Scott Ruggels

Far too late to stem the flow. There was already a vanguard with Tabaxi, tortles, and loxodonts. A good argument could be made for gnolls, when anyone allowed them as PCs. The recent crowd funded “The Delver’s Guide to Beastworld” has put an official seal on the inclusion of furries in 5e. That was an effort that came out of a group of furries on Second Life. https://thedelversguide.com/

Never ask for a die roll.

Lee VanCleef.

Be cautious about which version you pick up. The Velo bound version has the first iteration of Tri-Tac’s system, which is crunchy and difficult. The system evolved over time. The supplements are a hoot to read.

What about the version of grabbing the sword, using two hands in a "clap" so as not to get cut?

Alain Duval, a senior man-at-arms. Smart and lazy, so any task he does will be done efficiently. Hates hot weather. Often drills the other men, as his combat experience informed aaa him that being prepared for the worst has great benefits. Expects the worst from and news coming through the gate from the outside world, though is always looking for such information. Speaks three languages and is a passable mimic. Semiliterate. Very loyal to His Grace, and keeps few secrets from him. Often found in the gate house. Not fat but a bit thick, as he enjoys his comforts, and he looks a bit rough, unless he need to polish up so as not to embarrass His Grace. He’s not a gossip but does like to talk. As a fighter he is pretty strong. Can fight sword and board, but prefers either a long spear, or a heavy crossbow from behind a crenelation. Fighting fair is for chumps. Teaches that to his men. Has above average endurance, and gets by in about 4 hours of sleep. Every so often he will take a few men and take a walk outside the walls to check on the local environment ( and avoid some paperwork or housekeeping chore). He has been with His Grace since the border troubles, years ago. Thickset man of rural peasant stock, salt & pepper hair, gray eyes and a potato shaped nose, he’s shaven, but it isn’t a clean shave. He wears a gambesson over his tunic, and a padded hat that he can put a chain coif, and brimmed infantry helmet over at a moment’s notice.

I would be interested in hearing the results of your efforts. So does nightly maintenance reduce damage, or does one have to go to medium or larger towns to find competent smiths to perform repairs and have to pay them?

As a player, from “back in the day”, having UN personnel on US soil was an issue. The Cold War was still ongoing and deep suspicion about any sort of one world government led to talk of fire arm confiscation and personal liberties restrictions. Basically, back door authoritarianism. So while UNTIL often existed in many campaigns, responsibilities within the borders of the US, were Federal, state, and Local agencies. They were the people that would shrink wrap defeated villains and truck them off to Stronghold. How Primus, or SAT or any of the homebrew agencies were handled was very dependent on any of or crew of rotating GMs who handled our shared universe at the time. Later when I gamed with the Hero Games folks after work hours,, UNTIL was more of a presence, and often assisted with investigations, and equipment, as well as shrink wrapping defeated villains. If there had been no PRIMUS, there would have been an agency formed to fulfill those duties. ( often by GM homebrew).

An example of World Building I haven't seen the likes of since the 1990s. Artist’s Tumblr: https://iguanodont.tumblr.com/ Artist’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/iguanodentist

Artemis will attempt a launch on the 16th of November: https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-1-moon-mission-go-for-launch-watch-live

More 6e stupidity. Some things should avoid the Tool kit approach and just exist, Like Transfer, and instant change. Now you know why I stuck with 4e. Keep Instant Change because it's easier for novice players to understand it, as it's a comic book trope. Then again is this Champions or Fantasy Hero?

https://gizmodo.com/loftid-inflatable-heat-shield-nasa-splashdown-1849768136 The LOFTID seems to have splashed down in good shape, and was still inflated when the recovery boat went to pick it up. Well this will be a very important technology going forward. I also see this as a viable option for Orbital drops for space troops.

https://scienceandstuff.com/yes-china-really-grew-a-plant-on-the-moon/

Walking down a country road, and spotting these plinths at the corners of the fields. On top of the plinths are holy symbols. As you approach the town, all the fields have these at the corners. They are subtly magical, but don't call attention to themselves. the symbols are from the fertility deity, and have been blessed within the town temple. The town is very prosperous, and there is a lot of commerce in crops and produce going on there.

There is a third option cropping up, with A.I. generated artwork. People using stable diffusion, installed on their desktops, we are starting to see on one of our gaming Discord servers the GMs generating NPC portraits using Stable Diffusion, by citing a few similar artists, to keep the style consistent. This had been a helper for non artistic GMs, but it also has been an impetuous for me to go whole hog into 3D art, lately*. One of the big attractants is that A.I. art is rights free, So the user of the A.I. art generator can do what ever they want with the art. (* recently I did three pages of vintage style comic art as an [expensive] art commission, and used the proceeds to pay for a new Desktop. However, completing that commission, using the old tools has completely soured me on traditional sketching and drawing. Intellectually, I have been more stimulated by diving into Blender, and getting back into 3D characters, animation, and dabbling in VFX. I am having more "fun" with 3D presently. I do admit it's a lot slower than sketching and drawing, but I would rather go bobbing for French fries, than sketch these days.)

