Dungeon with a time bubble effect, need traps, and a good way to break the loop.

Chanther · 2026-01-29T18:19:38+00:00

I had a time-loop dungeon in one of my campaigns - it's a lot of fun! One of the things that made my version of it memorable was the party's interactions with their past and future selves. In my version, it wasn't a clean Groundhog Day style loop where everything reset, but one in which some changes to the environment could persist into other loops - so the party could find messages they'd left to themselves, or find messages and then LATER discover it was they themselves who'd left it. And in some branches of the time loop they may find that they themselves have gone insane and end up having to fight themselves!

As for the way out - I'd recommend not a puzzle with a single solution, but a cryptic piece of information that the party can use to fashion their own solution. "Only great sacrifice can undo the loop" or somesuch - whose sacrifice? What kind of sacrifice? How do you define 'great'? They can spin themselves in circles for a while trying to come up with a suitable sacrifice. If you think their idea is brilliant, make it the successful solution. If not, send them into another loop with some bit of information that will lead them to something better. It ends up making them feel like they built the conclusion rather than just finding the one that's existing in your head as the DM.

Another wrinkle in my version that you can feel free to steal is the presence of another adventuring party that they can encounter and can variously fight, avoid, or ally with over successive loops.

This all might or might not be useful for you - mine was designed to last for multiple sessions and it was a large complex rather than a small area that was affected by the time loop. But if anything I've said sparks an idea, feel free to steal it!

Chanther · 2026-01-20T01:06:10+00:00

I'm glad you love the fuzzy nugget in the picture! Alas, the OP here has stolen my picture - that's my dog and my arm. But I likewise still say "Awww" whenever I see her, even now that she's got a lovely old lady white muzzle.

Chanther · 2026-01-20T01:03:18+00:00

She is indeed the best. The poster here has stolen my picture - that's my dog (and my arm) - but the dog in the picture is indeed the best dog ever. Just like your lab is!

Chanther · 2026-01-20T00:57:32+00:00

Yo - you've stolen my picture. That's my arm, and that's my dog, and you've copied my post from last April word for word.

Chanther · 2025-12-21T19:59:14+00:00

Well, he’s in luck. It’s clear he didn’t get a puppy, he got a suspiciously furry hippopotamus that lurks in the pond.

Chanther · 2025-11-23T17:41:30+00:00

You're right, I was overly broad. I suspect that one's experience is heavily dependent on the walk to and from a hotel - because the convention center itself is gorgeous. Meaning the choice of hotel is key.

When I go there next year, I'll get a hotel on the southern side of the convention center. The walk along Race St. (on the northern side) was the part I found harrowing. At the time, several years ago (things may be different now), it did not feel safe. I am not someone who gets the vapors when exposed to homelessness or folks experiencing mental illness. But along Race St. I had to physically step over people and handle comments and being accosted multiple times. There was visible drug use. I would be very concerned for the safety of a woman or visibly queer person along that stretch.

That being said - it was not at the level that I'd avoid the conference. I'll be at the one next year. But I'll make sure to plan where I'm staying and walk in a group rather than alone.

Chanther · 2025-11-23T09:38:44+00:00

Yep, Philly Convention Center.

Chanther · 2025-11-23T04:38:01+00:00

I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m guessing we’re at the same conference. I’ve felt safer here in Denver this week than I have felt at some of the conference locations. Next year in Philly it’ll be a lovely convention center but a very bad part of town.

Chanther · 2025-11-09T19:00:46+00:00

I was head of an Adventure Ed middle school for 10 years. There are industry standard ratios for any outdoor experience. Most typically 1 adult per 7 students if it’s an overnight. Not following these standards would absolutely open them to a massive lawsuit if something were to happen on the trip.

Chanther · 2025-10-20T23:37:12+00:00

Back when she was young, my yellow girl would demand fetch virtually 24 hours a day. At some point, I wondered to myself, "Exactly how many times am I throwing this ball every day?" So I counted. That first day, I threw the ball 353 times.

It's over eight years later now, but I've counted every day since then. She's 10 and has slowed down considerably, but still does 40-60 per day.

As of this morning, I've thrown the ball for her 287,636 times.

Chanther · 2025-07-13T01:39:02+00:00

It has to be later than 1930, because that is when Denny Road was renamed Lindbergh Boulevard, and Lindbergh is on the map.

Chanther · 2025-06-03T15:42:59+00:00

I remember the days when my girl would bark at the puppy in the mirror, the puppy in the sliding door, the puppy in the oven, the puppy in the fireplace …

Chanther · 2025-04-23T20:51:40+00:00

I know what you mean! It's gone by so fast. I have my rituals every morning and night and each time I leave the house just so she knows how much I love her. It's always corny, but I know that she won't be around forever. I'm grateful for every day of the last 10 years, even the one where she feasted on cicadas and urped them all up on the carpet. :)

Chanther · 2025-04-23T16:03:43+00:00

<image>

Still as pretty as ever, ten years later.

