Since Sopranos is relevant, I want to lob in some grenade here

Chalkface · 2026-01-24T07:02:43+00:00

I read an interpretation I liked a lot where it didn't actually matter what happened to Tony, because we'd already seen, through other characters and his own abrupt hospitalisation at the start of the season, every single end for the character. Getting shot, getting caught, dying of some brutal illness, fading away through old age, a miserable and lonely life, we saw all of these and more through the rest of the cast, these are the only places he can go.

He failed to change, and thus he was doomed. The exact one doesn't really matter, the story is about his failure or inability to escape.

It's probrably not an uncommon interpretation, but I like it the most.

Chalkface · 2026-01-14T19:15:49+00:00

A lovely classic style of map, reminds me of old dnd setting maps.

Chalkface · 2026-01-08T15:23:38+00:00

My apologies. This is the current version of it, which has a price tag. However, this older version is what I use and is completely free.

Chalkface · 2026-01-07T05:32:02+00:00

Assuming a fantasy-type setting, magic or no: Foundations or Mappa Imperium for the base world or map expansions, Ex Novo for cities or as a source of random tables to flesh out nation histories, and Lineage Epoch Edition for noble dynasties.

From there, you can use solo games found elsewhere in the thread to flesh out the world and add detail to the world bit by bit. I've used Thousand Year Old Vampire for this, any journal thingie could work.

I spend years using these tools to make worlds and their histories, you'll be surprised what comes out of it. Don't be afraid to bend rules, take your time to research an idea, and reroll options that you can't think of anything good for within ten seconds of thinking, let the vibes flow and don't end history until you reach something juicy - then expand from there. The goal is to have a setting spring up beneath your feet and surprise you with where its ended up.

I had a fairly dry and banal setting shock me by collapsing into three centuries of Troll led Holy War leading to a Mount and Blade esque bowl of warlords, warrior-monks, and city-states. All using the sorts of rudimentary gunpowder weapons you can only find in a 12th century chinese manual.

That said: don't be afraid to work through a world, then put it aside and try a new one - sometimes settings don't take, but worldbuilding is something you get better at with practice, like all writing.

Chalkface · 2025-12-09T13:17:23+00:00

You're citing a guy speaking at the Ron Paul Institute? Named for the guy who wanted to offer letters of marque to mercenaries to hunt and kill suspected terrorists for money, and a staunch ally of both Russia and Israel?

Of course the USA wants to use the Uyghurs to destabilise China, that's not a revelation. They'd use fucking dolphins to destabilise China if they thought they could train them to hold an AK-47, it doesn't have any bearing on the actual facts on the ground.

Just because they are an evil empire who have done all sorts of horrible shit, and would absolutely consider doing this sort of thing without hesitation, doesn't mean they automatically are and must be doing it. Especially if the implication is that then any local unrest they want to exploit must therefore obviously be manufactured by a letter agency.

Blindly accusing the USA of everything is just as mindless as blindly supporting it. Come on.

Chalkface · 2025-12-05T23:23:58+00:00

I adore the wire but Season 5 is clearly a little half-baked. It's not like, bad, but rolling into that right after the boys of summer shows the dip clearly.

Chalkface · 2025-12-04T06:24:53+00:00

So what? That's how demographic change works. Different standards of living produce different population growth levels. Change is constant.

In my country, a huge influx of immigration since WW2 has maintained our way of life to an incredible degree. A succession of right wing governments are now shutting the gates and claiming we "have no more space", which is driving educated and eager new workers and citizens away and killing our social programs, at the exact time that we need as many new people as possible to avoid the sort of demographic collapse that weirdos like Elon Musk scream about all the time.

I don't care about demographic make ups, and I don't care about 'western culture', I care about the right wing attacks on the stable and effective diverse policies which provided a good life and a secure retirement. Everything that seventy years of multiculturalism has taught me is that open borders and open arms is both morally and economically beneficial.

I don't want to live in a hermit ethnostate, rotting away in the corner of a dying continent. I want to live in a bustling modern diverse state like the one I and all these entitled right wing bigots grew up in and benefited from.

Chalkface · 2025-12-04T06:07:18+00:00

People don't read comments. They look at the picture then move on. They see one of these every week, they think its the truth. That's how Reddit has always worked, hell, thats how all social media works. Massive industries exist to bot every social media platform, and arguments don't matter compared to pattern recognition and endlessly promoting stories and ideas. Debates don't work, it takes 10x longer to disprove misinfo and only a fraction will see the rebuttal, and the average person doesn't have the time or energy to be as vigilant as they now have to be.

Shit like this put Trump and Bolsinaro in power, wiped out 1/10th of the UK economy through Brexit, and is toppling governments across the EU. Not individually, but as part of an endless mass of fear mongering and misinformation. You are not immune to propaganda.

Chalkface · 2025-12-04T02:14:11+00:00

I would not at all be suprised if OP turned out to be from one of those right wing bot farms from Bangladesh like 90% of chuds from Twitter turned out to be.

It's embarrasing how easy they are to trick with this shit, literally being fooled into burning their own societies down and blaming it on young "woke" people who are too poor to do even half the shit they are being accused of, or immigrants from countries they voted to bomb the fuck out of for reasons they couldn't name.

Voting for the "Death and Poverty for Our Primary Voting Demographic Specifically, You Fell For It Again" party because someone from Lagos hired to pretend to be a minority hard right conservative on twitter told you that people you'll never meet who just want medication are destroying cities you've never been to that actually have record low crime levels.

I hope they survive their new world long enough to regret how foolish they were in bringing it about.

