A name that seems to indicate something ominous about its origins. It’s been whispered that its the only thing that ever stood up in a fight with the Eternal Fleet (which we now know also came from Iokath. As part of their War Game scenarios). It’s been a while since I’ve played that chapter and paid attention to the dialogue, but I recall Valkorion being a bit… vague about it. Like, possibly that he had no fucking clue it was there. (Or he did, hard to tell with Voidy McLiarface). It has this mysterious room that we spend at least two scenes in, and we’re like “Wow, this is weird”, and the game’s like “Yeah, isn’t it? Hahahaha, we better go stop Arcann now shouldn’t we little Outlander?” and you promptly forget about it until your next playthrough and you’re like “Yeah, this is still weird.”

Then we’ve got Scorpio, another Iokath droid, one of the more intelligent ones. She can talk to the Gravestone, interface with it directly. She tells us it has intelligence, an intelligence almost rivals hers. I think she even hints that it has its own purposes but that it won’t say what those are. Before we can delve into “Wait, are you saying that my brand new ancient starship is sentient?” oops! We gotta go stop Arcann again!

Then we’re in KOTET, we’ve just disarmed a fucking quantum bomb on board the Gravestone, when all of the sudden EVERY SINGLE SHIP IN THE FLEET + THE GRAVESTONE suddenly gets pulled back to its point of origin: Iokath. This is a really weird side trip considering its only purpose in the bigger plot of KOTET seems to be to explain the Fleet’s origins as well as give us some shiny new shield upgrades for when Vaylin attacks in Chapter 8 so we don’t immediately die. But hey, our Love Interest was super duper cute with us during this chapter and that was touching.

And then we defeat Vaylin, the Eternal Fleet goes feral and we have to tame it, we kick that stupid ghost out of our head once and for all, and we all live happily ever after! Yay! GO TEAM!

And then. We have to go back to Iokath. Everyone has to go back to Iokath, because a mysterious third party has suddenly slipped in information about these superweapons that literally no living character has memory of, or any reason to have memory of. Specifically, memories of ancient war machines that have been known to decimate entire organic populations, just because. One of their favorite hangouts being Ancient Zakuul, who built up an entire pantheon around them. The only justification for Theron knowing about this is that he plugged in during the Iokath chapters, but his behavior during that and subsequent chapters is either the best acting in the world, or suggests that he doesn’t know this at all. He in fact is the one who plugs back in, and finds evidence that explains the purpose of the superweapon. Dialogue on mine (because Light Side ftw baby!) indicates that maybe it’s Scorpio who’s giving you this information? But it’s vague, almost as if it’s someone else… like, say, an ancient artificial intelligence that lovingly takes you around the galaxy and lets you play with it’s big old Omnicannon? And it’s ignited another conflict, that has the potential to spread throughout the galaxy.

Oh yeah, and then there’s you. The latest in a line of people with control over the Eternal Fleet. Something that has been shown to mercilessly rain destruction on inhabited worlds like a mad dog unless someone is holding its leash. And hey, if you were, to say, be killed while sitting on a throne that information was planted for one of your trusty sidekicks to find, maybe it would be free to go about it’s business raining destruction on the galaxy. Oh, and those old slumbering “Gods” might wake up too, and go cause a few apocalypses of their own. And while everyone is distracted with all this dying, maybe that dark presence in that weird room might finally wake up and watch it’s handiwork.

Being limited as an AI on a warship, it might, say, I don’t know, send vague and cryptic messages to various opposing intelligence organizations. Possibly it had communication with that whole Death Cult that formed around it and lived in the swamp where it lived. Maybe it sent them some messages too, once the coast was clear, and the Eternal Fleet was no longer in opposition to it, now that it’s unwitting puppet had taken out every Zakuulan who had sat on the throne controlling it.

Or you know, Theron changed his clothes for the first time in his fucking life, threw on his Evil Cloak of Evil™, and said “Sorry bitches! It’s Apocalypse time! God I love dying horribly! Mwah ahahaha!” and rigged a train to explode. Because he’s just Extra™ like that I guess!

I mean, you know, who can say which theory is right? The straightforward one we’ve been led to believe with the 5.4 datamining retconning five years of character development for a pointless shocking twist, or the one with an ancient evil sentient warship that just wants to watch the Galaxy burn? I mean, they both have arguments in their favor, amirite?

Because I mean, I don’t know about you, but the only thing more bizarre than Theron being the traitor all along would be that we weren’t betrayed by a person all along, and no matter how many people Theron and Lana interrogated would they discover the culprit. Because who would think to turn to that giant hunk of metal parked outside and say “Hey buddy, sent any super secret encrypted transmissions with that intelligence we forgot about for 1.5 expansions?”

