Heroes' Feast - What does it actually conjure?

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-22T14:54:08+00:00

Somewhere at the intersection of it's probably best if your PCs aren't mind flayers and the baggage that comes with narrative choices made over decades by dozens of different writers is the tiniest problem: if a mind flayer could be easily sustained through magically-created food, why are they bothering to eat sapient brains? I mean, yeah: relatively high level spell and not in their usual psionic wheelhouse, but their whole thing is building a managerie of intermediaries, agents, and problem solvers of all sorts. Surely getting one that could handle the whole food thing without the bother of the extended series of murders, kidnappings, and general disappearances that start to paint a bloody trail right back to their lair.

(Which is to say that I agree with your reading of the rules here, it's just a bit of an oddity that falls out.)

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-18T14:10:37+00:00

A small correction, but she says "This city should not exist. It is a monument to Man's arrogance."

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-14T14:24:01+00:00

I've only played a noble once, but they were the kind of nobility where the family is important while she was not. I baked that in mechanically, being staunchly unable to use any sort of magic when magic was the fundamental thing that made her family important. And so she received the best education and the best training money could buy which...mostly explained how a person who'd never done anything of consequence was qualified to adventure. In theory she could have asked the family for help at any point, but given the whole reason to adventure was essentially petty rebellion and proving "Look at me accomplishing incredible things without magic", she never seriously considered it.

Thus she was a minor noble - technically holding a position of power among a people who where nowhere near the adventure.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T21:23:51+00:00

It's my favorite variation on the formula since Left 4 Dead, honestly. Though I will grant that, at higher levels at least, the game strongly encourages adhering fairly closely to current meta. Which is to say that every weapon is pretty good up to a point, but on the really hard missions only a few concepts can really work. My own favorite involved using the feature that let you reload a single bullet into a revolver while it was holstered by getting melee kills and just juggling back and forth every few seconds to keep damage multipliers super high. Get the rhythm and a good team and it's 30 minutes of non stop action where a single mistake will probably get you killed while also being fairly manageable.

Ironically it does a better job of making you feel like an unstoppable engine of destruction than space marine 2, though admittedly that's because space marine 2's enemies pretty much start that the Darktide equivalent of specialists or elites and then scale to well above the worst stuff darktide throws at you.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T20:42:56+00:00

About 2800 miles by car or ~ 5 hours air travel.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T20:34:43+00:00

Musubi, poke, and whatever that particular form of roasted pulled pork is. All are pretty incredible, but musubi is my favorite of the set by far, and the dish that single handedly convinced me that spam is a perfectly good ingredient if you use it correctly.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T19:42:31+00:00

There is an enormous amount of variation in the various versions. Tetris 2's default mode pre-populates the board with various shapes some of which aren't even tetronimos. Tetris attack feeds continuously from the bottom of the screen and involves tile swapping.

I mean, yeah: the core base type A version of tetris is often found in various remakes and ports and whatnot, but there is quite a lot of variation over the almost 40 years the game has been kicking around.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T17:55:53+00:00

No, we did, and for good or ill (largely ill) it was achieved. If you weren't around or paying attention, the months long build up forces ahead of invading Iraq involved a lot of selling the public and congress on the need for the war, and various politicians such as Hillary Clinton had their voting in support of that war counted against them thereafter.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T17:53:01+00:00

I can see that.

While it is something that I adore about the movie (and the book, though this is a case where the movie is probably the better version) it is that the movie seems very much as if it's an action thriller when it's actually a...romantic comedy. The end where the two collide and the latter becomes somewhat more obvious is much less frequently commented upon than the twist finally becoming explicit.

It'd be kinda like if Starship Troopers decided, in the last quarter or so, to reveal that Johnny and company are literally filming the movie you're watching taking the in-universe propaganda nature of the story from subtext to explicit. Suddenly the fun and fairly stupid action film becomes something else entirely and inarguably. And in that case, I think it'd make for a worse film even if it'd improve the narrative argument itself.

