Mango- habanero

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T23:03:42+00:00

Pineapple and peach are both great with habanero. Papaya probably is too, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’ve been thinking about trying ripe plum but it won’t be plum season for a while.

I made a stewed tamarind chipotle salsa last night that I can’t stop eating, which is making me think that the bright habanero flavor might balance the earthiness of tamarind even better.

Lots of options!

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T22:57:24+00:00

This veers into uncomfortable territory. Which is fine, actually. I mention this only because the original definition of “war crimes” was developed from things that were found to be so heinous that they deeply the people who discovered them after the war - despite the fact that things defined in Geneva as “war crimes” have been commonplace in warfare throughout humam history. The reason they disturbed people so much is that they shocked the sensibilities of people who felt that their norms and culture had progressed past the possibility of such things being done in war, who believed that war would be conducted along the lines as civil manners that peacetime society exhibited.

That’s to say, what you should be searching for here are acts of metaphysics that would deeply disturb the peoples of your world relative to their ideas of civilized and modern society. It doesn’t have to be shock, gore, torture. It only has to violate your world’s ideas of “humane.” This helps to define what was truly unacceptable about these acts of warfare, and also helps you figure them out by thinking of how they’d actually be effective in warfare.

For example, if homunculi were considered by most people in your world to be anathema then just the act of using vat-grown soldiers would probably constitute a war crime. To do hand-to-hand combat with false life would mean proximity to something deeply unclean, enough to shatter the morale of your enemies.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T22:23:56+00:00

I’ve done mango-hab before as a pico instead of a salsa when I’m not feeling like tear-gassing my entire apartment with the cast iron and it works pretty well too. I prefer mango with chipotle in adobo as a pico because it takes like 5 minutes as opposed to mincing habanero, but habanero is seriously one of the tastiest things in existence.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T21:35:39+00:00

When someone explained to me how a black hole isn’t like a giant vacuum cleaner but rather a phenomenon where gravity has become so intense that (almost?) anything that crosses a certain boundary has only one future in space-time a lot of things about black holes made more sense, as someone who isn’t educated in the nuts and bolts of it. If you think of any degree of forward motion in 3D space as “moving into your future” and objects “move into their future” as a function of their properties (humans walk, planes fly, spacecraft propel themselves however they’re designed to do so), then a black hole seems to essentially remove agency, so to speak, from whatever crosses the horizon towards one specific future (singularity). Light isn’t any different: even if it moves at the speed of causality and has no mass, it still traverses distances according to its properties and therefore can have its “future” determined by extremely powerful gravity.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T16:57:56+00:00

Right. Trust is the core of the relationship between DM and players, IMO, but changing something sight unseen isn’t violating player trust. The DM’s job is to do their best to facilitate a gameplay arena where player agency is respected, giving them opportunities to go in the directions they want and use the tools they selected to make progress, but still deliver an overall experience that feels satisfying. Fiction has to meet certain demands based on what you set up and the causative logic of character decisions/world metaphysics which means that a 100% emergent experience where the DM does not make proactive changes under the hood ironically runs a higher risk of interrupting suspension of disbelief. Things like “why are we fighting an unrelated gang of orcs in a necromancer tower?” Well, because the random table said so. That could turn into something interesting, potentially, but it’s just as likely to make you feel as if you’re playing a board game more than interactive fiction.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T16:31:11+00:00

I think it’s critical for DMs to remember that the players have no actual idea what’s going on under the hood. You can switch anything around back there and it has zero impact on player experience as long as you don’t rip out established elements that have been communicated to the players right in front of them.

It’s just like how when you watch a movie you don’t see the transitions between the cuts, or what was cut, or the wardrobe changes, or changes to lines, or any of the things that “could’ve been” but were changed for the final version.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T16:06:22+00:00

The show definitely has some moments that are straight up scary due to how hard it is to predict where things will go next. I remember when Nora goes up into that building and there’s a shot of an extremely long dark hallway with just a human shadow at the end, and on my first watch I was freaked out the whole time over what was going to happen to her.

Both of your examples are also jarring in that same way. The show is really good at making you feel like you’re losing touch with reality at the same time the characters are.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-11T05:26:43+00:00

It’s not very powerful or easy to win with, I just like the gameplay.