We were betrayed. By a fucking warship. OUR GODDAMN SHIP HAS BEEN PLAYING US ALL ALONG WHAT THE HELL BIOWARE I’M LAUGHING AND CRYING THIS IS SO INSANE IT CAN’T BE TRUE

Join me next time in “Insane Theory Land that Will Not Be True”, as I argue that Tenebrae/Vitiate/Valkorion, Master Manipulator and Devourer of Worlds was outsmarted and used by a sentient spaceship because lolololol. And—OH WAIT ONE LAST THING:

Back to Tyth’s speech. At the very beginning he says this: I AM ONE OF SIX. THE SIX BOW TO NO ONE.

The six gods in the Zakuul Pantheon: Izax, Scyva, Tyth, Aivela, Esne, Nahum. Zildrog isn’t included in that. Some believe he’s another form of Izax, the chief among the Old Gods. I’m nowhere near my PC right now and can’t double-check who is listed on the Iokath Operation, but… it was five bosses, not six right? Am I correct in remembering that Izax wasn’t listed?

Because there’s another funny thing about Izax you guys. There’s this whole “Watcher Izax” that’s mentioned by the guard captain in Chapter 6 who had gone off to the Core Worlds and didn’t come back. And then there’s Guss’s recruitment mission, where his master is named “Isaac”, and when we get back from that Sana Rae is very clear that there’s something very powerful, and very dangerous about this guy.

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED. UP IS DOWN. NORTH IS SOUTH. WAKE UP SHEEPLE YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT.

(Okay I’m probably wrong.)

I mean, there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered: Why did the Gravestone start attacking the Eternal Fleet? If it’s part of the fleet, why is it the only Iokath ship, that looks different from all the rest by the by, that doesn’t need a Gemini droid to control it? Why did the Gods go to sleep? Why didn’t the Gravestone just wake itself up? Is the mud on Zakuul that sticky? The world may never know.

#5.4 datamine #spoilers #speculation #i know #it's probably not true #BUT WHAT IF IT IS #swtor #i will go back to writing my angsty fic now #I've planted too much false hope that might get dashed as it is #gravedrog

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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‘The Harder They Come’: A Pop Classic That Has Hardly Faded

A brash bumpkin from the countryside comes to the city, dreaming of stardom. He cuts a record, gets ripped off, turns to trafficking drugs, is betrayed, and dies a folk hero at the hands of the police as his song becomes an anthem.

“The Harder They Come,” currently being revived at BAM Rose Cinemas and Metrograph, is a universal story set in a highly specific milieu. Powered by one of the most infectious scores in the history of cinema, it is also a pop classic — the movie that brought reggae to America and “launched a thousand spliffs,” as the New York Times critic Ben Brantley joked in a 2008 review of a theatrical version in London.

Inspired by the life of the Jamaican outlaw Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin, credited with the line that gives the movie its title, “The Harder They Come” was a vehicle for the reggae star Jimmy Cliff. It was independent Jamaica’s first homemade feature, as well as the first film directed by Perry Henzell, a scion of that nation’s white planter class. The distinguished black playwright Trevor Rhone co-wrote the script. (“The Harder They Come” is being shown in conjunction with the theatrical release of Henzell’s long-delayed follow-up, “No Place Like Home,” which is also at BAM.)

Beginner’s luck — or lack of same — might almost be the movie’s subject. Robbed upon arrival in Kingston, Ivan Martin (Cliff) founders at first in the urban maelstrom. Social conditions are manifest in documentary-type shots, filmed in 16 millimeter, of poverty and desperation. Ivan finds his footing only to mix it up with an assortment of predatory preachers, mercenary record producers, corrupt cops and miscellaneous hustlers. In the background, Toots & the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, Cliff and others sing a collective siren song of fame. Chased by the police, Ivan creates his own legend, leaving graffiti (“I am here — I am everywhere”) and imagining an audience for his last stand.

A movie of abrupt transitions, “The Harder They Come” appears to have been assembled piecemeal and shot off the cuff. Cliff, who wrote the title song, has described the film changing direction while in production. In an article published in The Caribbean Quarterly in 2015, the cinematographer Franklyn St. Juste said he never saw a script: “I really didn’t know what was happening — and what was going to happen from one scene to the next or from one setup to the next.” But the spontaneity proved a recipe for what St. Juste termed “happy accidents.”

