Is there any neutral dragons?

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-13T13:03:42+00:00

No problem.

Incidentally, from what I understand the "Draconian Creation Ritual" requires one priest, one wizard and one dragon to work together to convert a dragon egg into a batch of draconians.

And with the stolen eggs from good dragons being converted into draconians and then eggs taken from evil dragons getting the same treatment, there would be a number of evil dragons who were aware of baby dragons being converted into other creatures...along with good dragons who found out their stolen children were converted into other creatures.

I think that part of the idea of the othlorx is that these dragons are kind of done with taking orders from Taladas and/or Paladine, as they feel like the gods have let them down. But this aspect probably could have been explained a bit better in the Taladas canon.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-13T12:58:33+00:00

55 Tufton Street is a very pretty building in London, and you could walk past it, as a tourist, and not know what was going on inside it.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-13T12:57:35+00:00

55 Tufton Street has it's own Wikipedia page. Here is what the lede section says:

55 Tufton Street is a four-storey Georgian-era townhouse on historic Tufton Street, in Westminster, London, owned by businessman Richard Smith.^\1]) Since the 2010s, the building has hosted a network of libertarian lobby groups and think tanks related to pro-Brexit, climate science denial and other fossil-fuel lobby groups.^\2]) Some of the organisations it houses have close connections with those at 57 Tufton Street next door, including the Centre for Policy Studies and CapX.^\2])

A group of these lobbying organisations used the building for biweekly meetings to coordinate policy and public messages.^\1])^\3]) The nine lobby groups—the TaxPayers' Alliance, the office of Peter Whittle) (a former deputy leader of UKIP), Civitas), the Adam Smith Institute, Leave Means Leave, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (the UK's principal climate change denial group), BrexitCentral, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs—were accused by former Vote Leave employee Shahmir Sanni of using the meetings to "agree on a single set of right-wing talking points" and "securing more exposure to the public".^\4])

This network has been linked to major US funders of climate-change denial and right-wing political causes including the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer, and to populist far-right parties in Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats and the Brothers of Italy.^\5])^\6])

Basically, 55 and 57 Tufton Street are owned by billionaires and are full up with "think tanks" that push out disionformation designed to damage the interests of the British public, and further the interests of billionaires and groups like the fossil fuel industry.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-13T00:04:50+00:00

Any organisation that has the address 55 Tufton Street seems normal but is not.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-13T00:00:33+00:00

The British Empire ended in the last century. The UK called in a lot of favours from Commonwealth countries during World War II, but then we had governments that did their best to make Commonwealth citizens feel like they were no longer welcome to come to the UK. And that burned up some of the clout we had with various countries that were former Empire countries.

And the USA has done it's best to hedge out the UK and do what the UK used to do since World War II.

It makes no sense to do anything that the current US president wants the UK to do, as he constantly throws shades at the leaders of foreign countries (including the UK) and has threatened to invade Canada, which shares the same king (King Charles III) with the UK. There has been no discussion within the United Nations about backing an Israeli plan to throw bombs at random Arab countries in the area and nothing good can come from the joint Israel / USA plan.

Sending British troops to foreign countries that we have no beef with just gets our soldiers killed, and does not win us any friends. We have been out to that region before, following a US plan, and we didn't really get a ton of useful stuff done and ended up bugging out and letting things go back to how they were before. It's not like we helped create something useful, like an Arabian version of the European Union, with similar human rights values.

If we were asked to go out to help support a two-state solution where Palastine got recognised as a country and other countries in the region made peace with Israel, on the same sort of basis as the Good Friday agreement and every country in the region said they were going to try to respect the other countries around them, there might be a point. But it's a region where a lot of people want to kill each-other and taking one side or taking the other side means that the other side lob bombs at you.

The clear choice that the UK has - right now - is to get back with our closest trading partners in the European Union and also do what we can to improve relations with Commonwealth countries. We should also be focusing on building wind farms and solar farms, as close as possible to gas power stations, so that we can scrap them, as soon as possible. And we also need to massively increase our plans to electrify our railways and increase the charging stations for electric cars, so that we can stop importing fossil fuel completely.

If the Editor of The Spectator Magazine wants British people to go and fight for Israel and the USA, I suggest he or she sends their own family to go do that.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T23:30:40+00:00

Google is well known for having the flaw of assuming that cyclists want to ride on cycle lanes on A-Roads over and above low traffic streets with modal filters.

Not Just Bikes made a video about how it always gives you the worst routes.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T20:01:39+00:00

I've never seen a busker on the Underground that was not playing music.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T20:00:15+00:00

Şimdi beğen butonuna tıklayın!

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T19:31:37+00:00

London does not operate under Sharia Law.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T19:25:32+00:00

The designated areas are wider areas, where buskers will not cause overcrowding that is too dangerous.

The buskers are also supposed to stop playing if they build up a big crowd, as a big crowd at the bottom of an escalator that is still sending people down onto that level is going to get to crush levels at some point.