Lars Anderson continues his demonstration of Archery tricks.

So went with a friend out after lunch to find the FLGS. I had not been since before the lockdowns, and also heard it had closed. Driving around we found where it was. The Shop on Mendocino Ave was gone. Cleaned up and empty. Ah well … So I checked my phone, and found a Yelp review that mentioned the store had moved! They were now south of the Mall on Cleveland Ave. it wasn’t too far, so we drove over. They had a tiny sign board we almost missed. Do we pulled into the parking lot. It was full… on a Sunday. We eventually found a spot and walked in. the space had been a music store that had sold pianos and other instruments as well as LPs, since the 1980s. But now, it was packed with customers, gamers. It was remarkable how well the old store,s philosophy fit into the space. The lower level was divided into various merchandise. With collectibles and expensive items in the glass cases, or the wall behind them. The south half of the first floor was comics and graphic novels, with a few tables of back issues in long boxes. Then in the middle was a stair case to the upper level. The north half of the store had a bookcase of fresh 5e, and Pathfinder books, with several Starfinfer hardbacks, and also several books for. Genesis, which looked like another class based SF game with painted Cyberpunk imagery. Other RPG books were shelved in that case, like Savage Worlds, so this was more material than I had seen in the wild since I had been in The Last Grenadier in Burbank about 10 years ago. The back wall had tall shelves of boardgames… dozens, if not hundreds of boardgames. Flanking the stairs were three tables of dice. Mostly 20 spiders, but they had nice set in the glass cases up front. the upper levels that had once been where the instruments had been displayed, was now lined with crowded tables of gamers. We did not go up the stairs, but we asked about it. The staff helpfully explained that the tables were for card games and wargaming, but they had sound proofed practice rooms that they would rent out to RPG groups, so they could make ad much noise as they wanted. They used an app called Warhorn to organize The games, and mentioned they were looking for GMs. (Hinted towards 5e, possibly Adventure League ), but mentioned that one of their staff ran Pathfinder. The place was well vacuumed and neat, the noise level was moderately low, and it was organized. The both of us were quite impressed. We didn’t buy anything, but we felt the strong pull of the tables upstairs after years of online gaming. The number of people at the tables, and browsing the merchandise made the hobby look much healthier than I had expected. So I was impressed with Outer Planes Comics and Games new location and they seem to be doing most things right. D&D Tuesday nights from 5:30 to 11:30, but if there is an open table or room on other nights..,. Now if only I owned a car.

Eastman came back recently and wrote “Ronin”, a dark revenge story about the last surviving turtle, Mikey, going up against The Foot Clan and a Cyborged Shredder in Cyberpunk future, and it’s Eastman’s best writing. Worth looking up, or getting it online if you have a good sized iPad. Bushido is what we played, and played concurrently with “In The Labyrinth”, before Champions came out. Bushido needs an interest in feudal Japan to work, and some knowledge. In the San Francisco Bay Area, in the 70s and 80s we had a few repertory movie theaters, and our local one was The New Varsity, and it showed a lot of Art films, Animation Festivals, and Samurai films from various famous directors (as well as Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Song Remains The Same, at midnight every weekend). The Samurai films, and TV26, which would flip over to Japanese programming, and show Samurai dramas (Edo period cops), and Anime (Ikyu-Chan), had the area steeped in Japanese culture if you knew where to look. The Samurai films were probably where the “popcorn nooks” came from that we all used in our campaigns. We played a lot of Bushido, with each person taking a turn as GM every few months, just so we all could get a chance to play. Each GM would set up an arc, and would hand the reins over to the next guy. Made for wildly different styles. Was fun though. I would still recommend it. Haven’t run across it yet in the wild. Maybe next February at our first totally post COVID con. I’ve heard of it though, and know a couple of the artists that worked on it. Sounds like a good intro to the hobby for kids. My gem would be Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller. It uses the same stats and the mechanics are similar enough that you can use most, if not all the Classic supplements, and adventures. The main GM sprung it on us when he ran out of steam running his home brew 5e campaign. For me, it was like putting on a comfortable pair of boots. Mechanically it is similar, but the character generation owes a bit to R. Talsorian’s life path, as characters do not die in character generation, but the twist from both is that characters are assumed to know each other, and players negotiate on how each other met, and work out the details. This made for a very tight knit starship crew, with kind of a family feel. It prevents “A$$hole Loaner”, and secret villain characters, or makes them super hard to create. This was for an Online game on Roll20, organized on Discord where no one had webcams, and it helped greatly. With all of the Traveller information online, such as Travellermap.com, it made for a very rich game. As for Bureau 13, having it run by the creator, Richard Tucholka, at Gencon (in the Milwaukee days), was a treat, so I went to work for him. Anything modern probably won’t work for me, as I have a distaste for narrative focused, minimalism, which seems to be the modern trend, and find that 5e is about as rules lite as I can enjoy.