The timing was also fortuitous. The film arrived on the international scene in the wake of “Shaft” (1971) and “Superfly” (1972), with a hero akin to the righteous outlaws in films like the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha’s “Antonio das Mortes” (1969), Melvin Van Peebles’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971) and numerous Italian westerns. (It’s hardly coincidental that Ivan goes to see “Django,” Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 evergreen.) For early audiences, Ivan’s willingness to defy authority at the cost of his life evoked Bonnie and Clyde, the Black Panthers and Che Guevara.

After making a splash at the 1972 Venice Film Festival, “The Harder They Come” was picked up by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures; it opened (with English subtitles, because of the particularly thick Jamaican patois) to some success at a Broadway theater in February 1973 and enjoyed a second run as an exploitation film. (I saw it that summer in Florida on a double bill with the Pam Grier prison movie “Black Mama, White Mama.”) It would soon have a third life. In a 1974 piece titled “Films That Refuse to Fade Away,” the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted the movie’s popularity as a midnight attraction.

As reported by Canby, “The Harder They Come” ran for 26 weeks at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., in 1973. A true cult film, it was brought back in 1974, where, as Jonathan Rosenbaum and I wrote in our book “Midnight Movies,” it remained another seven years. In April 1976, The Times ran an article, noting that “The Harder They Come” had played 80 consecutive weekends at the Elgin Theater in Chelsea. (The run would continue there for months.)

In his enthusiasm, Canby called “The Harder They Come” “a more revolutionary black film than any number of American efforts, including ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.’” In any case, “The Harder They Come” provided a model for later movies, most notably the 1980 British film “Babylon,” which belatedly opened in New York this spring and itself became a cult film. (It is on the Criterion Channel and can be streamed elsewhere.)

That film’s director, Franco Rosso, named “The Harder They Come” as his inspiration. “Babylon” (1980) might be a sequel, focusing on West Indian life in London. An immersive, verité-style movie following a disaffected young singer of a homegrown reggae group, it uses a constant flow of music to animate the struggle for survival in a hostile white world. “The movie is more interested in what feels right than what seems right,” the critic Wesley Morris wrote in his review for The Times.

See one and stream the other. Even more than the program I caught in Florida, they make a sensational double bill.

The Harder They Come

Aug. 21-27 at BAM Rose Cinemas, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, BAM.org

Aug. 23-29 at Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; 212-660-0312, metrograph.com.

Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies playing in New York’s repertory theaters.

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queersatanic · 3 years ago

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Spectacle Films Inc

For more information, see The.Satanic.Wiki

The other day, someone tagged us on Twitter in response to a tabloid headline.

Here is that tabloid, and the completion of that joke.

[Tweet]

Which still needs a little bit of explaining.

Why in the hell would someone tag us on Twitter about a person drinking urine?

What does "Cevin" have to do with The Satanic Temple?

And how does this relate back to The Satanic Temple at all?

Stick with us because it is all a lot weirder and more relevant than you can possibly imagine.

vimeo

Urine: Good Health is the name of 1999 documentary produced by Cevin Soling.

Here’s a taste:

Urine Therapy is an unconventional and controversial practice that involves the use of one’s own urine for health benefits — a practice that has been employed throughout history by people around the world.

Naturally, you have questions.

Let's do the easy part. Urine: Good Health was the second film produced by Cevin Soling through his corporation Spectacle Films Inc.

OK, so how did Cevin Soling, later to be a co-founder and owner of The Satanic Temple, get into the movie business?

Well, Soling is the wealthy scion of Northeast real estate developers; he's son of Chester Soling, himself a landlord who naturally sued to evict his own tenants including one whose mother had just died. Although Chester's obituary preferred "philanthropist".

It's easy to get sidetracked here, so suffice to say, the anecdote in this 1970 article "A Million‐Dollar Hotel Where the Oldest Guest Is 12" paints a picture of a certain upbringing.

But Cevin Soling apparently entered the 1990s wanting more out of life than just being a comfortably wealthy and rent-collecting vampire for the rest of his life. He wanted those things and to be considered creative, talented, and, eventually, a serious thinker.

On the same day in June 1992, Cevin registered both Xemu Records and Spectacle Films as corporations in New York State, but he seems to have focused on projects under the Scientology-nodding record company at first.

Other than raising an eyebrow about an interest in profitable cults, Xemu doesn't really intersect with The Satanic Temple, or it might be more accurate to say: we have not come across any public record of that intersection. As you should be able to tell from the scroll bar, we have enough material to cover without it.