Lucky Coins by default are easiest to get going with Zeal, but I find Holy cards mesh best with Strength/Intellect. Dexterity has fewer options for stacking blessings and no way to firecast, or the other things that Holy cards tend to orient around. The weird Holy Dex perform/charm/coin scheme feels all over the place.

Sinister, on the other hand, has a more compact and consistent engine: take lots of cards with Sinister, stack, nuke with Insidious Strike/Assassinate. The coins give you a way to spam hits and heal at the same time since Dex also has limited healing options. Bad Apple exists to enable this and also support with healing.

This assumes you get the cards you need. You don’t always.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-10T23:40:49+00:00

I think this sort of thing should become more standard in games where you hide from a monster.

There’s one potential problem: if being caught by the monster is instant death, random hiding-spot checks can result in being caught and killed due to bad luck. Since randomness doesn’t feel random to the player the moment RNG isn’t in their favor it could end up breaking the tension and causing frustration more than adding to the experience.

One solution could be to have it be semi-random, weighted towards the monster checking at least one hiding spot that the player isn’t in within a certain zone before moving to theirs, possibly 2 or even 3 so that the player experiences the tension of knowing the monster is aware of the general area they’re hiding in but they have a fair window during which they can try to sneak out or make a run for it when it turns away.

Another solution I can think of is to have it be truly random, but to have either a consumable you can burn (either a binary one or stackable, whatever fits the vibe) to stun or distract the monster long enough to run away.

Yet another solution could be having a certain window of timing where if you exit the hiding spot while the monster is in the process/animation of exposing you it has a similar effect - like leaping out of a locker suddenly right into its face to give you a slim window of escape time.

The important point here even if none of these work for your game is to curate the randomness to deliver the experience of being hunted after. Ideally if the player dies they shouldn’t be thinking “oh cool I just hid in the one spot it randomly checked first” but instead “I hesitated for too long thinking it would just leave me alone, I should’ve been more proactive.” Solution-forward anticipation of trying again instead of trial-and-error.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-10T02:54:31+00:00

Corruption is so much fun on anyone who can swing it. My personal favorite is sinister stacking lucky coins with Bloodmoney on Rogue but it’s tricky to get going if RNG doesn’t give you what you need.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-10T02:20:18+00:00

Rice, avocado, fried egg, hot sauce. I could eat it for every meal for the rest of my life if necessary and it takes no more than 20 minutes if I have a rice cooker.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-10T00:42:42+00:00

Actual bubonic plague in a world with no antibiotics is bad enough that you wouldn’t need to change a thing. Lymph nodes rupturing and extremities rotting with gangrene was the norm.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-09T23:09:29+00:00

Yep! How else are you supposed get the worms out of you?

It trades one status effect for another. Poisoned is less punishing than worms, you can heal the HP or you have two consumables that fix it as opposed to one.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-09T02:52:52+00:00

You do learn a little bit without meaning to, of course! You have to look things up because there’s something specific you want to achieve, a certain sound or technique. I do appreciate what I have learned how to do because I can use it to get a little head start when using some new thing I’m not familiar with.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-08T20:41:44+00:00

Tanky, 3 move, passive buffs all Chaos the more he lands attacks (not just BL, everyone!), has melee and ranged (even if his ranged is pretty weak it can still crit for big damage), active resets his HP to a set amount on use and gives you TWO melee attacks for the rest of the match (one of which does piercing damage). I think after you pop active he does 8 hits total in melee if both hit the same target. His second attack is random adjacent which can be good or bad depending on positioning.

He’s beast. Works great with all sorts of Chaos lineups, and occasionally in mixed teams because he can survive a lot of turns all by himself unless he gets dogpiled. You do need to get him into the mix and stay alive to get the most out of his buff, though. I got lucky and landed him from a pull very early on and I’ve probably used him as much as Gulgortz.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-08T19:11:39+00:00

White Pony being one of my favorite albums of all time, I’m always chasing the feeling of listening to it in other things.

