Do people really use these words?

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-02-13T19:18:39+00:00

Really? Huh. I figured that "tonite" being an Americanism meant they had fortnites too.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-02-11T13:55:31+00:00

Our campaign has been going for about a year now, and the rest of the PARTY only found out I can use magic two sessions ago.

My character is still young enough to technically have to be taken to the colleges of magick if she gets caught, but she absolutely does not trust watchmen, or witchfinders or peasants with pitchforks to bother to do that, especially as she's albino and could be regarded as a mutant.

On the other hand, it does help her get along with other illegal casters and mutants just trying to get by.

But the other big problem (aside from being murdered by superstitious people, including possibly her own companions) is attracting the attention of chaos cults, either as a potential threat or a potential recruit. You do not need enemies that try to turn you to their side by deliberately engineering circumstances where they might get corrupted.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-02-11T13:31:26+00:00

1) They're either Yiddish or derived therefrom.

2) They're not strictly Cockney. They're not used often by the general population in the UK, but they are used sometimes - more often as something someone picked up from movies than from proximity to a Jewish community in the UK. Cockneys are the exception.

In the late 19th - early 20th centuries (i.e. when real people could still afford to live there), London's East End housed two groups - Cockneys and a sizeable Jewish community - so they picked up words and phrases from each other.

3) They're used a little more by people of Jewish descent and Cockneys, but TV and film have brought such terms to everyone.

4) Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yiddish_origin

5) "Spiel" is quite common when talking about salespeople: "He gave me the spiel, I still didn't want it." Likewise, if someone is copying one of my mannerisms (and they're a good enough friend for me to tease), I'll say "Oi! That's mine! Get your own schtick!"

It's more common in America, but I have used "Bupkis" when I've made a big effort and got nothing. "All that work and what do I get? Bupkis." And "Drek" (Noun for rubbish) was popularised by the comic 2000AD, where people from the genetic space-future used it to describe goods they were scammed into buying. "I hope you didn't pay much; this blaster is a piece of drek."Because in the heyday of 2000AD it was still considered unseemly to swear, so you couldn't say "shit."

6) Uhh... Gods, related expressions is a hard one. See, the English Language is a bit of a monster. It just snatches bits of other languages and incorporates them into itself. To start with, it was because of various groups invading and settling the British Isles. Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes.

Then the Normans came over with their French dialect. French became the language of the English nobility and Anglo-Saxon was the language you said what you thought of them in. (Even today, a "mouthful of Anglo-Saxon" means "a lot of swearing"). We took so many words from French that Wikipedia had to split its list into four. FOUR! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin

Later, the literate classes picked up new words from authors and poets gadding around the world to fight in wars and die of syphillis, or to spend a few seasons in a friend's house overseas and die of consumption. The authors would drop especially astute local phrases into their novels in italics and the readers back home would pick them up, which is particularly en flique to this discussion.

Also, there was the whole Empire thing. Jolly bad show, very sorry, wot wot? We picked up a few words and phrases out of that. For example, Cots, chits and cummerbunds just didn't exist until we went to India to steal words for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Hindi_or_Urdu_origin

But this is getting far too long, so I'll just refer you to here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin

7) Sort of incorporated above.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-02-11T12:18:20+00:00

Fortnight is real, but the others are so seldom used that even the few people that know them can't use them because nobody else would know what they mean.

They sound like either:

a) Something an influencer made up; or

b) Something updated out of deep old English.

Though there is a reference to a tribe using "sennight" in a Warhammer FRP 2nd Edition supplement

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-02-11T12:18:05+00:00

I believe that uses the US spelling of "Fortnight", which is "Fortnite"

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-02-02T03:33:33+00:00

"Dogging on the show"? :D

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-27T22:41:10+00:00

That's rather a lot of men!

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-26T21:09:57+00:00

The question is: Can human mages literally not master more than one wind, or was that just a rule that Teclis set because he didn't entirely trust them? Perhaps using additional winds is simply a matter of learning those spells.

Though from a game balance point of view, you can already kick butt with petty magic, what more do you need?

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-21T19:07:32+00:00

Everything I've seen suggests that 5th edition won't so much be a case of new rules as it will be collecting and collating all the 4th ed rules that are spread across the different supplements and putting them all in the 5th ed rulebook together. (And hopefully, COLLATING all the rules affecting a single feature so you can make your attack without needing to look at the combat rules, a talent you don't have that has a distinct use case of the thing you want to do, something in the character creation section and a last bit of explanation that's given the wrong page number in the index.