By the late '90s, Beatles super-fan Cevin Soling had discovered a curious interview question and answer involving John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and he was inspired to buy into another hobby:

[T]he way I got into film, for instance, I never went to film school, I just had an idea for a documentary after reading this article, this interview with Paul McCartney where he was talking about having dinner one night with John Lennon, and Lennon was saying something to the effect of, "I s'pect we get holes drilled in our heads. I read somewhere it expands consciousness." And McCartney responding, "Well, you get it done, and if it's great I'll think about it." I'm a huge Beatle fanatic, and read all the interviews... But this was something that had never been mentioned in any other interview, never came up. And so it was kind of surprising to see the story. And then I did a little bit of research and found the background of this doctor who came up with this theory about drilling holes in people's heads, and how it results in increased brain blood volume. And he believed that it resulted in greater brain metabolism and expanded state of consciousness. So it seemed like there might be some truth to that. So I was kind of curious and decided to study it, but to make it into a film. And I had no film experience, but it was like, Hey, why not make a movie.

"Hey, why not make a movie?" indeed.

So like anyone with lots of money, he paid people to do it for him, got his producer credit, and the result was 1998's A Hole In The Head directed by Eli Kabillio.

A Hole In The Head examines the development of "modern" trepanation as used by people in the United Kingdom, The United States, and The Netherlands for the purpose of attaining a higher level of consciousness. This procedure, used by the ancient Egyptians, Incas, and others, is believed by the voluntarily trepanned to allow for renewed brain pulsations that increase brain blood volume and thereby improve brain function. Interviews regarding the history and efficacy of the procedure are also held with some of the world's most respected neurosurgeons and anthropologists.

Apparently it's not a bad documentary, for what that's worth.

And it was successful enough at the time to run it back and do another in the same vein, Urine: Good Health about urine therapy, again produced by Soling and directed by Kabillio. You saw the result above.

A couple of years later, Soling gets into the director's chair himself for The War on the War on Drugs:

Comprised of over 60 independent short scenes shot in a wide variety of cinematic styles, THE WAR ON THE WAR ON DRUGS parodies drug war propaganda and those who insist we fight the drug war at any cost.

But Soling's big push, and the one he probably thought was really going to break him through to the mainstream as a big-time serious person was 2009's anti-public schools documentary The War on Kids.

It brought him to the highs of an appearance on the Colbert Report.

But it also brought Soling to the lows of demonstrating that his opposition to public schooling is in complete alignment with other "libertarian" unschooling advocates, like white nationalist and "scientific racist" Stefan Molyneux.

We will return to this subject at a later time (Soling certainly has), but this has already gotten fairly long, and this may all seem rather tenuous or at least tangential to The Satanic Temple.

In actuality, Urine: Good Health and Spectacle Films' "out-there" documentaries are a perfect lens to view The Satanic Temple because that seems to have been all it was ever meant to be.

To repeat:

The Satanic Temple was supposed to be another Spectacle Films documentary.

We've actually got quite a lot of evidence this is so.

The earliest press releases for The Satanic Temple predated the incorporation of its own legal entity by about a year, and the connection to Cevin Soling wasn't even kept particularly hush-hush at first.

In April 2013, Spectacle Films announces a talk to be given at Harvard:

The Cultural Studies Club of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education will be hosting ‘A History of Satanic Worship’ to be presented April 11, 2013, by academics and practicing Satanists. Satanic Temple spokesperson, Lucien Greaves, will present ‘A History of Satanism from The Old Testament to The Satanic Temple’ accompanied and followed by long-time public Satanism advocate, Szandora Lavey, who will offer a personal perspective on the modern practice of Satanism. Cevin Soling, of Spectacle Films, a Harvard Graduate School of Education student, will speak about the use of religion in the service of social activism and as a potential device to protect civil liberties.

(Beyond this, Szandora LaVey — former wife of a grandson of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey—doesn’t seem to factor in as a pivotal early figure in TST; if that’s wrong, drop us a line. As of 2021, she was still collaborating with TST as a burlesque performer, though as of 2019, Szandora said she considered herself “a solo figure in Satanism.”)

But the point is Cevin Soling, in his capacity as owner of Spectacle Films, was openly promoting The Satanic Temple at first.

Within a few months, Lucien Greaves had brought back in longtime friend and fellow protofascist-book fan Shane Bugbee, and in June 2013, they sent out another press release, again through Spectacle Films, for an Adopt-A-Highway fundraising campaign. This is the first video still on The Satanic Temple’s official YouTube channel. (The trailer to A Hole in The Head, is too, by the way—without noting its connection to TST’s owner and in order to promote another Soling-owned corporation, Cinephobia LLC’s The Satanic Temple TV.)

