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I have completed and sent Western Hero to Hero Games to look over and build a cover for. Its a complete book with all you need to build characters and play the game (minus powers and modifiers etc, as not applicable in a heroic game) with a full campaign setting adapted from the original Western Hero 4th edition, plus tons of adventure ideas, campaign tips, background, maps, etc. Also, I have uploaded a file of The Greatest Guns Who Never Were, a file containing almost 50 fictional characters of western and western-inspired background from books, comics, movies, television, and radio, from Hopalong Cassidy to Mal Reynolds and all points in between. Its free in the Downloads section and includes full Hero Designer write ups as well as a pdf containing them all and some notes on how they were made.

Fever broke last night. I'm going to be okay.

Good for him. As a 40+ male with severe respiratory issues, he's very much in the high-risk category.

We pause for a very special moderator advisory Okay , while I understand it is hard to avoid this getting political at times, the Duke has a point ..and I think some folks are forgetting what Simon said on page one of the Political discussion thread which I will quote below... So, perhaps try to down play the political side of things at least in this thread, and then go write the political view heavy posts in the other one.

Not sure if it's been posted yet or not, but the paper that's likely driving a lot of the time estimates: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2EzKndfMupd6kQ4mQ7sl9aTW9XQ7p_8tsgwDkeq664mosM5OCxZw_NU9g TL;DR: The current social distancing/self-isolation/school closure is likely to continue for a minimum of 3 months. If relaxed after 3 months, there would be a resurgence of cases with ICU peak being exceeded in October and an estimated 1.1-1.2 million deaths in the US. In order to minimize the impact of corona, the full suite of measures would need to remain in place for up to 18 months (until general availability of a vaccine).

Not that the two are mutually exclusive, of course.

My school is providing box lunches (and breakfasts). Student comes in, gives their code, takes the box and leaves. In and out in under a minute. It's not ideal, but it's better than kids not eating.

HAH! Scored a jar of Red Star* and a 4-pack of TP! I feel like I've had a good turn in a game of Heads & Feds. * Active dry yeast.

It's interesting to note that this pandemic shows us who's really important to society. When the celebrities and the rich cower in their mansions, no one misses them. It's the "lowest" of the workers who are the most necessary to society. We need to ensure that society provides for them.

Hillary cost Hillary the Presidency. Time she get to the stage of acceptance.

Man, I didn't know Tribbles came in so many different colors and sizes.

Proof that Bernie Sanders is actually Sith Lord.

Dude, if there was a sudden epidemic of a diarrhea virus, they'd start hoarding shampoo and mustache wax.

Someone Built A Drone That Looks like Snoopy Flying Around On His Doghouse https://odditymall.com/snoopy-doghouse-drone

Alex Ross can make anyone look awesome. Anyone.

Hmm. My recollection was that he said a prediction of 400,000 deaths "was not absurd" if the government stuck to its mitigation strategy rather than actively seeking to shut it down. He has now, like a good scientist, revised his estimates in light of new data. I would stick with the problem that the media is there to make money, not to educate or inform. If they achieve all three then it is a happy coincidence. Trust the scientists when they are talking science, when they stray from science they are just another opinion. Doc

We're in a battle against the virus. Everyone just stay one hex apart, just like any other battle.

IT is called being an introvert. I have been in training by entire life for this.

Our early game that had the Society of Ternaugh* also had Queblar Elves, who were known for their uncommonly good magical baked goods. One of the more useful combat spells expanded a special cookie into a decoy to draw fire. *Ternaugh was a wizard who gained his inspiration for spells by scrying nearby dimensions. Spells usually had box somewhere in the title**, and they also had really odd Side Effects for when the Magic Skill roll was flubbed. It's probably everything that people in this thread feel breaks fantasy immersion, but we had a lot of fun with it, and that's all that really matters. **Examples include: Ternaugh's Box of Puffed Grain and Nuts with a Secret Magical Surprise, which was an Aid spell with a requirement that the target must use the Secret Magical Surprise found within in order to gain the benefits. Eating the Cracker Jack was optional. Ternaugh's Box of Slightly Questionable Liquid Refreshment summoned either a case of Sprite soda, or a really angry sprite if the wizard failed the magic skill roll. Ternaugh's Box of Summoning created a phantom telephone booth that pulled a creature into it. The wizard needed to pick up the ghostly receiver, drop a coin into the slot, and dial the number of the creature so desired. Failures would result in "wrong numbers", which would summon a different creature.