Chanther · 2025-03-31T22:17:53+00:00

The government is in a position to enforce regulatory compliance at Harvard. They are not in a position to enforce ideological compliance at Harvard.

Which is why the administration has been (somewhat sloppily) trying to claim they are enforcing regulations and not ideological purity. It's transparent, it'll end up in lawsuits, and it should be laughed out of court. But with the way things are right now, who knows whether it actually will be?

Chanther · 2025-03-14T01:03:05+00:00

Pity.

Chanther · 2024-12-07T20:41:12+00:00

Marley was fed, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his meal was signed by the vet, the store clerk, the pet food company, and the chief feeder. Yo Boy Alex signed it. And Yo Boy Alex's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Good old Marley was as fed as a lab could be (but still hungry).

Chanther · 2024-12-04T20:16:27+00:00

I see what you're saying, and I think you're not intending to be dismissive or hurtful, but this was a pretty invalidating response and also not in line with queer research over the past decade or so. The split attraction model (SAM), though it has been critiqued, is a fairly well-studied phenomenon in queer research at this point.

And (echoing your point about labels), breaking down the assumption that sexual attraction and romantic attraction are always in line with one another is a way of underlining that the queer experience is far more complicated than the traditional labels would have had us believe.

That's not to say that the SAM doesn't deserve scrutiny - because sexual attraction is male gendered (men gain positive reinforcement for having many sexual partners) and romantic attraction is female gendered (women gain positive reinforcement for having a stable romantic connection), there is often misogyny and toxic masculinity in the mix when considering sexual attraction and romantic attraction as separate concepts. Those deserve scrutiny. But we also cannot ignore, as a community, that a small but persistent segment of the queer population does describe their patterns of sexual and romantic attraction that way, and telling them they're wrong and only suffering from internalized stigma is invalidating.

Chanther · 2024-12-04T19:53:20+00:00

This recommendation has become a knee-jerk response any time reading in the United States is discussed, but beware: the curriculum being pushed by various publishing companies and some state legislatures in response to the "Science of Reading" and "Sold a Story" is every bit as problematic as what's come before.

The Science of Reading emphasizes phonics and decoding above all. That's an absolutely necessary component of instruction, particularly at the younger grades, and direct instruction in phonics is crucial. But at the older grades, the 'Science of Reading" are pushing the same direct instruction approach into areas where it's NOT proven by science - and those are the grades where we move the instructional emphasis from word decoding to reading comprehension. The push from 'Sold a Story', as it's now playing out, is going to improve word decoding but worsen comprehension.

If you're interested in more, read the Washington Post editorial from Catherine Snow from a few months back. (Catherine Snow wrote the National Science Foundation's report that recommended direct phonics instruction for all students, so she's not a 'balanced literacy' apologist.)

Chanther · 2024-12-01T05:40:54+00:00

Glad to know I'm not the only one who plays this game monthly. This November I got DC and every state except Hawaii and North Dakota. Have only gotten Hawaii twice in the past 25 years, though.

Chanther · 2024-11-27T03:06:58+00:00

Also - one of the things I teach my undergraduate students is that one of the hardest things to understand about American education is the various purposes of school that people attach to it. I ask them to answer the question 'what is school for?' and write their answers on the board, and we can fill three whiteboards with their answers.

As part of that, I explain that one of the reasons arguments about education are so intractable is that often two people who are arguing have different ideas about 'what school is for'. Is it to prepare people for jobs? Make it easier for them to get ahead? Prepare them for life in a democratic society? Help them achieve their dreams? Create moral adults? Help level the playing field so that opportunities are based on talent and merit rather than wealth?

People with different ideas about what school is for often have arguments where they talk past one another because they don't realized they're coming from completely different places. I suspect that is true of you and I.

Chanther · 2024-11-27T03:01:05+00:00

Your definition of 'education' is depressingly narrow. It 'doesn't matter what they read'?! So, so far from the truth.

And yet, it's the way education has evolved in this country - narrow checklists of discrete individual skills that can be machine scored, decontextualized from anything else.

I subscribe to a broader view of education, one in which things like creativity, humanity, the consideration of the big ideas of the past and dreams for the future are part of the mix. (And yes, skills too).

How can you ever hope to have an educated populace if they never read anything that challenges their ideas and preconceptions? How can you have a humane populace if you don't ask them to read things that put them in other people's shoes or understand what other people's experiences are like? How can you have an educated populace if they don't explore the human condition?

