Cancer

That sets me thinking about buffets near me ... only one that pops to mind is a Chinese one.

I would have liked a reference to a source closer to the original publication or announcement.

Have you seen the catalog of pr0n stories which involve unnatural acts with churros?

Independent of whether you are trying to build a horror-type atmosphere or not, if you're a GM, it behooves you to give the players relevant in-game information at something more than millibaud rates, while utterly stonewalling their attempts to pry it out of you. The pastime is supposed to be a participatory story telling, not the GM's own oral still life with flies the GM gets to pull the wings off of at their leisure.

AND THEY SAY NOTHING ABOUT WHERE IN THE SKY IT WAS??? Belongs in the Fail thread.

Junkers Ju-88 two-engine bomber and night fighter

Some 3rd party comments about all that

(ORDER UP!) Sir, is that an Extra-Large order, or a Cosmically Huge order of that raving insanity?

A concept I used in a campaign (which ended before the nature of the enemy became completely apparent) is the incursion of old evils (evil gods' cults, archdemon slaves, the less human the better) coming in, not because they were always around, but because the old regime/dynasty/whatever as things were coming apart for them cut deals with whatever they could get to listen to get the magical power they needed to try hanging on to temporal power. Now, despite the deals (too little, too late) that regime was ended forcefully and rendered fully extinct. But, since the evil powers had had sense enough to require collateral of actual land, landmarks, neighborhoods, etc. when they made the bargains, those bargains remain valid and the evil things are showing up to collect their payment. So the players (and whatever alliances they form/join) have a multi-level task in front of them. First, they have to recognize that it's not just one big evil bad guy; it's half a dozen or disparate bad guys, each with their own calling cards, themes, modus operandi, preferred l00tz, etc., despite having crudely similar but completely disparate goals in their incursions. Then comes something of a desperate hunt through the ruins of the Bad Old Days to see if any records of the old regime's deals still exist, and to make clear that the bad stuff happening now is not just evil entities trying to reestablish the old defunct regime, which is an easy conclusion to jump at. The campaign got into the transition from the first stage to the second, but broke down before getting further. The next stage never got underway, which was trying to compose a unified countereffort to stave off the not-actually-united evils trying to break into the realm and consume their own parts of it (parts which, from a purely legal view, they did have a legitimate claim to). That multiple-evil-influences let me grab whatever cool-looking bad stuff I happened to read, and slap it into the campaign without worrying about any integration into a coherent plan: it's just another infernal debt collection coming in and there was no coherence to it. ("If you have no plot, you can't have plot holes.") How could it all be resolved? Well, I didn't worry about that too much; the evil creditors varied from pretty punky as cosmic evil things go, up to things that (once fully awakened) could eat entire kingdoms. I was explicitly hoping for creativity among the players in building solutions to the individual problems.

It took centuries, but the Chinese gradually replaced the hereditary aristocracy with scholar-bureaucrats (who had to pass the imperial civil service exam to join that civil service). This was complicated by the ebb and flow of different religions' influence in the empire: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and whatever the northern horse barbarians were for the current incursion....

So much of this depends on as-yet-unstated-in-the-thread expectations about what the table play actually is going to be like. If 3+ hours of every 4 at the table is spent in combat, then yeah, characters all need to be combat gods and noncombat skills are wasted character points. If there's actually a story plot that players can sculpt if they think about it, and where intrigue in court can accomplish the players' ends, then a character's ability to do something something beyond swinging a sword might actually matter. Discussion of this meta-structure for the game needs to be open and frank before character construction begins.

It's worth adding here that medieval governments outside of Europe generally looked very, very different from standard-issue Euro-based societies. In assembling a campaign that can most compactly be described as circa 800 AD maritime adventuring in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and the Indonesian archipelago, there's a range of religious and history contexts that contrast sharply with those of post-Roman collapse Europe.

Doesn't that imply a batch operation rather than continuous fabrications?

Might it be the product of a literal backyard chemistry experiment?

Will it make him clean this time?

Gah, don't do that, Duke. We had our own medical emergency in the days leading up to Christmas, but (1) you halfway expect those when the victim is a cancer patient, and (2) we hit the year's catastrophic out-of-pocket limit on my wife's insurance early in 2023 so we weren't put any deeper in debt by it. We're all getting older, an we have to take care of ourselves.

The gift of a a pair of gloves of the appropriate sort, dated and signed by Muhammad Ali.

Interesting little analysis piece on the latest fad, motion offense

Mama deer tries to hog all the Cheerios to herself, so wife went out and throws a second double handful further out in the yard so not-quite-yearling deer could get some.

Was it a C-130 that couldn't hold oil pressure so it took three hops to get from Rota to Madrid? (I was on that flight. True story.)

* Wild cheering *

Xenomorph eggs ready to be implanted, in temporal stasis capsules

Who checks their eyes? Doesn't everyone carry them to their seat with the rest of their face parts?