Lord Liaden

That has to be Ming of Mongo's personal limo.

I'd also look at Takofanes. The Turakian Age almost is Middle-Earth, after all. Tak might think he's gone home.

Sure, there are lots of ways you could take DEMON after Black's scheme (presumably) fails. It's just that if someone wants to use DEMON as written in their games, including the buildup to Black's apotheosis gambit, changing his birthday is the only conceptual modification needed. As I mentioned before, I've liberally adapted 4E characters to the new continuity for my own games. For example, the Rose from 4E DEMON works just fine for me as one of the lieutenants for Takofanes. Ditto Mordeki the Unspeakable, whom I retconned as one of the Archlich's followers from the Turakian Age who endured to the present day. There are other members of that earlier incarnation of DEMON whom I worked into the structure of the 5E group.

Brangomar, aka the Shadow Queen, most recently written up Champions Villains Volume One: Master Villains, is essentially Disney's Maleficent (the classic animated version from Sleeping Beauty, not live action); except that instead of being a dark faerie queen who can transform into a dragon, Brangomar is a dragon using magic to appear as a human-like woman. Her personality and style are very much like Maleficent, and like the evil Queen in Disney's Snow White. Brangomar rules a land called the Shadow Realm in the dimension of Faerie, that being the sum of all the lands, races, creatures, and gods from human myth and legend. The Shadow Queen is also a powerful sorceress in the aforementioned "fairy-tale" magic style.

Easiest way I found to deal with 5E DEMON is to move Luther Black's 100th birthday a few Leap Years later. 2024 or later is just as good as 2012, excepting that whole Mayan calendar apocalypse business.

Looking at some examples from fairy tales: accelerating the growth of/animating plants, e.g. walls of thorns, grasping tree branches or vines; conjuring/summoning animals, solo or in groups; changing one's form into an animal, a monster like a dragon, or to resemble another person; transforming someone else, such as making them old or hideously deformed, or turning them into an animal, possibly under the magician's command; cursing someone with perpetual sleep, or madness; enchantments through an object, e.g. poisoned fruit or sharp items whose prick brings a curse; enchantments through crafts, like spinning straw into gold, or forging weapons. Beneficial effects are also possible, such as blessings of health, strength, or beauty, especially on newborn children.

I'm curious as to the background of Elisha Mulraven. I wasn't able to find info about him on the Internet. Anyone else know anything? If so, is there anything in his story to suggest a supernatural element?

I apologize if you thought I was misrepresenting you. I was making an assertion about a particular element of this incident other than the points you listed, which I believe needs to be taken into account when determining culpability in this case.

The officer used the strobe as the instructions explicitly say one should not. That's fair to say. That's not excusable.

Indeed. But if the police department issued strobe lights for weapons without training officers in their use, the department may also be culpable in this tragedy. If said officer acquired a cool toy on his own, without learning how to use it, and that contributed to the shooting, then he was negligent regardless of other circumstances. As Beau and Unclevlad point out, instructions on how to use strobes are readily available. A further question of concern is how many of the department's officers carry strobe lights on their weapons without training?

I always wanted to ask Steve about the Vornakkian city-state of Kurum-Sathiri. In its main entry in TA it's described as a mageocracy, with social status and influence directly tied to skill with magic, and its ruler, the Ar-King, being the state's strongest mage, having proven that through "duel arcane" with any challenger. Yet the Religion chapter of TA asserts the Sithians are monotheistic, worshiping a supreme deity called Mahin, and its priesthood following a strict hierarchy topped by the Mahinturi, literally "the voice of God." I've long wondered how this dynamic played out in Steve's games, or how he imagined it playing out if he never actually gamed Kurum-Sathiri. For one thing, where do priests of Mahin fit in the social hierarchy? Does divinely-granted magic count the same as wizardly spellcraft in determining status? For another, the Ar-King and the Mahinturi sound like two very powerful poles of authority sharing the same space. Does one traditionally defer to the other? Do church and state have clearly defined spheres of control which never overlap? Or are they like the Pope and the Emperor in the Holy Roman Empire, constantly jockeying for control over various issues? (FWIW for my own games I moved the Mahinist religion and priesthood to another city-state, which I made a true theocracy. I don't like focusing too much Vornakkian weirdness in one place, I'd rather spread it around.)

Since we're getting into the mechanical details of the shooting, there's one element involved that I haven't seen raised anywhere but here:

That would explain a lot, wouldn't it.

If there were real fairy forests, these would be their trees.

Considering how poorly we're designed compared to other animals, it's amazing we survived this long, let alone became apex predators. We might not have made it if there were tyrannosaurs around.

I could see purple for the Chief Justice.

Just color-coordinate their robes.

These protestors may view any institutional organization as, to borrow an old term, "the man."

Speaker Pelosi throws cold water on a progressive bill that would expand the Supreme Court to 13 seats Pelosi says there are higher-priority bills Congress needs to deal with first, and won't bring this one to the floor. However, she notes that President Biden has established a blue-ribbon panel studying this and other issues, which is due to report in six months.

One of the things I like about the Champions Universe is that, while the top-tier technology remains in the hands of superheroes and supervillains, quite a bit of "supertech" has filtered out into the wider world and made a substantive difference to that world compared to our real one. In particular, Champions Universe, Champions Beyond, and Millennium City detail those differences. I summarized that info for the Champions Online community, which the curious can read here.

What a beautiful, innocent world that was. I'd have loved to hang out there. I still would.

"That makes perfect sense and is appropriate." When do the anti-vaxxers ever make perfect sense? The issue isn't the reason why this is happening. The issue, which Beau concludes in his video, is that many, many people have already died from COVID-19, and there's an overwhelming demand for government compensation for the disposition of their bodies. That compensation is therefore very time-consuming and stressful to obtain at a time when family members someone left behind because they weren't protected, are already dealing with grief and unexpected expense. OTOH there's lots of easily and relatively quickly obtained vaccine to save your loved ones from going through that. Beau is formulating an argument to persuade the reluctant to get vaccinated by engaging them on the emotional level, the same as the anti-vax movement does.

Bottom line, between 4E and 5E I have more villains, NPCs, monsters, gadgets, weapons, spells, optional rules than I could ever possibly need. I wouldn't mind more in the way of adventures and maps, but 4E did better with that than 5E, and 3E and earlier adventures aren't hard to adapt, so I'm not hurting. TA in particular could really benefit from both, regarding specific locales in the world.

So, I got my first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Tuesday morning. Other people have been sharing their vaccine experiences here, and maybe that helps everyone get a better sense of what to expect, so I might as well join in. No pain, swelling or redness at the injection site or the rest of my arm. No discomfort at all for about twelve hours. Then I started to get the 'flu-like symptoms I'd been told to expect that indicate the vaccine is working: low-grade fever, chills, muscle aches all over, fatigue, mild headache. They peaked over two hours, although never severely, then gradually subsided. Now about thirty hours after the vaccination and eighteen hours after symptoms started, they seem to be pretty much gone. I will probably have to wait three to four months for my second dose. Here in Ontario they're trying to stretch out the followup vaccination to make sure they have enough vaccine to give everyone at least one dose. (Vaccine supply in Canada has not been as initially advertised.) The pharmacist who gave me the shot claimed that delay actually works to my benefit, because research suggests the AstraZeneca is more effective with a few months' delay between doses. I haven't found that research online yet, but I haven't had the time to really search for it. If it is just a line, at least it's a comforting one.