The IndieGoGo campaign fell flat, just $2,244 out of its goal seeking $15,000. This benefitted "Lucien Greaves" directly because remember, "The Satanic Temple" still doesn't officially exist yet.

This press release gives us the explanation of what Spectacle Films' ostensible involvement is, though.

Spectacle Films will be documenting The Satanic Temple’s efforts toward contribution to the Adopt-a-Highway program in an ongoing project aimed at chronicling the Satanic organization’s unique activities.

After some sort of falling out, Lucien Greaves' old bud Shane Bugbee posted on his own website and told then-Village Voice journalist Anna Merlan about the original plans for The Satanic Temple: a “mockumentary” in typical Spectacle Films style.

This is from the Catholic News Agency article, but they use Merlan's reporting and put it together with some other contemporary coverage going back even earlier, to the Florida actions aimed at then-Gov. Rick Scott.

That same month [January 2013], the Miami Herald's Naked Politics blog reported that Lucien Greaves was listed as casting director of a feature film called "The Satanic Temple." A casting call on the Actors Access website sought actors "to be the followers of a charismatic yet down to earth Satanic cult leader," required to wear "tasteful Satanic garb." "Spectacle Films and Polemic Media … are producing a mockumentary about the nicest Satanic Cult in the world," said the casting call, according to the Huffington Post.

Let's take a break to quote that ad in full, via HuffPo.

Spectacle Films and Polemic Media the companies behind ‘The War on Kids’ and ‘Freeloader’ are producing a mockumentary about a the nicest Satanic Cult in the world. We are looking for actors for 8 speaking roles to play minions as well as 10 featured extras. We are seeking people from all walks of life, goths, grandparents, soccer moms, etc to be the followers of a charismatic yet down to earth Satanic cult leader. The shoot will be on January 25th in downtown Tallahassee. Actors will be required to wear tasteful Satanic garb.

The Miami Herald further specified, "A casting call was posted on the web site Actors Access on Jan. 7 seeking non-union actors for no pay."

So there are some things they're consistent about.

Back to the CNA article:

Shane Bugbee, an early collaborator of the Satanic Temple, told a version of the group's history at the Vice magazine website, and then a more critical version in an interview with the Village Voice and related blog posts in 2014. He said that Lucien Greaves is in fact Doug Mesner, who reportedly studied at Harvard University, focusing on neuroscience and false memory related to ritual abuse and alien abduction. [Note: If this is true about the credentials of Lucien Greaves, whose real name is actually "Doug Misicko", no one has ever offered evidence verifying it.] Bugbee himself had interviewed Mesner for the website Vice, an interview published July 30, 2013. Bugbee named Cevin Soling, president of Spectacle Films, as the real man behind "Malcolm Jarry," the pseudonymous co-founder of the temple. According to Bugbee, Soling was president of the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club at the time it attempted to host the black mass. Bugbee alleges that David Guinan, owner of Polemic Media, was a third co-founder of the temple.

This is a lot of information, but it's actually been known virtually all along. The Church of Satan has documented this stuff for years, and these accusations have never actually been refuted, despite what some TST defenders will say.

But it's this next part that can be distracting because it goes back to "there is only one true Satanism" which most people outside of the Church of Satan don't really care about.

Claiming a long history with Satanism, Bugbee himself said he and his wife held the final interview with prominent Satanic figure Anton Lavey, who allegedly made Bugbee a Satanic priest. He contended that Mesner is an employee of Soling and that Soling asked Bugbee to play the role of Lucien Greaves. [Note: Whether or not this is true, Penny Lane's Hail Satan? film contains footage corroborating that Doug Mesner/Misicko was not originally intending to take on the role of Lucien Greaves.] Bugbee said he at first saw the Satanic Temple as a prank, believing it was "thrilling" to participate in "a joke on the public at large and, in general, the grossly inept media." He said the group's purpose seemed to shift after the fake rally for Rick Scott. "The dissolving of the original idea of making a mockumentary and the rise of a want for a real religious sect seemed to happen very quick," said Bugbee. He objected that Soling and Guinan had "no real relationship with Satanism."

Sure, Shane Bugbee has an axe to grind and a very particular view of Satanism, but is he wrong?

As that excerpt talks about, the original "second rich kid" in the project was David Guinan, the director for another Cevin Soling self-insert “documentary” Mr. Cevin and the Cargo Cult a.k.a. John Frum, He Will Come, being worked on since at least 2006 but officially released in 2017.

The premise of that stunt seems to be that Soling was interested in convincing the people of the island of Tanna that he was John Frum returned, the messiah of a cargo cult.

You can judge for yourself which trailer makes him come off worse (Facebook video, if the first embed doesn't work).

