…it’s an okay movie: perfectly servicable Standard Hollywood Treatment^TM; competently written, directed, performed, and edited; genre trope in-jokes liberally sprinkled throughout…

…i believe most positive reactions stem from defying expectations that it be a bad movie, rather than actually being good…

…so what you’re saying is that we should start calling drow shiela and bruce?..

“You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range.”

…its only component is verbal, and while it’s not subtle casting it’s fair to characterise as subtle casting; i’d argue for first-round surprise in the context of open dialog and in fact that’s how we’ve played it at my tables…

feet.

…it’s a tarantino thing…

…yeah, i think that’s an essential cultural distinction between tabletop and videogame backgrounds; i started seeing the transition in campaign styles in parallel with the advent of structured narratives around the mid-eighties leading into the nineties…

…by contrast, our groups routinely swap DM roles across multiple tables which all share the same more-or-less persistent world, although individual character and DM experiences can vary within the boundaries of narrative coherence…that sustained investment is the fundamental point of of our tabletop campaigns; it distinguishes freeform from prescribed gameplay and is why we chose open-ended campaigns over closed-form boardgames…

…are you familiar with the old RPGA living campaigns?..ignoring the structured campaign setting, that style of pickup game used to be how most folks played…

…if player characters aren’t at liberty to move between campaigns, then ultimately no, they don’t have agency: they’re just ephemeral labor playing-out the DM’s narrative with nothing to show for it afterward…

…mind, i’m not damning that arrangement - some folks enjoy the transient experience - but i have no interest in investing my own creative energy toward anything that i don’t keep…

^{(i already deal with that sixty-five hours every week and remuneration barely suffices to stay my contempt)}

…fair enough; i don’t invest my time in campaigns where players don’t retain agency over their own characters…

…west marches vs. one-shot campaigns, plenty of tables for both styles…

…nah, i have plenty of characters from other campaigns available when the opportunity arises…

…i’m not big on contrived replacements; i may rejoin organically at some point in the indeterminate future but if i’m out i’m out…

…not in fifth-edition dungeons + dragons: knowledge checks are intelligence, judgement is wisdom…

…disappointed to see alarums + excursions end so close to the gold mark but by that same measure its run is nothing short of a triumph by modern standards; lee gold’s shadow looms large and well-earned…

East Asia gets a very mixed representation in western media, but it’s still better than the (effectively) no representation that is typical of SEA (bar like one or two countries).

…for all grief folks give kara-tur, they made a respectable effort to represent the breadth of pacific asia folklore and culture; no less a patois of anachronistic legendarium than D+D did with western europe…

https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Malatra

TIL!

…i also had no idea aluminised tetrapacks were recyclable; always figured composite materials were dead-end landfill fodder…

(the changeover wasn’t entirely in the sixties, though: as a kid, we used to peel cartons open and scrape off the wax for craft projects clear into the early eighties, never realised the packaging had changed prior to the advent of plastic screw-tops)

…typically they’re coated with food-grade wax…

…advanced marvel superheroes, the full FASERIP system…

…i’ve been disappointed with the print quality of most of their POD books since last year: it’s like someone isn’t monitoring the ink levels and one of the CMYK colors almost always looks washed out…

…1981 moldvay red box was my first product, but the first i played i think was 1977 holmes, although i don’t know for certain because i never saw my cousin’s books; in fact, i’ve been unable to identify which module he ran us through to this day…

…if you’re into paper books (and a hefty table) the DK complete world atlas includes a lot of geographic information, or if you prefer a dryer, more-authoritative presentation, the times world atlas is the grandaddy of the format…

…it looks like DK also offers a digital version of their previous editon…

(i have the millenium editions of both atlases, and they’re both fantastic tomes, but i think the DK complete atlas is more of what you’re looking for)

…looks pretty much the same on bing maps, except they’re so committed that they named it twice…

…but it’s not in any way contiguous with south america; that would be the caribbean sea…