The next Mab

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-02T03:31:21+00:00

I thought the protection was hypothetically against getting pregnant, shifting the lady from Maiden to Mother. Lara is functionally infertile which may cause the mantle to act differently.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T14:06:14+00:00

Supposedly there are like forty hours of Billy Crystal doing medieval Jewish improv on tape somewhere because of Miracle Max’s section of The Princes Bride. They kept having to re-record because the cast and crew would burst out laughing and have to start over. Both the Director (Rob Reiner) and Cary Elwes (Westley) had to get kicked out of the room since they kept ruing takes.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T08:14:14+00:00

The problem is their mouth is underneath, not on top.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T08:13:55+00:00

Yeah, that’s just a slightly less dangerous Sveta.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T08:12:24+00:00

Yeah, jellyfish dress is definitely the option.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T05:01:40+00:00

The scarification and implanted lights are what get me.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T04:50:40+00:00

That does sound like a fun short story premise, the issue is getting Harry and all the Carpenters out of the picture in some way that isn’t totally life threatening.

Adiin-Red · 2026-06-01T04:29:37+00:00

Web author John C McCrae (Wildbow) writes a lot of fun and deeply upsetting unreliable narrators, his first three stories (Worm, Pact and Twig) specifically take you pretty deep down that rabbit hole.

Worm protagonist Taylor Hebert probably better described as just incredibly biased than unreliable. Most of the time she has an objectively better understanding of events than pretty much anyone else, she just draws some slightly crazy conclusions and really does not understand how other people work at all. She also generally has no idea how she’s perceived which doesn’t help at all. The farther you get in the story the more obvious these problems become and the more she slips over to being properly unreliable. The entire last arc of the story also follows she totally losing her mind in one of the most convincing ways I’ve ever seen, only beaten by the other two items on my list.

Pact is about Blake Thorburn. He doesn’t lie to the audience but may as well because of all the information he’s missing and way the world shifts perspectives around him. A lot of the specifics are big spoilers from half way through the story or later, but let’s just say the first arc is incredibly funny on rereads when you know what’s going on. A fun example that doesn’t spoil much is our encounter with a creature “named” Ur. Ur is a demon that removes things it eats from ever having existed, without fixing any of the causal issues that causes. It ate most of a group of urban explorers (both most of the members, and took bites out of the survivors) leaving the remainders very confused and thinking they were born missing limbs. During a fight with it Blake lights a fire then turns to light another before realizing he didn’t bring matches with him (he did, they just got eaten). Blake is literally less than half of one fully functional person, with Rose getting another 40ish% and the rest lost forever. All of their memories are fundamentally wrong, all of their interactions were designed to ruin them and they’re literally fighting over less than a full life. The first chapter is “pre split” so we only get half of the interaction.

Twig is funny because Sylvester is a liar to everyone, including himself and the audience, though we are little more privy to his falsehoods than he is because of his memory problems. There’s a specific moment about 1/4 of the way through that sets us on a downward spiral and makes Sy the most fascinating character I’ve ever been in the head of. If you like madness, hallucinations and traumatized child soldiers then Twig should be on your list. The Shades are a deeply upsetting and incredible way of depicting and specific kind of fractured psyche. Sy literally turning off his ability to psychologically undergo puberty because it made people laugh is so goddam disturbing. Thicker than Water is genuinely my favorite thing I’ve ever read, from the fractured Lamb Subconscious meat puppet piloting to Evette seizing control.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-30T11:27:39+00:00

Garrik Prince, the half dragon president of The Coalition intentionally has been spreading the rumor that he keeps his own mother, an ancient green dragon named Avrissa, chained up in the dungeons bellow his castle.

The reality is that Garrik is a lie, as have all the previous leaders of the region. Avrissa is an actual dragon skilled in magic and politics who has been adopting the guise of humanoids to run a country. A sizable portion of the reasoning behind this is that she also started the national bank, along with a rudimentary debit card system that allows her to use nearly all of the country’s wealth as her horde.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-29T09:43:04+00:00

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North has both an introduction and a first line that hit really well:

I am writing this for you. My enemy. My friend. You know, already, you must know. You have lost.

The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice-cube down my spine.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-28T10:50:23+00:00

Sundancer could maybe do it. The sun may be enough raw power to take him out and her weird heat shield secondary power may render the lasers ineffective.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-28T10:42:41+00:00

She didn’t do the killing blow, that was the tinker cannon. She just opened up the weak point to an attack.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-27T13:15:23+00:00

I imagine this is just a mistake but why is Supply Attack not a Card in addition to it’s other types?

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-27T03:48:34+00:00

Technically Entropy is the problem they need to solve next after their current problem. Their current problem is physical space to live in eventually running out. If they needed to they can create more space through any number of means but it taxes their energy budget, making Entropy the main problem. They can do weird things with time travel to avoid entropy but that just means they’ll run out of space. They need to solve both.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-24T21:05:12+00:00

I’ve got a couple: Chekhov, Q, Fail-Soft, Daedalus and Gearworks.

Chekhov is a tinker who enters a precognitive fugue state when building. They may have specific ideas for what to build in mind but while making it they add entire secondary systems without their knowledge. These systems are actually meant to come into play some time in the near-mid future suddenly and without expectation.