"I believed that by fulfilling the prophecy, I truly would be John Frum," Soling says in the first trailer.

vimeo

"I think you're a lazy guy who wanted to start a cult so you picked up on one that was already around," offers up the second trailer.

Hmm.

Anyway, Professor Joe Laycock in his... "scholarly" look at The Satanic Temple confirms all this original intention about TST being meant to be a similar documentary, and it's anything but a secret.

Here's how book reviewer Brian C. Wilson, a professor of American Religious History, puts it:

Laycock’s book is roughly divided into two parts. The first charts the history and development of TST, while the second addresses how TST has shaped national debates on several fronts. In March 2012, Florida governor Rick Scott signed into law a bill “allowing students to read ‘inspirational messages of their choosing’ at assemblies and sporting events”. In order to push back against what they viewed as a violation of the separation of church and state, three friends, Malcolm Jarry, Doug Mesner, and David Guinan, decided to stage a public rally for a fictional organization called The Satanic Temple, praising Scott for finally allowing Satanists a public voice. Other publicity stunts followed, but by this time a creed had been created and TST began to coalesce into a real organization.

Guinan used his real name for all this, including in the book; Soling instead used "Malcolm Jarry".

(And for those who are still confused, a person whose legal name is Doug Misicko has also publicly used "Doug Mesner" for past public work, and an absolute legion of sockpuppet names, but he's popularly known by "Lucien Greaves" now. Unlike Soling, Greaves apparently doesn't try to have a separate public life pretending he's not an owner of The Satanic Temple, so we stick with Greaves' pseudonym for most references.)

You can easily see how what was intended to just be a film taking the piss out of conservatives for their public religious hypocrisy snowballed into the beast that is The Satanic Temple today.

Penny Lane's documentary/propaganda film Hail Satan? released in 2019 even seems to rely on some of this early project's footage since there's no indication anyone else was involved at that early stage in 2013 when TST hadn't even decided if they officially believed in a supernatural devil or not.

To recap, this silly project—meant to be just one of many—came first.

But at some point, apparently rather quickly, they realized:

And the connection with Spectacle Films was eventually (mostly) severed as they invested more and more into this one.

Which is unfortunate for all sorts of reasons—not least of which being that The Satanic Temple never fully lost their original ethos, and they muscled their way to the center of attention in regards to reproductive justice and abortion access in the United States by taking advantage of conservative media outrage and straight journalism's laziness—exactly like Bugbee claims was the plan from the start.

They have also been given a lot of money by people who just learned about them five minutes prior, knowing none of this history—or of their founders'—and The Satanic Temple's various corporations have continued to not be forthcoming about how much money they're pulling in with this trick or transparent in how it's being spent.

But, and this is key, they have argued for many years that they are a legitimate religion.

That means that criticizing them, particularly with factual references to well-documented events, is not defamation.

(Even if they sue you and lose anyway.)

Hail Satan for the First Amendment, huh?

Next time, we'll actually take a look at The United Federation of Churches LLC d/b/a "The Satanic Temple", and what will hopefully be a much shorter bit of writing since you all should already be at least a little bit familiar with it.

P.S. - Spectacle Films continues to publish Cevin Soling film and book projects. The most recent of which was Tiffany Brittany Brooke.

Here's the first page.

In between the book printing and the eventual short film adaptation, someone apparently had the brilliant insight that perhaps the phrasing here ("young girl") is not ideal, even for a supposed dark satire, and wouldn't it all land a little better if it was "a young woman" instead?

So remember, self-publishing your ideas can be risky business, even if you can afford it financially

But mainly remember, when it comes to The Satanic Temple there's always more, and it's always worse.

"well you see, the for-profit United Federation of Churches LLC does business as 'The Satanic Temple', but the old name of the non-profit church 'The Satanic Temple Inc' was ALSO just 'The Satanic Temple', so you have to go by federal EIN & secretary of state ID number for corporations" just very normal, very cool, very on-the-level religion things, obv

[actual image of describing in person the situation of who is suing @QueerSatanic, colorized]

#The Satanic Temple #TST #Spectacle Films #Cevin Soling #Lucien Greaves #Malcolm Jarry #Vimeo #Penny Lane #Hail Satan?#Shane Bugbee

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theonyxpath · 5 years ago

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Of course the big news is that we’re starting the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter campaign tomorrow, Tuesday July 2nd, at 2pm Eastern US time. And above is one of the pieces of artwork; this one featuring the dramatic moment when Randel Portman manifested his powers. Becoming then, The Fireman – the first known Nova (Aberrant).