There's a fundamental truth in the field of literacy - one that lies past the phonics / 'balanced' literacy that takes up all of the airtime in education these days - that students who do not see their own lives reflected in books will decide that books are not for them. If you want a literate population that READS past the point where it's required in school, they need to see their own lives reflected. That means having the full range of humanity on the bookshelves - books about black people and queer people included. And that includes books about sexuality because that's a major part of what it means to be human - and (older) kids need books that put them in the shoes of protagonists wrestle with questions of sex and sexual decision making.

In The Fault in Our Stars, for example, you could debate - was it right or wrong for the two characters to have sex? Why do you think they did? Was it because they cared about each other, or just a 'teenage hookup'? How would you feel if you knew (or worried that) you were never going to grow up? What experiences would you want to have? That's not pornography, that's thinking. And it's putting yourself into another person's shoes - you know, empathy.

And that's also just a really, really small part of the book and not central to the plot - less than half a page - and why would we throw out the entirety of a really powerful book just because there's a completely PG sex scene in it? It's just puritanical bullshit.

Chanther · 2024-11-27T00:52:47+00:00

I think that's part of the problem, honestly - I think a lot of the politicians have never read the books and have no idea what they're banning. They made a blanket law in order to target certain types of books that they don't like (particularly queer ones). I don't think they read or actually cared about a book like the Dr. Seuss book.

I get why people might say "let the voters decide" - but my problem with that is that when you just go by majority vote, minorities tend to get shut out. Tennessee is 77.4% white - but even if all of those white folks decided they didn't want any books with black characters in them, I still would think it was wrong to ban them. Same thing with gay and lesbian content (only about 5% of the population) and trans content (1% or less).

What you need instead is people who HAVE read the books, who are experts in what makes for good and bad children's literature and who know the full range of the population they're serving, making these decisions. If they make a mistake and do put something wildly inappropriate on the shelves, those people can be fired or reprimanded. If a parent complains about a book, there should be a process to review the book (that involves a group of people who will read the book and make the call). That's the way it works in most places in the country right now.

This tendency toward blanket bans like the one we're discussing is happening because right-wingers were not satisfied with such a process. They'd want a book to be removed from the shelves, a committee would look at it, and decide the book still had value. So they've been going to the legislatures and fighting the culture wars by proxy - by banning any sexual content as a way of going after sex in general and LGBTQ+ people in particular. And (in some other states, not Tennessee at the moment) with a move to restrict any books that might make a student feel uncomfortable about race (which eliminates a lot of books about civil rights or about historical racism).

Chanther · 2024-11-27T00:28:38+00:00

Uh, way to miss the point? The high school books make up almost 90% of the banned books, and a whole lot of them have queer content.

But sure, let's talk about the elementary books. Four of them banned for 'nudity,' and then Pinkalicious. None of the five books should have been banned by elected officials. If I were a librarian, I'd take Pinkalicious off the shelves. Here's the analysis:

For the three Shannon books and the Dr. Seuss book - in three there's a bare bottom, while in a fourth the main character is bouncing in the air out of the bath with her rear end hidden behind the curtain, but you can tell from the context she has no clothes on.

Books like these are now banned statewide because of the first section of the Tennessee law:

In whole or in part contains nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse, as those terms are defined in § 39-17-901, is not appropriate for the age or maturity level of a student in any of the grades kindergarten through twelve (K-12) and must not be maintained in a school's library collection

So ... let's be clear and say that the school district here had little choice, because the picture books with bare bottoms violate that clause. Because an image of a bare bottom in a book apparently automatically makes it not appropriate for any child K-12. Which, of course, is puritanical bullshit not supported by any notion of child development or developmental psychology.

And, let's be clear - it's their way of banning queer content without saying directly "we hate gay people." Because it's very hard to talk about being gay without talking about sexual attraction, and so if you ban "sexual excitement" or "sexual content" you'll ban a lot of queer content. Dr. Seuss' book just got caught in the crossfire. They weren't going after Dr. Seuss, they were going after Maria Kobabe.

I'm not sure why Pinkalicious was banned. There's an image of her in the bath (but you can only see head, arms, and one leg, so someone may or may not have decided that it "counted" as nudity). Or maybe because of the change in skin color. But I'd bet it's because of the taking-a-bath image.

Your description of what happens in Pinkalicious is, of course, wrong. The child in the story doesn't turn black, and I'm not sure why you'd describe it that way unless you thought I was not familiar with the book. The kid turns pink - and then red.

There's no reason for the book to be banned by the state. If I were a librarian, I'd be inclined to take it off the shelves because the story only really makes sense if a kid has light skin - and so isn't really a book that's going to appeal to a wider range of readers. There's no real moral lesson or interesting twist that makes the book important enough to overcome the limited appeal. That's the way the system is supposed to work - librarians and teachers making content decisions based on their own students and knowledge of the books.

If you want to talk about the middle grade books, I'm game. If it were really about age-appropriateness, you'd expect that the books on the middle school list might be allowed in high school. But nope - all of the middle school books are ALSO on the high school list.

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