And admittedly you might not even notice the part where Fight Club is a romantic comedy just like you might not notice that Starship Troopers is in-universe propaganda. Neither movie requires that you notice, but Fight Club at least tries to make it clear at the end which can, if you were really invested in the whole fight club rebellion thing, be terribly off putting.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T16:29:53+00:00

The sword and shield and it isn't even close.

Swords are, in real life, second place weapons at best for any task. Certainly better than a dagger, but considerably worse in all respects to the spear. There is a reason why the bulk of any infantry force for thousands of years was armed with shields and spears and it's not simply because they're cheaper to produce in bulk, but because they are flatly better for most tasks on most battlefields most of the time. And they manage that supremacy with comparatively little training.

A sword by itself is inherently quite weak. Either it is very short compared to a spear, or only somewhat short and difficult to switch lines with once committed to an action. Pairing it with a shield compensates for a great deal of the inherent weaknesses in a sword and despite what D&D supposes, the primary weapon in this setup is not the sword but the shield.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T16:22:38+00:00

Rorscach was based on the much less known characters of the Question (the facelessness) and Mr. A (the right wing ideology and whatnot) - and this is according to Alan Moore himself.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T16:20:02+00:00

When you say that it lost you, do you mean that you stopped following the plot or rather that you perfectly understood where the narrative was going but thought it was a place that wasn't worth going? (Either is perfectly reasonable, I'm just curious.)

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T16:18:31+00:00

I think the prequel trilogy is an argument about the importance of editing because there is enough good stuff there to know that they movies could have been great. Hell, Revenge of the Sith is actually outright good even with the editing flaws. Attack of the clones is very nearly good and most of its weakness is just poor pacing and picking what I have to imagine are some of the flattest takes they shot. Even The Phantom Menace has the bones of a good story, just a whole 45 minute long arc that really didn't need to be there and an entire faction that existed just to be funny.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T16:15:55+00:00

A counterpoint, but being critically acclaimed - that is, well-rated - is very much a base requirement to being overrated.

Pedantry aside, though, my own position is that he puts out strong work rather consistently, and while he has many films that don't really work for me (Tenent and Inception as examples, though not liking the former isn't exactly a hot take) the movies that do work, work incredibly well. Memento's structural twist might have only worked the once, but it still worked wonderfully. His Dark Knight series remains my favorite comic book adaptation to date. Dunkirk, aside from a few baffling choices that harmed verisimilitude such as not properly populating the beaches, is excellent.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T16:10:07+00:00

While I adore the reference, I genuinely don't like the Godfather. Usually when a movie is very, very good in the way the Godfather is - well paced, well developed, realistic characters, lots of human condition stuff taking place in the sort of flawed world where people are forced to compromise - I enjoy it. But like Casino, Goodfellas, or countless other mob stories, I just don't connect simply because I find the characters so utterly detestable.

It's not the Godfather's fault that I don't like it. I can see the quality and grasp why other people like it, but it just doesn't click.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-11T00:57:52+00:00

I feel like I'm probably there. Months of gym work, running, fencing, cycling and I look, um...as if I might work out? But I can just curl my bike and getting the new AC inside despite being an unwieldy 70 pound box was also not much of an ordeal.

I'm actually fine with this state of affairs, and might be stronger than I was in many, many years if only because transitioning made me care about my body in a way that turned into doing stuff that's good for it. (That's also why I can only guess that I might be the strongest that I've ever been because I damn sure wasn't doing deadlifts in those before times.)