Just one Word of Warning about the KS: as of the time I’m writing this, we are still waiting for the OK from Kickstarter after their review of the site. Certainly, we don’t expect issues after 30+ KSs, but if they don’t green-light this in time – just keep an eye out on our social media for when it will be live!

And while I’m at it, please note that you’ll need the Trinity Continuum: Core book in order to play TC: Aberrant, and we’ll have options for how you can include that with your rewards. We’re also going to give backers links for the finished TC: Core character creation chapter and the TC: Core Jumpstart along with the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant preview text released during the Kickstarter.

As previously, our goal with this Kickstarter is to raise the funds to print more books than the ones backers pledge for, so that we can get Trinity Continuum: Aberrant into retail stores. Scion 2nd Edition has only just been available for a month in retail, and our next Storypath System books to go into stores will be the Trinity Continuum: Core and TC: Aeon projects, followed by Dystopia Rising: Evolution and They Came From Beneath the Sea!, so we’re just getting started with introducing Storypath to the world.

Any help you can give by pledging to this Kickstarter will certainly help that effort!

Shunned By The Moon art by Leo Albiero

Like I mentioned last week, I personally have a long history with Aberrant, so I’m really looking forward to seeing where this KS goes. Plus, I got to work with Steve Kenson on this edition, a designer whose work I’ve loved since Mutants and Masterminds, and who was great to chat with on the couple of Diversity in Gaming panels we were on together.

I was so glad that after having pitched him on joining the team, and then poor Steve having to wait years as we hammered out the core Storypath rules, when at last I could finally contact him and say we were moving forward. A fair amount of that gladness was that he was still interested in the project after so much time had passed since we first talked about it!

But he was, and, in fact, you’ll be able to hear his fascinating thoughts on Trinity Continuum: Aberrant, as well as many other games and issues, on this coming Friday’s Onyx Pathcast where he is interviewed by the team!

In parallel with the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter, we continue to run the TC: Aberrant web comic You Are Not Alone right here on this site. So far, we’ve been thrilled with everyone’s comments as the storyline begins to talk about the world situation in TC: Aberrant and hint at the changes we’ve made to the setting in this edition.

Please be assured, we made no changes lightly, but this is very much a new edition, not a continuation of storylines from first edition. Our real world has significantly changed since the late 90’s when Aberrant was conceptualized, and so must the game’s setting. Plus, then, the idea of examining personality cults and deconstructing super hero tropes was still something fresh to the genre…not so much now.

We think we’ve moved the whole setting forward in ways that will thrill newbies and long-time fans alike, but we should know better how that has registered once You Are Not Alone and the TC:Aberrant KS have finished. Come along with us – and let us know what you think – it should be a fun ride!

Related Storypath System news: the Storypath Nexus Community Content site looks like it’ll be ready to go after this week. The July 4th holiday just jams up our effective time, so after this week we’ll be more readier.

Speaking of another world entirely, July is also the start of the Scarred Lands mega-campaign.The Vengeance of the Shunned starts, why, right about now, on the Slarecian Vault Community Content site for SL.

This was all planned by a team of community content authors headed up by Travis Legge, who we just recently brought on to lead the development of Scarred Lands. So, you could think of this mega-campaign as a really huge “audition piece”! But really, there are so many talented people who contributed, and I’m sure you’ll be seeing their names in official projects before long!

Wraith20 Book of Oblivion art by Mel Uran

Finally, I’d just like to encourage our community to give a listen to last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast. Our Trio have had a lot of fun during this past year of podcasting, and while they continue to bring their positive energy to last Friday’s episode, the subject matter is really not something that they are joking about.

The subject is Harassment, which is an issue that we at Onyx Path have been dealing with in a variety of ways since the company was founded. In fact, some of the strongest sections of this Pathcast are when Dixie, Eddy, and Matthew, speak of the different kinds of harassment they have personally encountered during their time in the TTRPG business.

From over-eager fans, to other industry “professionals”, to attacks and threats from strangers on the internet; all of these and more demoralize and frighten the very creators that our community look to for creative and engaging work.

I’ll provide you with another anecdote: if you look at our production in the 2017 time-frame, and the relative dearth of Kickstarters and number of seemingly stalled projects, a large number of these issues were because our creative teams were simply exhausted from dealing with harassment across the board. They had no creative impetus because so much of their time was spent defending themselves, and friends and co-workers.

A large part of our 2018 and 2019 Onyx Path Summits were about how to deal with all this negativity, including my shifting these blogs away from talking directly about these ongoing problems and into focusing on the fun and creative things we are doing. Not as a smoke-screen or panacea, but as a deliberate effort to remind both our community and ourselves of how awesome it is that we are able to create whole worlds for a living.