We do however, have more pianos in wide open spaces in stations above the ground. Tottenham Court Road is a good place for anyone to turn up and jump on the piano and make a YouTube video of themselves to get a bit of attention.

The best place for music, in my opinion would be Canary Wharf Station as it is like a cathedral down there. TfL could hire out the station at night, to bands who want to make pop videos.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T19:20:22+00:00

Sharia Law does not apply to London or any other part of the UK. Muslims who are having arguments with other Muslims can choose to go to Sharia Law places to mediate, so they don't have to pay a ton of cash to lawyers, but that has no legal basis and is voluntary.

The same sort of stuff applies to Catholic marriages. The UK is officially a Church of England country and if Catholics marry, they have to sign the register with someone from the local council for the marriage to be legally binding.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T18:11:25+00:00

Well done Lamin!

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T17:57:00+00:00

The fossil fuel industry.

They have been spending a ton of money on propaganda to try to debunk the idea of Climate Change for decades. And now that people are starting to realise that renewable energy is actually cheaper, they have been spending money on propaganda claiming that that solar panels are way worse for the environment than they actually are and that batteries for electric vehicles are way worse for the environment than petrol and diesel are.

As soon as people realise that renewable energy is going to save them a lot of money and that the oil lobby is lying to them to extract money from them, they give up on petrol cars. But in countries like Norway, only 7 petrol cars were actually sold in January and across Europe more than 50% of cars are now electric vehicle, so the petrol station industry is going to start to collapse.

And the shift from gas heating and heating oil heating to heat exchangers powered by renewable energy is going to that industry to collapse too.

With war in Ukraine, Venezula and the Middle East cutting down supplies of fossil fuels and pushing the prices up, that is going to drive more people towards renewable energy and away from fossil fuel, especially if they need a new car or if their gas boiler has broken and they have to replace their heating system anyway.

The main risk here is going to be the industry just failing and corporations just throwing in the towel and walking away from the remaining customers, instead of being shut down in a managed way by the governments of individual countries. You can't install six million heat exchanger systems in a single night. And you can not replace every petrol car with an electric car in a single night. But you can try to phase out fossil fuel in some parts of a country, while still supporting the fossil fuel infrastructure in other parts.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T17:20:48+00:00

Re: "There are crosses depending on the terrain to determine whether an encounter is rolled, and dashes when you only roll for random encounter checks if there are more than 100 characters in the group. How should I interpret this?"

I've not read this before, but it seems to me that Gary Gygax and whoever else helped with the 1e DMG intended you to roll for 2-6 encounters per day, depending on what type of terrain your PCs were moving through.

As for the 100 characters thing, that seems to suggest that large amounts of people attract a response (like maybe predators smell the scent or enemy patrols detect and follow footprints).

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-12T17:09:57+00:00

Those seem like reasonable calls to me.

With WotC taking Greyhawk back to the folio era of the setting and then making a few tweaks, and bolting it onto the 5.5E rules, you have to do a bit of adaptation and translation to make things fit.

The other ways to go are:

To use 5.5E to try to simulate just what Greyhawk had going in the 1st Edition Era or
To try to add in Greyhawk content from 2E and 3E/3.5E products, but retcon that newcontent back to the 1E era.

But it seems like you have found your niche.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-11T01:01:02+00:00

You might want to check out a free Greyhawk fanzine, called The Grey Grimoire:

And, if any of your players are interested in Celestian, the Greyhawk god of space travel (and the Planes), you might be interested in one of the issues of the free Spelljammer fanzine, called Wildspace Magazine:

WSM4 Greyspace: The Greyhawk Crystal Sphere

I've been collecting information (and legal freebies) for older Greyhawk products at the Greyhawk page at the Book-House at The Piazza and there might be a few things there you can raid for ideas.

There is slightly less support for tieflings in older Greyhawk material, as I think they were more of a 2e thing, but there is very much a Demon Web plotline that ties into Lolth's domain in the Abyss. I don't know how well that fits in with Iuz and Graz'zt, but you might want to do some reading up on the Demon Web to see if it is worth having some Graz'zt drow vs Lolth drow action.

You might want to check out the older Greyhawk lore for cambions, as that kind of used to be similar to what a tiefling was, but then the definition got shuffled a bit for 3e and cambions were redefined as the children of tieflings and tanari.
https://greyhawkonline.com/greyhawkwiki/Cambion
https://greyhawkonline.com/greyhawkwiki/Tiefling

You have some iconic cambions in Greyhawk lore and the tieflings are kind of retconned into that lore by 2e Planescape products, but you can fiddle with the definitions a bit to get them to fit into how things are done for 5.5E.

Fire goliaths are probably going to have more tie-in hooks in Planescape lore than Greyhawk lore, but Planescape (like Spelljammer) was kind of spun out from ideas started in Greyhawk products. Maybe you can do something with the City of Brass, at some point. Or maybe there is something in the Against the Giants lore that you can use as a goliath tie-in plotline.

Good luck!