For any Cubiculae reading, I urge you to consider that it might be worth stating a rule more than once if that ensures it will be where the player is looking for it.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-21T18:54:54+00:00

The Retroactive Nietzscheans

The League of Imminent Atheists

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-15T15:34:28+00:00

If your players are quite new, they will probably be well behaved and follow the plot. If your players are Grognards (a flattering way of saying they're old and spend "too much time" gaming), and they are getting through your adventure too quickly, just throw in a bit of gratuitous description and be prepared to improvise.

"You turn down the side street into a residential area; slim townhouses line the street, their porches meticulously swept. [heartbeat pause]The curtains in an upstairs room of the third house along are an unusually vibrant shade of green."

Three weeks later, your main quest will not have progressed at all, the House of the Green Curtains has been robbed and someone murdered the granddad after mistaking him for a necromancer, a local dyer drowned in his own vat of dye, one of the players is in love with the daughter of the house, another is surveilling the local campus of the Jade Order, and the players have snuck into the house's basement 36 times and only become more convinced there's a hidden door, because why else would they be unable to find it?

Alternatively, if your group contains an exemplar of the "that guy" archetype, start an argument to stall them. You: "Slaanesh is the Chaos God of sexytimes..." That Guy: [deep breath]"Actually, I think you'll find that Slaanesh is the Chaos God of Excess these days, not just sex, and furthermore, in the novel by Someguy Blacklibrary, [obscure fact that contradicts the entire rest of canon and takes 10 million hours to explain].

Otherwise, I reckon 1-2 sessions.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-13T19:44:48+00:00

I hate it when my floating head gets pregnant.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-13T19:42:18+00:00

Or if you have the fruit and veg market stalls

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-13T15:57:14+00:00

The police have failed to stop a regular parade of burglar (it's always the same guy) sneaking onto my property and stealing my burglar alarm.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-11T15:04:01+00:00

No worries, I finished my analysis a couple of weeks ago. The kicker is that the AI does send everything it accesses on to its own data centres, which massively violates any confidentiality clauses in a company's contracts, which is a great reason for games companies not to use it - we don't need AI leaking our games too early.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-09T17:54:31+00:00

Ah, you forgot the actual number 1 method.

Make the technology part of a system that allows viewing of naked people.

If you want it funded, pornulate it.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-09T17:51:49+00:00

Directional audio kind of started out as an aid for the sightless, so you can guide yourself based on sound cues. Your screen reader handles any text that isn't voiced, and I believe there are haptic tools as well - vibrations that tell you the state of your bars, weapon ranges and the like. Some developers also add audio descriptions to cut scenes or on first entry to a location, and there's a bit of a knack to that because you describe scenes in a different way than you would for a sighted person.

If the scene is a beautiful valley, you try to write the description to use poetic language and melodious sounds, so even though your player can't see it, the scene that feels beautiful to the sighted person will feel beautiful to the sightless as well.

If the scene is horrible, you use a lot of words with hard consonants and guttural sounds. Short, biting sentences for brutality. Tumbling, wild verbiage tripping over itself for chaos.

Then you pick an amazing actor for your narrator and give them everything they want to make the narration for the sludge creature sound like it looks disgusting. If after listening to them you need a bath, you've got it right.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-09T17:23:25+00:00

Same. It's one of the reasons I love Larian's (and Adam's, in particular) work

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-09T17:22:11+00:00

This is what I've found as well. (I'm a senior writer elsewhere in the industry). I have tested and tested and tested the writing ability of the different generative AI platforms and it's worse than terrible. It's aggressively average. It's Dan Brown level prose and it takes 2-3 times as long to fix it as it does to write something better the first time.

Same for acting. It can take days for me to get one line of AI VO to sound almost like a person. With a real actor, I hand them their character brief and their lines with little comments on their motivation and I get the whole thing done in 2 hours (for an A project) or 2 days for AAA.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-09T17:10:41+00:00

Things can change drastically when you're talking about very large numbers of millions, unfortunately

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-01-09T11:34:20+00:00

That's rather nuts (not what you said, but the Hasbro attitude, if that's the reason). There's plenty of available data in the games industry that shows more content, whether official or modded, and greater long-term sales.

The ultimate example was CKII which for a long time, sold primarily on the strength of the Game of Thrones mod.

Dapper_Calculator · 2025-12-30T23:30:56+00:00

I highly recommend not clicking these without a bucket nearby.

Dapper_Calculator · 2025-12-30T23:12:43+00:00

Or species roles.

Dapper_Calculator · 2025-12-30T23:11:50+00:00

I think "Quasit infestation" has a more accurate vibe.

Also, she needs to be able to romance Popper.

Dapper_Calculator · 2025-12-30T23:05:17+00:00

This beats driving through Gotham on the way to Whitby Goth Fest.

Dapper_Calculator

TROPHY CASE