We can acknowledge the seriousness of the issues involved without letting that drive us away from the truly magical projects we create. You can hear that in the voices of Eddy, Matthew, and Dixie, and the conversation they have.

This is why this episode of the Onyx Pathcast is important.

Please take some time and give it a listen, if only to get a better grasp on the challenges we all face to bring you all of these:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

Starting Tuesday July 2nd at 2pm EDT, the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter will blast its super-powered way into our lives!

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Onyx Pathcast art by Michael Gaydos

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features world-renowned expert on all things super-heroic in games, Steve Kenson! The gang talk with Steve about his huge body of work, his specific brilliant design work on Trinity Continuum: Aberrant, and his many other interests: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

The live Onyx Path News was such a hit last week (watch it again here: https://youtu.be/ssolzT5iGOo) that we’ll be doing it live again this coming Wednesday! Subscribe to our channel and click the bell symbol to be informed whenever a new video goes up!

Matthew’s Contagion Chronicle actual play continues apace with multiple parts uploaded over the last week! Here’s episode seven, where our characters encounter (and slaughter) a bunch of Beshilu: https://youtu.be/U5yrLR1WYmI

Keep watching Travis Legge’s Scarred Lands actual play of Myths & Matchmakers over here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmiXCaSrrCIjmCJQQ7oLwLNahmDbdn_2J Seriously: he’s one of the best people to watch if you want to find out about this setting!

Devil’s Luck Gaming haven’t stopped with their epic journey through Scarn either: https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING

And our journey through the Scarred Lands doesn’t end yet, as the always excellent Caffeinated Conquests continue to march through the Gauntlet of Spiragos here: https://youtu.be/ygamfg9yBak

Returning to the Chronicles of Darkness, Occultists Anonymous‘ latest episodes of the Mage: The Awakening 2E continue here: Episode 25: Igniting An Old Flamehttps://youtu.be/2va2Eae2jfcMammon has some time alone to reconnect with an old acquaintance. Atratus speaks with her dead brother. Wyrd has some concerns. Songbird… meditates.

Episode 26: Escalation https://youtu.be/L4pADEK8aPo Atratus, Songbird, and Wyrd the Seer have a discussion of what is necessary to handle the mysterious Letter Man. Plans are made to investigate the original meeting spot. Songbird remains in his room..

And the Keeper of the Archive continues their overview of Scion Second Edition here! https://youtu.be/nCg8aXg1c0c and https://youtu.be/iaLFToU6OD0

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we are offering the Changeling: The Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition Player’s Guide in PDF and physical book PoD versions on DTRPG!

CONVENTIONS!

Gen Con: August 1st – 4th Save Against Fear: October 12th – 14th GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon) Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

W20 Art Book (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Redlines

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Development

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Manuscript Approval

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Editing

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Post-Editing Development

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle

Dark Eras 2

M20 Book of the Fallen

VtR Spilled Blood – Waiting on the splat art.

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds – Sketches coming in.

Trinity Continuum Aberrant – KS Sketches and finals coming in.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Ex3 Lunars

They Came From Beneath the Sea

TCFBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

In Layout

V5: Chicago – A couple of chapters left to go!

Trinity Core – Getting cover specs from printer.

Trinity Aeon – Getting cover specs from printer.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel

Proofing

DR: E – annotated proof back to Josh

Aeon Aexpansion

C20 Cup of Dreams – This week.

Ex 3 Monthlies

At Press

Dragon Blooded – Deluxe shipping to Studio2.

Dragon-Blooded Cloth Map – Shipped to Studio2.

Dragon-Blooded Screen – Printing.

The Realm – PoD proofs ordered.

Trinity Core Screen – Printing.

TC Aeon Screen – Printing.

C20 Player’s Guide – PDF and PoDs for sale Wednesday!

Geist 2e – Need to input Errata.

Book of Oblivion – Putting in errata.

Trinity: In Media Res – PoD proofs ordered.

Scion Jumpstart – Gathering errata from Backer PDFs.

Scion Ready-Made Characters – Gathering errata from Backer PDFs.

Blood Sea – Errata being input.

WtF Shunned by the Moon – Advance PDF prepping for next week.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

On this day, at about 11:30 in the morning after 23.5 hours of labor, my first daughter was born, singing, well cooing, from first breath and looking right into my eyes with her baby blues. And today, she’s a Psychiatric Resident and mother of her own cute little baby. Time, it flies! Love ya, kid!

#Onyx Path Publishing

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