Scott Ruggels

The largest City is Falernia  at Grid square 10, 5.  it's probably about  400,000 with it's port mixed in. It's food intake is supplemented with a vast fishing fleet and seafood is a large portion of the local diet.
 
Map legend to indicate population sizes: 

 
Hope this helps
 
 

A recent trend in the 5e games I play on Roll20, are DMs prohibiting Tasha's content, Eberron, Spell Jammer, plus several other  supplements. As of now, there are 45 books and supplements for 5e, and including all of them would really make an entire mess of a campaign.  In the Old days, people would homebrew most of everything to make a D&D campaign, but With an embarrassment of riches, it seems like perceptive DMs are following your advice, and purposefully limiting the inputs into their games, so as to come close to homebrew.  Sure, its not yet common, and yes, they also get complaints from possible players, but from what I have experiences it makes for a better game. (though it's still not Hero).  Sadly, the young groups are resistant to learning Hero, so if I am to GM again, it may have to be 5e.
 
List of current and announced D&D 5e books:
https://dicecove.com/list-of-dnd-5e-books/
 

Some good points here:
 
 

The Hero cheese space is finite, whereas every new D&D expansion will add new, stronger-smelling cheese. 

They are options to pick and choose, but the problems go deeper than that.  First, there's powercreep, so if you're playing a Fighter you're just going to be outclassed by the player with the Samurai at any level.  Second, the exponential growth of feats, spells, and subclasses guarantees loopholes and unintended rules consequences--as just one example, the Sleepless Warlock/Sorcerer has practically unlimited spell slots and is perfectly legal (until the GM kicks you out of the campaign). 

I think the Heroite bias is to assume everything you find in the books are options to pick and choose from when worldbuilding and genre-simulating.  That is not how the average D&D player, or even the Wizard's writing team, seems to relate to it, however. They seem to have taken the generally laudable notion of player agency straight past reasonable into its logical extreme. The general 5e D&D culture seems to maintain is that limiting  options to build a more coherent filled with more relatable stories and protagonists is "autocratic." That, and even with limited options, I still wouldn't like how it plays. Its not a bad game, per se, but I find the experience it provides decidedly unsatisfying. 

My long-term gaming group has been playing online with discord video-calls. We used to play all kinds of genres and systems, including Hero, but for the past 18 months all they've wanted to play is varying iterations of D&D 5e. It has some interesting ideas, but I really don't like the way it plays. The more options the devs introduce the more restrictive and bland it feels. When the cool races and classes from individual editions and settings all get lumped into core they lose their distinctiveness and it just becomes nonsensical kitchen-sink fantasy. Loss of focus means loss of vision.

Featuring a universally evil species/race does not make one genuinely prejudiced any more than featuring a benevolent kingdom indicates real-life support for monarchies or featuring a mausoleum dungeon highlights a deep-seated desire to advocate for grave robbing.
 
On the other hand, yes...reality could do with more elf maidens.

To knock this question down to it’s bare bones, to a formula that can be used in any game, any genre, it would be the opposite side of the coin to “garbage in, garbage out.”
      The more history, details, background, illustrations, whatever you can provide will get your players to create more interesting, more varied, more detailed characters.  There’s no way to know what will get two neurons rubbing together in a players brain and create a spark that will light up your game.
    It doesn’t have to be a dry history and timeline that you wrote but instead refer your players to the books, TV shows and movies that inspired you to create that world and run that game.  Put on your Professor Harold Hill straw hat (or the guy who sold the monorail to Springfield) and get them fired up. The more excitement you can generate to them is the more fun you’ll all have in the game.
     If you’ve ever seen the movie L.A. Confidential remember the opening sequence with the postcards and newspaper photos of Los Angeles in the early ‘50’s.   How it brought you into that world ?  That was all taken from the pitch meeting presentation the would be Producers of the movie did for the studio exec’s to try and get funding for the project. It was such a success that it became the entryway for the audience as well.   This is what you have to do for your players 
  It’s an axiom in the military that “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.”  The same thing holds here. The more you give the player, the more you will get from the player. 

Speaking of bull pups, a new contender for the M-16/ M-4 replacement, in the Army’s new 6.8mm  is on trials. However the rifle is using a plastic cased ammunition that it backwards compatible eith the 6.8mm brasses caded standard ammunition. See the weapon demonstrated here:
 

We have urban agglomerations of 30 million plus on Earth right now, so in a world where magic can do as much as or more than modern tech, that wouldn't be a stretch. But that would be too "high fantasy" even for me.

The largest City is Falernia  at Grid square 10, 5.  it's probably about  400,000 with it's port mixed in. It's food intake is supplemented with a vast fishing fleet and seafood is a large portion of the local diet.
 
Map legend to indicate population sizes: 

 
Hope this helps
 
 

I uploaded a couple of these to the Downloads section a month or so ago, @Scott Ruggels.   
 
 
 

The largest City is Falernia  at Grid square 10, 5.  it's probably about  400,000 with it's port mixed in. It's food intake is supplemented with a vast fishing fleet and seafood is a large portion of the local diet.
 
Map legend to indicate population sizes: 

 
Hope this helps
 
 

I still want a 4th Edition Style , 3 column sheet with no picture, for 6e.

Quite possibly, but I think it's better for Artists to create something from scratch, or from very 'distant" sources, rather than borrow from their contemporaries. If you are going to draw Mickey Mouse, or Superman, then just accept a "work for hire" contract, and get paid.

Oh and Disney and Scarlett Johansson have settled the pay dispute lawsuit.
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/scarlett-johansson-disney-lawsuit-settled-1235078355/
 

Eh; you can't see the dents from that angle.    turns out that no matter what you tell your hired help about the turning radius on a twenty-one foot long truck, they are still going to try to turn it around in a stand of planted pines.   
 
