A great video on political philosophy and the broligarchs' misinterpretation of SciFi.

A great video on political philosophy and the broligarchs' misinterpretation of SciFi.

youtube.com/watch?v=_LQa28X-1A…

I want you to shush

youtube.com/watch?v=h7u91Gi4d4…

Looks like Trump is the third most powerful person in that room.

The shadowrunners got what they were looking for, and are now trying to get out of an office tower a...

The shadowrunners got what they were looking for, and are now trying to get out of an office tower after the alarms have gone off. Instead of going out the front door, where most of the security is (but also a protest turning into a riot that could cover their escape), they instead decided to take the stairs from the 10th floor all the way back up to the 55th floor to access the roof where where the stealthy ultralight Nightwings they used for insertion, are still waiting for them.

Security teams tried to intercept them, with little success, until a couple of security teams band together and wait for them on the top floor, joined by 4 spirits from the corporate security mages. Generous use of grenades and monowire whips clear the way to the roof, where their Nightwings are indeed waiting for them. But as they prepare to take to the sky again, they spot a dragon in the distance, approaching the building.

At this point, I could discern roughly 3 options: leave by Nightwing and hope to outrun the dragon; get back inside and find a different exit, because any amount of security is preferable to a dragon; or hack the building's air defense turret and actually try to defeat it (no idea what the odds are, but it's not a Great Dragon, so it's not impossible).

They opt for the first choice: fly, dive down, and hope to land as quickly as possible in a street before the dragon catches up, and hide. The decker rolls very well and dives down to street level in a smooth maneuver. The first street samurai carrying the mage as passenger doesn't roll so well, but the mage has an air spirit that helps them descend more quickly.

The other street samurai is not so lucky. Terrible roll, lags behind. The dragon, looking to toy with its prey, doesn't kill him outright but casts Confusion, crippling his questionable control over the Nightwing even further. The mage's air spirit tries to help him descend, but the dragon quickly banishes the spirit. The mage tells the street sam to just jump out. The dragon turns to roast the ultralight and its occupant, who in desperation jumps out. The dragon crumples the plane and then dives after the falling street samurai.

The mage tries to catch the street sam with the Levitation spell, but wants to time it so the dragon flies past the falling runner. I make this an opposed roll. The mage uses Edge to push the limit, the dragon uses Edge to reroll his failures. The mage wins, and snatches the falling street samurai away in levitation just as the dragon was about to catch her. The dragon has to steer hard to avoid crashing into the street below, and that's where we're ending today's session.

#shadowrun #ttrpg

The last couple of years I've been wondering what happened to all the protest songs. In my parents' ...

The last couple of years I've been wondering what happened to all the protest songs. In my parents' time, there were Dylan and Donovan and all the other '60s protest songs, in my time we went from punk to Public Enemy to RatM. But I haven't seen a lot of protest songs these past two decades. What happened?

I don't know, but some recent event seems to have woken people up and brought them back:
youtube.com/watch?v=wUaCz28bm1…

Fix it in hardware

3D printing is fun, but there's some snags. Had a couple of misprints yesterday because of new filament getting entangled. Turns out I'm not the only one with that problem, and the community has designed several fixes for the problem.

People with a new printer always end up first printing a couple of accessories for their printer. Would the printer have been better if this wasn't necessary? Of course. But the fact that you can customise your own printer is really cool.

It reminds me of the ideals behind free/open source software: you can customise it, fix issues in software. It rarely works out that way in practice, because often the software is too complicated to fix it quickly like that, but it's really cool that with 3D printers, you can fix issues in hardware.

SMS app enshittification

SMS is the most basic and ancient of mobile phone technologies. SMS apps were always freely included. It just sends text messages, and that's it. Can't be simpler, right? Somehow today, all SMS apps seem to be thoroughly enshittified.

The SMS app that came standard on my Fairphone 5 worked fine for a while, until it suddenly wanted to connect with my Google account. Why does SMS need my Google account? And it refused to show me my messages without it. So I delete it and install Chomp SMS. Can't get more basic than that, right? But today, Chomp suddenly asked for my permission to share cookies with a couple of hundred of their "partners". And there was no option to refuse. So I google for ad-free open source SMS apps, and find Pulse. I want to install it, and despite the web listing it as ad-free, Google app store says it contains ads.

What's going on?

#enshittification #sms #android

...

My idiot son thought it was a good idea to mess around with a kettle bell minutes before he was supp...

My idiot son thought it was a good idea to mess around with a kettle bell minutes before he was supposed to leave for school and dropped it on his toe.

Reign

I finally managed to acquire @Greg Stolze 's Reign. (It's surprisingly hard to get in Europe, and shipping from the US costs a whopping €75. But a German webshop had it.)

I may talk about questionable book organization later, but first I want to talk about how frigging awesome character creation is. Of course there's boring point buy, but there's also Random, and true to its One Roll Engine, random takes only one roll. And that one roll got me:

A lowly beggar who first became a street entertainer, then joined the army as a foot soldier, but soon was promoted to leader of his squad. There, on some mission, presumably against a magical cult, he had a profound mystic experience that awoke some magical abilities in him, and also bestowed some unlikely education on him, making him a student of the occult. But the trip also left him with some unexpected windfall in the form of a really nice sword.

That's quite a lot from a single roll, isn't it? Not every roll produces results that are easy to work with, though. I'm still struggling to figure out how a noble byblow (I gather that means "bastard") became both a squad leader and a master sage.

My son gave it a try, and he had a champion in the army, press ganged into the navy, where due to some mistaken identity shenanigans he was recognized as the long lost son of a prominent noble. (We originally thought he was both a front line fighter and a gladiator, but that turns out to be impossible; he's a champion instead.)

It's a weird an glorious system. Most stats end up rather average, though. I think the tables can be improved upon, so you don't get multiple royal cobblers in the same group, and the rules recommend you customize these tables for your own campaign, so that's awesome and I will.

#ttrpg #reign #reignrpg

Brainstorming my new RPG campaign

Enough politics. Time to talk about something else! And for today's topic, I'd like to brainstorm a bit about a new RPG campaign. My old Shadowrun campaign is coming to a close, and I'd like to do something a bit more character-driven, with a bit more player agency, a bit more actual roleplaying, and a bit more freedom and a bit more personal stakes, because Shadowrun is pretty mission-based.

Years ago we made a false start with the Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign, and while I loved the concept (wilderness exploration followed by kingdom building and politics), I did not like the execution much. I'm not a fan of Pathfinder-style build-centric systems or the mechanics-first style of play they encourage, and while Paizo's adventure paths are certainly an easy way to get a big campaign, they're kinda linear and never quite seem to fulfill their promise. So let's reinvent that thing.

And instead of a long form post, I'm going to cut this up into bits.

#rpg #ttrpg #httkingmaker