Plane with 5 passengers on board: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, The Pope and a 10-year-old schoolboy. The plane is about to crash and there are only 4 parachutes. Trump says I need one: “I’m the smartest man in the USA and am needed to make America great again.” Takes one and jumps. Johnson says, ‘I’m needed to sort out Britain’. He takes one and jumps. The Pope says, ‘I need one as the world needs the Catholic Church.’ He takes one and jumps. Angela says to the ten year old: “You can have the last parachute. I’ve lived my life, yours is only just starting.” The 10-year-old replies: “Don’t worry, there are 2 parachutes left. The smartest man in the USA took my school bag.”

This doormat is going viral, or so I hear.

Ting is, I've learned that the first idea is often not the best idea, and sometimes the best worldbuilding strategy is just to throw things out and see what connections develop on their own. Let me give an example: As part of my Mystic World playtest campaign, I ran a story arc set on my Jack Vance "Dying Earth" homage, the world of Loezen. I'd already decided that saving Loezen would involve time travel: The PCs would need to go back in time to obtain the lost artifact they needed. (Lost, in Vancian irony, because they stole it.) So I dashed off a list of fruity-sounding past ages for Loezen: Before the modern age (not yet named because it's still happening) was the Age of the Road Builder. Before that, the Age of the Cloud Lords. Before that, the horrible Age of Red Shadows. And before that, a mishmash of Ages that were often nothing but names: the Arcuate Age, when people wrote in characters made of short, curving lines; the Age of Towers, inferred from certain massive ruins; the Anaglyphic Age, for the picture-writing carved on buildings; the Trilunar Age, when Loezen apparently had three moons (it presently has two); and the one that mattered for the plot, the Age of Six Sovereigns, when six immortal and ultra-powerful wizard-tyrants contended for rule of the world. Okay, so one of the PCs already had a time travel spel... with a control roll. Which the player blew. Badly. Instead of 8,000 years into the past, they went 8 million! No problem, I'm good at improvising. The players enjoyed an hour seeing the very strange world Loezen had been before its sun began dying. They obtained help from the;;; mages?... of that time. Not wanting to trust another time-jump, they sought other ways of reaching the Age of Six Sovereigns. I had one of their new allies suggest placing them in suspended animation, packing them into a ball and launching them into orbit, to descend and wake up at the proper time. (IIRC I'd recently read one of Cordwainer Smith's stories that had a person who'd awakened in the future this way.) The PCs agreed. Then one player's eyes widened. ""It's us," he exclaimed. "We're causing the Trilunar Age." And they all wondered how I'd set it up. Well, either my unconscious mind is a genius, and possibly precognitive... or I just got lucky, because the PCs did something that could tie into the blither I tossed out before. And the more of these fragments of information you provide, the greater the odds that something will later become useful in ways you never expected. Dean Shomshak