Due to a quirk of U.S. Law energy Pistols are not classed as firearms. They might be classed as unusual weapons, but things like coil guns or gauss guns are not firearms or even illegal. What this may mean is that felons in possession of such weapons will not be in violation of parole, and any charges would be based on actions taken by the possessor upon a target, but would avoid state and local firearm enhancements. It may be that gangs would start to adopt such weapons to avoid charges and be back out on the street faster. Regular citizens may stick with projectile weapons, because they can. However the balance of weaponry would be influenced a lot by the price compared to each other.

Marketing budgets are usually about equal to the production budget of Hollywood films. If the budget for Black Adam is $200 Million, the marketing and advertising budget will be about equal. Break even will have to be $400 million, world wide. Profitable would have to be $500 million.

From what he displays, he’s a Martial artist Brick with a pretty high PD and RPD, but an average stun count. No flight, but SPD 3 or 4. As he wades through normals. But is bested by a straight brick. He’s street level, in the Luke Cage mold. There are other supers (called “excepts” in universe) that do have different powers, and the local police have a unit with powers that deals with special incidents.

Eric D July, also known as Young Rippa) is a talented and opinionated individual. He is a Musician, commentator and writer. I often watch him on TouTube. He has not been satisfied about the direction that Marvel and DC have taken. Now while I used to have a severe comics habit, mine attenuated to nothing a few years ago, around the time Meltdown Comics on Sunset closed its doors. From what had been a $100 a month habit dwindled to nothing, with a few exceptions I will go into later. Eric, a very enthusiastic DC fan felt the same way, but decided to put his money where his mouth is, and put together a crowd funding campaign to not just finance a comic, but finance a company to produce a whole Universe of comics, the Rippaverse. Crowd funded comics are about the only comics I still pick up. Due to their expense, I am picky, but I was more than curious about what Eric had in mind. Rather than go through Kickstarter, or Indiegogo, he made his own crowd funding website, and launched the campaign after he had completed the first comic book. This allowed him to keep all of the funds he raised for the book. I donated my $35 for the book and a couple of days ago, the book arrived. The book was ISOM #1, a 96 page, full color, square bound, comic. How it arrived on my door step. The book arrived in some exceptional packaging. And was undamaged. The book itself was beautifully printed. Written by Eric D. July, drawn by Cliff Richards, and colored by Gabe Eltaeb, it is definitely a high value product, but the value is dependent on if the customer is a fan of American superheroes. Apparently there is a hunger for such stories, as the campaign raised nearly 4 million dollars. Looking through the book, the art is very open and clean, the action is clear, and there weren’t any perspective errors that have contributed reasons as to why I have walked away from The Big Two. The coloring contributes to the clarity of the images. I would almost say that the art is almost too sober for the story, but I am thankful for the clarity of it, especially these days. The writing puts forth a engaging plot, but some of the dialogue came across as a bit clunky. The main characters are black, and some of the speech from them in the black vernacular seemed a bit awkward during the fight scenes. That being said, the story itself built slowly and logically and definitely hints at a larger world beyond, as well as the characters having pasts. ISOM #1 is a story about a former street level Superhero who had “retired” to his Texas ranch, brought back into it as a favor to his sister, and then things get complicated. The finest comic book packaging for shipping I have ever seen. Crowd funded comics have been my last connection to American style comic books, as well as a few independents. The big two have lost my business. ISOM is a quality product, and at 96 pages, a solid afternoon read. It is a soft recommendation, as not everyone appreciates Superheroes, and it’s about as far away from manga as possible, but I enjoyed it, and will probably get more Rippaverse titles as they become available, especially if they keep this high quality up. The cover of the issue. There are two, or three other variant covers, but this is the standard one. A selection of recent , crowd funded comics I have collected.

You would have to explain the premise to us non academics.

There was an early Meso-American civilization living on the northwest coast of Peru. It was mostly desert, and it didn't rain a whole lot. The farmers worked tight river valleys into the Andes. This has a deliciously different take on a desert civilization without any Arab connotations.