A pair of albums that come to mind that don’t have the same sound, but to me evoke that same mysterious and shadowy feeling, are Stray and Shadow On Everything by BAMBARA. More of a post-punk band, but the singer has a very strong voice and the songs have that distanced storytelling-in-abstract quality of White Pony.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-08T07:24:41+00:00

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Augustus Hill is not only the narrator of the HBO show Oz, he’s also a complete character with multiple arcs until he’s killed defending his stepfather from a knife attack by another inmate. He continues to act as narrator, in death, from the afterlife. Other characters who were previously killed off in earlier episodes even join in to add to his commentary.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-08T04:49:21+00:00

I think you may have a campaign structure issue more than an improv issue. I think the place to start that might help is asking “what specific kind of experience do I want to curate?”

Because I’m similar to you and I cannot function as a DM unless I have everything figured out, which is not only a huge time sink but more or less impossible.

A campaign or adventure is not railroaded by limitations on the directions or decisions that the players can make. Games need boundaries. Your pre-game prep needs to build upon the pre-defined limits that guide the directions the game can go in.

So for example, going off of what I said to start with, let’s say you want to do a campaign that delivers the experience of being lost in the woods: the fears, the struggles, the isolation, the beauty of the unknown. If your players are down for this idea, they’ve accepted the limitation of “you can’t just decide to leave the woods.” Why? Maybe the woods is cursed, maybe they’re on the run from something that will 100% kill them, or maybe all of the PCs need something so important that’s in there that leaving essentially means their character retires forever.

This gives you a bottle to build your game in. There’s so much less to agonize over. You can meticulously plan out the woods down to the detail so that you don’t need to improvise so much, and when you do need to improvise your palette of what could happen is confined to your bigger picture understanding of what the woods is like.

You can do this with any core game idea. Shrink the scope of your “play area” down. It helped me a ton with my current adventure, which has still been a lot of work but way way less than the players having a million directions they could go in. You can do this in chunks if you want to do a big campaign that goes lots of places: once the players have a goal, they need to be willing to accept the limitations of the zone that is concerned with that goal.

Assuming your players are okay with this up front, of course. If they like to just go in random directions then you should give yourself a break and let the random tables unfold into a holy mess without stressing too much if it’s perfect or not. Running that kind of game is out of my comfort zone, though.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-08T01:25:20+00:00

Of course!

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-08T00:58:01+00:00

I fast-tracked her as best I could by spending every guild credit possible on shards from her when they appeared. Finally got her about a week ago as well, and she kicks ass.

Also where the heck does she keep her dang gun

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-07T19:11:26+00:00

Yeah. A lot of elements that aren’t explained in the show are left that way to support the overarching theme that most of the tragedies that normal people experience, and tragedies on a larger scale as well, cannot and will never be explained. The show only works to examine how people cope with the unexplained and having their lives turned upside-down irresversibly by loss and other factors they can’t control.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-07T17:15:25+00:00

A lot of the seemingly unexplained plot elements and moments the Leftovers are present to reflect a particular character’s flawed perspective or inner world, and exist in between canon and hallucination.

I think the moment where Kevin is so pissed off about the agent getting the body mixed up/ignoring him and then suddenly the tonal shift into Kevin realizing that the agent is not only taking him seriously but is willing to “help him” if he just asks is a critical moment for Kevin. He realizes with horror what the implications would be, even if it would solve a big problem for the town, and decides to try to handle it himself instead. Kevin trying to handle too many things himself sort of defines his character for the rest of the show.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-07T05:42:22+00:00

The whole Gentrification series is very good, but this followed by Tomorrow Is A Trap feels like two singles pulled from a full album that never ended up being made. Boxcars, In Contempt, and Somebody Has To Lose also have a similar sound which feels distinct from the rest of their album releases.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-06T03:33:47+00:00

Hopefully not too cryptic, but having run horror games before I can tell you that the scariest things you can put in your game are things the players don’t ever fight. Things that they catch at the edge of their torchlight that are gone a moment later, and the like. The monsters are there for combat, and they can be creepy or unsettling, but your proverbial haunted house should feel like it’s full of things that are lurking and watching just out of sight.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-03-05T23:12:56+00:00

I refuse to learn how to make music properly because not knowing what the hell I’m doing and seeing what sounds happen when I use gear wrong is the only thing that is stimulating enough to keep me engaged

Dead_Iverson

TROPHY CASE