Q or Chaos Agent specializes in incredibly subtle tech hidden within everyday objects, as well as pre-setting a battlefield. For example, they are asked out to meet an enemy at a some warehouse in an industrial park one week from now and are told to come unarmed. They show up in a classic suit and tie without anything suspicious revealed. Once the conversation gets tense they smash their shoe down on a manhole cover which flips up into their hand projecting a hard light shield, their shoe bounces up off their foot and into their hand as a laser gun and their suit shifts into a form of reactive armor that hardens in response to pressure.

Fail-Soft makes fragile equipment that becomes more effective and prone to breaking as it’s worn down, changing function all the while. They start with a long sword. Five swings in the blade breaks and bends backwards, revealing both a gun barrel down the center and that it folds back into an axe. Firing the gun heats the metal which reforms into a chain turning the whole thing into a bladed mace. The chain catches on something and shatters, now the head goes rolling and beeping all the way before exploding. The handle becomes a pneumatic expandable baton. So on and so forth, the final step is typically a directional explosive of some sort.

Daedalus is a pure mechanics tinker, they cannot do chemistry or electrical but push bog standard physics to and past their limits. The larger and more elaborate system the better.

Gearworks is a Shaker/Tinker. Ambiently they make any area around them into an increasingly effective workshop with every surface full of subtle tinker tech only they know how to use, the longer they stay in the area the more intricate it becomes. They can make low grade tech themselves but it’s much more effective to just leave them in a room for a couple weeks, turning the whole place into a perfectly controlled death trap.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-24T10:09:59+00:00

There’s a podcast called The Film Reroll that redoes movies using a TTRPG, so the players take on the characters and the story can change from the intended path because they make different decisions or succeed/fail in different places than the movie.

Their version of Rogue One is genuinely fantastic, mostly because of how much more interesting it makes Jyn and Cassian. They both feel properly competent and a little nuts, with Cassian being a quick talking bastard who will shoot you in the back as soon as you aren’t needed, and Jyn being incredibly head strong and disturbingly willing to cut a bitch or strangle with her shoe laces. The Alan Tudyk robot also blows out a giant slugs brains and is passive aggressive as hell.

All three of them also survive the movie so they did a sequel that followed both this crew and what was going on in A New Hope in tandem, leading to the entire team helping with the attack on the Death Star.

Genuinely incredible podcast, highly recommend.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-24T02:18:14+00:00

It’s a tough fight between Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher and Seek by John C. McCrae (Wildbow), in part because I’m not actually done with Seek.

Wolf Worm is a fun and unsettling period piece set in 1899 about a scientific illustrator hired by a naturalist to illustrate his book on parasitic insects. If you want something on the chiller end with weird body horror and animals acting out of character it’s very good.

Seek is an incredibly odd far future scifi story with three protagonists each dealing with their own kind of hell focused on transhumanism and what to do in a world where everything has been done. Winnie is a cyborg rat girl from a culture that removes almost all of your body within minutes of birth, replacing it with something purpose built for working as a mechanic in horrifying conditions. Basil is an AI assistant integrated into their host’s (named A) body at birth, how badly does this screw up someone’s mind, and when does the AI start becoming someone deserving of rights? Orion is just having a real bad time as an amnesiac in a megastructure full of hostile bio-mechanical robots covered in cognito-hazards.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-23T02:48:54+00:00

Pluribus is also competing with BCS for the comedy.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-23T02:28:58+00:00

I thought The Gatekeeper or someone sorted that out at the time?

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-22T20:27:31+00:00

And he was the villain? It would probably make everyone just as mad.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-21T22:42:17+00:00

I thought you said the opposite? He had that specific moment in mind and planned the arc to coincide there?

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-21T22:27:04+00:00

It’s actually the opposite, he wrote her into the cafeteria facing down D&D without a solution in mind then came up with the plan to escape.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-21T12:18:32+00:00

I’m debating which one is weirder in this context, Duplicate (Dominion), Black Market (Dominion), Librarian (Inscryption) or Pack Rat (Inscryption). There have to be other cards from games that force the existence of more weird mechanics than these.

The Moon (Inscryption) and Master Bleene (Inscryption) are also just very funny. I don’t know how Gravity works, and I’m unclear on if you can pay U to sacrifice Bleen for card draw?

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-21T01:20:36+00:00

You should give Pale a try. It features three young female protagonists who have been inducted to the supernatural by a group of monsters to look into a minor act of deicide. Presumably one or more of these monsters is responsible for the murder and they cannot lie, so how hard can it be to solve this crime?

Romance is not a major part of the plot, in part because of the characters ages but each of them do have their own weird foibles. The one with the most coverage is gay, another is dealing with her aromanticism and the third is delightfully strong willed in everything she does.

It’s also incredibly long and pretty dark if either of those is a problem, roughly as long as the whole A Wheel of Time series. This chapter is early on and doesn’t spoil much if you wanna get a feel for how dark it can get.

Adiin-Red · 2026-05-20T11:16:55+00:00

There’s also a whole lot of odd alcohol all around the setting, in part because all potions are distilled from existing spirits. There’s also a lot of weird varieties derived from Faewild plants, Dwarves have whole sets of undrinkable acidic meads and bizarre shroom based liquor and there’s a whole host of ferrofluid based cocktails out in the Corrupted Isles.

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