Come to think of it, it's probably time for an update on the project. I am currently in the middle of the Celtic Mythology chapters (that's plural because there are three of them; it's too large and diverse a topic to handle in just one). Unfortunately things have been at that stage for a long time, due to various distractions and real life what-not getting in the way of what I really want to. But fortunately, the main distraction actually helps me write Mythic Hero! What I've been working on for most of the past year, and pretty steadily for the past few months, is a nonfiction project: The Encyclopedia Of Mages, Magic, And The Arcane (or "EMMA" for short ). For years I have looked for a reference book specifically about terms for magic and users of magic. For example, I want to be able to look up what they call a witch or a wizard in, say, northern Australia, or Borneo, or among some obscure African tribe, or in parts of historical Europe. And then maybe I could also read about their terms for magic, how they think spells work, and other fun details. But unfortunately for me, AFAICT, no such book actually exists. So after decades of looking and hoping, I finally decided, "The hell with this -- I'll just write it myself." So as I read and did research for other projects (primarily MH), when I ran across a term I wanted to remember, I wrote it down. I began doing this years and years ago in an informal way, but now I really started paying attention. And if I had some spare time, I'd pore through the various encyclopedias of the occult that I own and copy out relevant terms. Eventually I had a long enough document that it hit a tipping point early last year where I finally had to begin focusing on EMMA full-time and turn it into a published book. And that's what I've been doing ever since. I've read dozens of books since then for research, and I have a bunch more I can work with -- but I am also entering the information I get from reading them into my master document. When I have no more books to enter data from, I intend to stop research (no matter how many books still wait in their stacks, as yet unread), and get the book ready for publication (layout, printing, etc.). Otherwise I'll just go on researching until I keel over. As I like to put it, EMMA is "a reference book listing and describing terms for magic, people who use magic, and related subjects from around the world and throughout history." It's intended in part for writers and gamers, of course, but I think it has some solid academic value as well (since, as I said, AFAICT no other reference book about this specific subject actually exists). Its chapters cover the following topics: —Terms For Magic (general terms for supernatural, arcane, or occult power); —Specific Magic Powers And Abilities (words for magical powers or spells of more limited scope, such as inedia, the magical ability to survive without eating); —Divination (various ways to foresee the future, often called “mancies” because of the frequent use of the suffix -mancy, which derives from the Greek word for divination); —Users Of Magic (names and titles for practitioners of magic, such as “wizard” or “karcist”); —Other Mystic Terms (any other mystic, arcane, occult, or “weird” term I considered worth making note of, or which I thought I might use someday); —Amulets And Talismans (names and descriptions of these enchanted items from around the world); and —Mystic Stones And Metals (mythical and legendary stones and metals which purportedly possess special magical powers). Naturally, this is a subject I can never fully exhaust. Once the book is published, I'll continue taking notes as I read, and eventually there'll be a Second Edition. Heck, there's stuff I could add (like more detailed info on Alchemy and Voodoo). I hope to have it all finished within a few months so I can get back to working on MH, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of my work on EMMA is also work on MH. As I read through my various references, anthropology books, and the like, I come across information on various religions and mythologies in addition to information about magic and its practitioners -- after all, for many peoples, the two subjects are closely related. So I take notes about the myth-related stuff too, and it will go into Mythic Hero. Heck, thanks to all the work I've already done, the MH chapter on Uralic/Siberian Mythology is practically ready for me to start writing! That goes for some other chapters, too -- and my EMMA research has even provided me with enough data to add some chapters (or significant subchapters) to MH, such as Huichol Mythology and Ulchi Mythology. I am not sure yet how I will publish EMMA, since I've never done anything like this before. It would be great if I could interest an actual academic publisher, but I don't know any and I'm not sure if they'd publish a (largely un-annotated) book by someone with no "academic cred." Still, I may ask a couple friends in that general field for advice about who I might approach for this. Beyond that, if I want to keep it simple, I could easily turn the manuscript into a basic PDF (few/no illustrations or whatnot) and sell it on DriveThroughRPG and other such sites. (And there has to be a well-prepared PDF of the book available; that way people can search it easily and bounce through the hundreds, maybe thousands, of cross-references with a click of a mouse instead of lots of page-flipping.) And of course there are lots of other ways to self-publish -- assuming I can't find a publisher inside or outside the RPG industry who wants the book but will let me keep all the rights. Depending on how this all works out, I may just finance the whole thing out of pocket -- if I stick to just a basic PDF and only free art, and do the layout myself, it won't cost that much. (And there could be a POD option, too.) But if I have to print a whole bunch of books myself, it may be time for another Kickstarter. Though I have my doubts that a project like this would succeed as a Kickstarter if I asked for what I think the book's legitimately worth. So anyhow, that's the update on MH, by way of EMMA. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to PM me or post 'em below. And keep on HEROing!