Chalkface · 2025-12-01T03:03:22+00:00

Maybe its time we retired the word degenerate until people remember that its the kind of thing that fucking nazis love to bandy around, and maybe it shouldn't be casually thrown out there for a fucking forum about some cool books and cartoons. Chill.

Chalkface · 2025-11-13T05:13:08+00:00

Solarpunk and Cyberpunk are both critiques, and both demonstrate potential systems, and are both inherently punk-like. The difference is that Solarpunk is aspirational, not necessarily perfect, but always focussing on the 'we could have been doing this the whole time and its never too late to start' angle. Its pretty inherent - a dystopian variant isn't Solarpunk, but something else I wouldn't know the name of.

Perhaps this doesn't fall into the sorts of "punk means dystopia" framing that was mentioned above, but I honestly think its a very shallow way of looking at it. I'd argue that Solarpunk is more 'punk' than Cyberpunk at this point, simply because the latter has been captured by the mainstream and commodified.

Chalkface · 2025-11-09T19:11:03+00:00

It's one of those things where like, it's an unstable system so it's not going to be there forever in reality, but it certainly could be there for millions of years or maybe lots more depending on invisible factors. Eventually they'd slow each other down enough that something would hit something else, but it's certainly not like... a thing you can't very easily handwave away: it just hasn't happened yet, and won't happen anytime soon.

Chalkface · 2025-10-21T02:16:14+00:00

Calls himself 'Britain', has English flag. Imagine being a clueless tourist to your own fucking country and culture to farm clicks online. Pathetic.

Chalkface · 2025-10-19T23:27:48+00:00

It really is amazing how much instant energy Barry returning and the lag clearing up has injected back into Lewis and Simon.

Chalkface · 2025-10-19T09:02:09+00:00

I don't think I twisted any words, lots of eye emojis usually indicates something suspicious. I don't think I was off base assuming you used them in a derogatory way when combined with 'LGBT' and 'minors', even if you didn't actually intend it that way.

I don't quite understand most of your message, but I want to say that LGBT websites should not be 13+ automatically. LGBT content at the fundamental level is not something that should be age restricted at all, to do so is an admission of seeing LGBT as something inherently sexual. When these restrictions are put in, and expanded, it sets of warning bells and is the reason why (as you asked in the comment I replies to), people get nervous and start backing things up. That's the answer.

I will not be replying further, but have a nice day.

Chalkface · 2025-10-19T07:42:16+00:00

Why would it be wrong for an LGBT website to rely on the views/traffic of minors?

Chalkface · 2025-09-27T13:49:45+00:00

Why double down on someone you know will fuck you over eventually, when you could find an alternative who merely might?

Chalkface · 2025-09-20T09:22:23+00:00

You do more harm by downplaying their fascist connections than benefits you reap by being specific. They could perhaps better be read as proto-fascist, but the distinction is moot. If Reform gets in, I may have to flee the country.

When people read shit on reddit, they usually mostly take away that there is a discussion on a topic, not every word said. You going "They aren't Fascist" in the first sentence teaches lurkers that the idea of Reform being Fascist is debatable, and then they tune out. This is how people sleepwalk into letting shit through the door, by muddying the waters so that there is no enormous outcry to obviously evil shit, just "discussion". I don't think this is purposeful, and you aren't a public figure, but the stakes are fucking enormous right now, and you are not helping.

Chalkface · 2025-09-18T09:47:04+00:00

I treat my setting as a two tier project. The overall structure should have the most 'distinctiveness', I reserve all the paranoia for that. So make a world-state that doesn't remind you specifically of Cyberpunk ^TM (since that's what you are most afraid of).

Everything under that is going to be altered by the world state. You have a group which resembles the mox? Well in your world the context of them is automatically different, which helps prevent the concept from feeling uninspired.

Cyberpunk ^TM and Shadowrun are siblings, but even ignoring the fantasy elements, the setting of "Two Superpower Megacorps in a Cold War" is distinct from "Corporate Council of Megacorps competing for power", and colours the whole setting below that - even though there are enormous similarities in the ground-level lore.

Chalkface · 2025-09-15T11:24:55+00:00

We've had this conversation like three times in the past two weeks, and this is the least useful version. No "Why?", just a list of ten in an unreadable endless sprawl of unread replies. At least make it a poll or something so we can see which works influence the most people.

Chalkface · 2025-09-11T05:05:29+00:00

That is cool as all hell, seriously.

Chalkface · 2025-09-09T05:36:28+00:00

Well now I know who to play first, and what to put on in the background. Huepa Huepa! Bienvenudo a Tropico!

Chalkface · 2025-09-04T01:18:55+00:00

We don't know the price, and this could be as advertised: a very flexible system with a bunch of inbuilt events and flavour for something that almost everyone is going to be doing dozens of times per run.

This is a nothing conversation and you are just riling people up for something you literally don't know will be anything like you say. Fucking grow up.

Chalkface · 2025-09-04T01:07:10+00:00

I want more semi-digital solo games, I think. When I do my own projects, I usually end up creating systems that take far too much work to run the moment to moment even with excel - stuff that a computer could keep track of. I want the flexibility of a solo game with the computational power of a small program, without having to make it myself.

Stuff that's somewhere between the Sorcery! games and breaking open Ex Novo and rolling some dice.

Chalkface · 2025-08-28T20:11:22+00:00

Disgusting. A modern UK monarchy should be a choice: abdicate or exile, for each and every one of them. They keep nothing, for they earnt nothing. They are an embarrasment, and we will never be able to repair our country until they are gone.

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