I didnt really "get into" anything as I got older.  Riding, writing, and wrenching have been my passions since I was a kid.
 
I have gotten _out_ of a few things as my age advanced: chasing women (I caught one, so....), hair styling (no need anymore), and a thirty-four inch belt (like I said, I caught one.  I can relax a bit now.  )  I have also gotten out of drag racing (too expensive and too much time that I don't have anymore) and out of dirtbike racing (too old and I heal too slow).  I still dabble on a bit of street racing (I know; I know- believe me, I know!  I just finished watching that trial myself).
 
thinking about it, I havent done any leather tanning or bookbinding in a couple of decades, either (I quit because I didn't want to learn and invest in the modern  veggie-based dyes, etc, and the traditional,stuff was getting hard to source in less than industrial quantities).
 
I grew up farming, so there is _zero- chance I want to sink a food plot in my backyard, though I do put in a few tomatoes every year just because they keep telling me you can't grow them around here, and I have both a grapefruit and a fig tree that are hyper-productive, but I think that is because I ignore them as hard as possible.
 
Monte (the across-the-pond neighbor-lady's cat has drug up a couole of buddies, but I am not terribly into that either.
 
looking back at it, i've been pretty fortunate: almost everything,I have ever wanted to do, I did while I  was young enough to do it fully and well.
 
the last couple of years I have worked half-heartedly at rebuilding my Hero Games collection, but really, I have regained everything I ever had (for what it's worth, the third-party magazines are the hardest), so now it's just picking a few things from 5 and 6e that sort of interest me.
 
the only thing I can really pretend is a new interest is the plan I am working on to build a camper I can pull behind the Valkyrie.  Apparently my wife is getting too old to sleep in a hammock tied to the bike and a tree under a tarp hung the same way.  And, in her words, "I want something I can shower in!"
 
i've got something workable that excites me, but I doubt I will ever have time or funds to pull that off, so I am not terribly excited by that, either.
 
crap.
 
I think I might be done living.....!
 
 
 
 

But Netflix is running into issues with flattening.  Which is why they started framing everything from a subscription angle instead of income angle. 
Their US subscriber base is falling and they are padding their numbers by saying that the total number of subscribers is up, which is true but misleading.  A US subscription is $14 (or is it $15 now) but the same level of subscription in India is 75 cents.   A million US subscriptions is $14 million.  A million in India is $750,000.
 
I have been getting ready to cancel mine because of Bollywood.  I hate musicals of any kind and Bollywood is nothing but. 
And for some reason even though I don't watch them my feed has been over run with Bollywood.   Everything I login that idiotic auto play trailer feature starts banging out that hideous musical crap. 
 
It sets my teeth on edge and the new releases seem to be all Bollywood. 
 
Ack!
 
 

 
Matt I hate you.  I just snorted my soda.....

Quite possibly, but I think it's better for Artists to create something from scratch, or from very 'distant" sources, rather than borrow from their contemporaries. If you are going to draw Mickey Mouse, or Superman, then just accept a "work for hire" contract, and get paid.

Quite possibly, but I think it's better for Artists to create something from scratch, or from very 'distant" sources, rather than borrow from their contemporaries. If you are going to draw Mickey Mouse, or Superman, then just accept a "work for hire" contract, and get paid.

How it used to be. From Wikipedia:
""US copyright law traces its lineage back to the British Statute of Anne, which influenced the first US federal copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790. The length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was short, 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more. 40 years later, the initial term was changed to 28 years. It was not until a full 180 years after its establishment that it was significantly extended beyond that, in Copyright Act of 1976 to "Either 75 years or the life of the author plus 50 years" and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also called the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", because it prevented the copyright from expiring on the first commercial success of the cartoon character Mickey Mouse), which increased it even more, to 120 years, or the life of the author plus 70 years."

"
The goal of copyright law, as set forth in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."[6] This includes incentivizing the creation of art, literature, architecture, music, and other works of authorship. As with many legal doctrines, the effectiveness of copyright law in achieving its stated purpose is a matter of debate.[7]
 
So, the intent of the law was "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.", and as such there are two situations. IT grants a monopoly to the creator, but then only for a set amount of time. Now I can agree that the current time of 120 years, or Lifetime of the author, plus 70 years  is maybe an excessively long time, but on the other hand I am unconvinced of the necessity of it reverting to the public domain, when it will either end up as Marxist deconstructions, porn, or hideous fanfic.  In any case the law is the law, and you either obey it, vote to change it, or declare bloody revolution and shoot your neighbors.

Well said. As an illustrator and graphic designer who does work for hire, I'm quite okay with the agreement that my employer (or their clients) own and control work I do on the job in exchange for a steady paycheck (and health insurance). I entered that agreement with eyes open, and could have chosen instead to create art on my own time and be responsible for all the costs, marketing, and so forth if I wanted sole ownership and control. Admittedly I've never created IP that became a major element of popular culture like Mickey Mouse or Superman did, but it's not as if comic book companies yanked those early writers and artists off the streets and impressed them into servitude against their will.

The cousins that have nothing. To do with me have my 6ed books, and it was agreed I'd deal a bit better with paper copies at the moment then play PDFs and get distracted with the net.

Well, current recommendation is still to wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status.  So while this is not technically a "restriction," I don't want to wear a mask during play, and I do want to follow the recommendation, so I won't return to meet-up play until that recommendation changes.  After it changes, I will be doing a mix of online and face-to-face, but for now, it's still all online.