On a related tangent (it's a real thing!), I had to go to the school yesterday because another kid dotted my son's eye for him. Short version: It was my son's fault. Him and his little pecker-head friend decided to pester another kid-- a kid, who by accounts of teachers and other students (yes; I asked other students. You can do that if you push hard enough) never bothered anyone. He had a reputation for letting things roll of his back, so I guess my kid and the other kid thought it would be "safe" to harass him a bit. Shorter version: My boy got his eye dotted. Great big goose egg on the brow ridge and a lovely gall-bladder green patina setting across the upper lid. So there we were, in the principal's office, right at the change of class, in front of those great big windows, my boy bent across a chair and me handing out the skippidy paps across his hind end while all his little friends watched on. (No: a few swats on the backside don't hurt: the embarrassment of it in front of your friends? _that_ stays with you a while. ). Then the lengthy lecture, skipping to the end: "... and you know the worst part of it? The absolute _worst_ part of it is that _you_ get to stay here in class. The other boy got booted out for a minimum of three days and him and his parents have to go to a school board "hearing" to see if he can come back-- all this is unexcused absences; he can't make up school work or tests or any of that-- unexcused. And it's _your_ fault. You and your little pecker-headed friend--" "Stop calling him that!" "Boy, if your friend was any more dickhead than he is now, he'd be a damned unicorn!" (the principal lost it at this point, but he regained quickly). "_You_ did this, and you get to stay here. The only thing that other boy did, as far as I'm concerned, was solve a problem you created, and _he_ is being punished. Does that sound remotely right to you?" At this point the principal interrupted and shook my hand again. "Mr. Oliver, you are the _first_ parent-- I've been principal here for twelve years, and you are the _first_ parent I have met that understands that. Of course, you're one of a very few that didn't start jumping all in on my about why they're kid didn't do it." So yeah; I'm totally with you on this: the people that _actually_ caused the problem should be completely liable for any and all damages. And the current school system rules are sickening.

It helps if you understand that a lot of American voters, on an intellectual level, aren't really sure what they want--but they know on a visceral level what they hate.

Back onto poo. One of my current games, the one with my ersatz Ancient Egypt and Akkad, is called the Shitting Curse. For reasons... On two occasions the players have attempted to weaponize bags of flaming poo. It didn't work. (no, this isn't why it's called the Shitting Curse.) And then back onto fantasy names. Just last night I was working on a system to come up with fairly consistent sounding names for gnolls. (Gnames for gnolls?) It's for the above mentioned campaign, the players are about to wander across ersatz African savannah and gnolls happen to be the main inhabitants. I went into it with a definite idea - I wanted the names to sound like a mix of laughter and growling. I already had one name - Heeyahee. It occurred to me to write out a list of sounds that I wanted to work with. I jotted down: Hee, Hai, Ha, Har, Her; Yee, Yai, Ya, Yar, Yer; Gee, Gai, Ga, Gar, Ger; etc. When I had 10 of those little lists I started putting the syllables together. Overall it's turned out alright, I have a decent list of potential names for NPCs. But a few of them turned out... poorly. For instance Garyee. It's Gary. We all know it'll be Gary the instant the players hear it. Gary the Gnoll. Then there's Yeehar. Yeehar has to wear a cowboy hat. Will my players remember any of the names? God no. Except for Gary and Yeehar, of course. Do I intend to have fun at the players' expense by having the NPCs be offended when the foreigners mangle their names? Yes. Yes I do.

Once upon a gloaming dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over a book of quaint Lewisian Lore I came upon a tale so disturbing, I tell you it was quite unnerving The Adventures of a girl in a place of logic curving, swerving into madness one deplores "Tis merely a stab at new math," I reasoned, "Merely this and little more" Yet Alice's wrath shakes me to the core And yet clearly I could read, how Alice made Wonderland bleed As her curiosity she would feed, from flower bed to Mock Turtle's shore Ever was her size a changing, by cakes and mushroom bites exchanging Wonderland she was re-arranging, homes broken and queens endangering "Curious" She cried, "And curiousor!" Tea parties she crashed, leaving their ruins to smolder her mad indifference ever colder, picking apart this world ever bolder Why I think she even killed some soldiers! Scattered them like cards upon the floor Madness taking her, and remaking her, into a monster any sane man would abhor "Curious!" She howled, "And Curiousor!" There is no haven, home, or palace-that can keep out the Alice As she destroys that which is different, different from her! As she bites growing cakes or drinks from shrinking chalice, now with a thirst for ruining ruining more! Alice cries, as her wrath she lets flies! "CURIOUS! AND CURIOUSOR!" Character Pick: Alice, From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Food is our number one need. Toilet paper is our number two need.

I am a Barbarian GM. I revel in crushing my players, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women. It is what is best in life.

Bernie Sanders IS reasonable and moderate. The fact that anyone here would consider him in any way radical is a substantial condemnation of how the Overton Window has been shifted way to far to the right. A moderate, centrist position on "the left" is considered radical, and on the right . . . well, we're at the place where concentration camps for brown people is at the "policy" level of acceptance.