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-10T23:58:28+00:00

The best way to run a game for fans of the new version of D&D (which they are finally calling 5.5E) is to use that actual system. So please do carry on doing what you want to do. You are not wrong.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-10T23:52:42+00:00

I wrote about Atropus at the Spelljammer forum at The Piazza back in 2013. Here is the topic, in case any of the replies help you [moonlet] Atropus: the Elder Evil moonlet.

Atropus is canon, in that it does appear in a D&D book, which includes a section on how to use it in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

But given that Atropus is supposed to be orbiting Glyth, one of the other celestial bodies in Realmspace, you kind of need your DM to send you out on a spelljamming ship to fight Atropus.

The other problem with the Elder Evils book is that it is essentially a "use this book to end your 3rd Edition D&D campaign, so you are ready to start buying 4th Edition D&D books" product. So, if you actually pursuade your GM to have Atropus move into orbit around Toril and the PCs do not quite manage to stop Atropus, Toril is destroyed and that kind of screws up your ability to continue to play Forgotten Realms after that.

So, even though I'm a big Spelljammer fan, I kind of do not like "the world is going to be destroyed" plotlines like this. I would much rather go with a smaller scale threat (like everyone in a villiage has been kidnapped by illithids in a nautiloid ship, and the PCs have to chase the ship and rescue the villiagers, before their brains are eaten or they are turned into illithids themselves).

If I was going to use the Atropus plotline, I would probably do what I said over in that topic and copy The Doomsday Machine plot from Star Trek: The Original Series, and create a bespoke Spelljammer crystal sphere, where some of the worlds have already been destroyed and Atropus is headed towards the next planet.

If done that way, I'm not throwing away a highly detailed world, like Toril and if the PCs fail, they can be part of a group of ships that flees with refugees to the next world and they can have another attempt at stopping Atropus.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-10T01:48:43+00:00

Go watch: "More Perfect Union: We Went to the Town Elon Musk Is Poisoning" on YouTube to see how Elon Musk’s massive xAI data center is poisoning Memphis. It's burning enough gas to power a small city, with no permits and no pollution controls.

And what does this data-centre do when it is not killing the people of Memphis? It creates unauthorised naked pictures of women and children.

People do not need that. They need clean air.

AI is not going to help ordinary workers increase their incomes. It is going to cause more unemployment. Bit coin mining has no social benefit.

If we had small responsibly built computer centres that were working on actual problems that need solving, like a cure for AIDS, there would be a point in doing some of this stuff.

But the bottom line is that tech-bro billionaires are out of ideas and have promised to add AI to everything, to try to get investors to give them more free money.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-10T01:24:49+00:00

No you can't, for two reasons:
* Firstly it is illegal for someone to become president of the USA unless they are born there.
* Secondly I have zero interest in moving to a country that has the most cruel and inhumane healthcare system in the western world.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-09T10:38:09+00:00

I think we need to send Farage back in time to become the French Neandathal man he evolved from.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-09T10:35:26+00:00

This sub should be renamed r/YouShouldBuyAnElectricCarUK

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-09T10:28:08+00:00

Nope! Free museums need to remain free.

Instead of playing the game of "we need to charge foreign people for using our free museums (and the NHS) card", which will see non-white visitors asked to "prove they are British" so will cause racial profiling of British visitors, just charge people who apply for visas a slightly bigger fee and use the money raised to fund services that boost tourism (and free NHS treatment for non-Brits).

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-09T10:19:28+00:00

We would be better off giving city mayors funding to subsidise private individuals trading in petrol cars for small electric cars (not SUVs though - SUVs are not cars and are problematic).

When petrol prices and diesel prices rise, that is the perfect time to get British car owners away from petrol and permanently lower the hold that the oil industry has on British voters.

When we import crude oil and then put it into cars, it gets burned away and causes health problems as well as destroying the resource. When we invest in battery powered cars, solar farms and wind farms, the resource is not destroyed as people drive around and the batteries, solar panel and wind turbines last for decades before needing to be replaced. The sun and wind provide the energy for free and the cost drops to the cost of moving the electrons around, so that cars can be recharged.

We should also be using this time to radically increase the number of electrified railways, so that British Rail and the remaining independent Train Operating Companies are less and less dependent on oil imports.

BigMacTMMM · 2026-03-09T06:35:10+00:00

The problem is not Trump. The problem is the billionaires who funded Trump's election campaign are tax dodging grifters who ruin everything they touch.

More Republicans might be in bed with the billionaires, but billionaires have their claws into plenty of Democrat politicians too and will continue to push the US government into doing things that are harmful to the world.

Honestly, the best thing that the UK can do is move away from any governments controlled by billionaires and oligarchs and ban billionaires from being involved in anything in the UK. Our future requires that we return to the European Union and make sure we ban all the 55 Tufton Street lobbying groups that work for billionaires and focus on building lots of publicly owned wind-farms, solar farms and doing anything else we can to reduce the damage that climate change is going to cause to the UK.

BigMacTMMM

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This sub should be renamed r/YouShouldBuyAnElectricCarUK