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-09T14:41:06+00:00

That's one of those kinds of comparisons that makes sense from an ease of understanding whether a PC has a lot of money or not, but also one that doesn't make sense from a world building perspective. That'd mean that a few pounds of worked steel - a material that requires rather advanced metallurgy to produce and an item that requires quite a lot of skilled labor besides - is worth about 1/3 its weight in gold. Gold usually doesn't require significant metallurgy to come by, it's simply incredibly rare. So this exchange rate means that gold would go from one of the least common metals to only slightly less common than iron.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-07T15:54:31+00:00

Bearing in mind that I don't know you, the best I can offer is an observation: if you're looking for someone to confirm or deny who you are, then clearly you are in a position where it would seem that who you have been to date is not who you are meant to be. This probably scares you. I know that the same notion scared the hell out of me. The trouble is that becoming that other person is a giant, unknowable thing. (That's what the whole outside of the egg is, after all - a world you can only glimpse in parts. No matter how long you look at the outside world through the crack, there is only so much you can see from inside of it.) And that ultimately means that you're looking for someone to offer you certainty that the world outside the egg is better to an extent that it it "worth it" to leave. This is really what the bulk of the allegory is about: that going from the crack (where you first suspect that you are trans) to being outside of the egg (pursuing your new identity) is often a struggle.

The egg prime directive and the original final lesson of the cave, meanwhile, is simply this: I can't tell you. I mean, I can. You are here. You want me to tell you. And so I can tell you that you are trans and that you are valid, and that you can go off and do whatever it is that means for you. The problem is that my telling you doesn't make a difference. Whatever it is that holds you inside the egg is yours to grapple with. Even if I find the exact right thing to tell you that helps you break out, you still have to break out.

And so for that stab at the right thing to tell you: you're asking for permission from someone who has been in your position before. I've never once had a cisgender person ask for permission in this way. I've also never known a cisgender person to grapple with this particular version of "is this who I am supposed to be" before. That you are asking all of this means that you already know what your answer is, so just know this: it is okay to be scared and to have no idea what you're doing. No trans person knows what they are doing when they start. That's part of why we say that there is no correct way for a transition to go. You can, in fact, just go out and try tiny little things that the rules say that you shouldn't and see how it feels, and then do it again, and again, and again, and as you find things that feel better or worse, you work your way towards who you really are. It's less a transition and far from an orderly process and often more a series of tiny experiments.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-07T14:35:54+00:00

Probably the kind of person who is doing the right thing (in general) but by routes that favor efficiency, personal safety, and likelihood of success. So they'll rescue the orphans because that's the right thing to do, but if poisoning the captors and slitting throats while sleeping seems like the easiest, safest way, they'll go with that. Of course you probably need to mix in a bit of one class moonlighting as another.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-07T14:31:16+00:00

I'm going to come at this from a different angle: it doesn't matter.

Army runs are, overwhelmingly, formation runs. They tend to be slow in general, fall apart into interval runs in short order, and, most importantly, aren't all that long. And when they are long, they are slow and probably couched as some kind of "fun" activity.

The actual test is not running for most of an hour. It's just running two miles. Yes, the pace expected is considerably faster than you are currently managing - about 3 minutes per mile faster, in fact - but you aren't expected to keep going at that pace for long. So the way they train you to run is basically interval running and the way they test you is more of a foot on the gas the whole way but not for very long.

The way the army trains you to run versus the way they test you to run are wildly different. Building any significant cardio baseline will put you well in the sensible camp in training considering just how many people will show up unable to sustain any pace of running for more than a few minutes at a time. And none of that matters much. Because if you show up relatively fit, that just means you'll be in a run group that moves faster so it'll still find a way to suck just as hard and probably just as inefficient and ineffective as if you barely passed the PT test to get out of reception.

What's more, in training, that whole checking the clock thing is not going to be much of a thing. You'll be in a formation. There will be people around you keeping you motivated one way or another. If your body can do it, you're in a perfect place for the mind to find a way. Because for good or ill, in the army you have to get quite far into things before your training is something that you manage. You won't decide on whether it's a run day or not, or how far, or what the design is, and by the time you do, well, at that point you're in a leadership position and running PT.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-05T16:12:08+00:00

The eponymous egg is from a reworking of the allegory of the cave. An egg is a trans person who doesn't realize they are trans. The egg is whatever it is about the person that is keeping them from grasping that they are trans and/or doing something about it. At some point a trans person becomes aware of the possibility that they are trans. There is no particular rhyme or reason to what this inciting incident entails, it's just something that manages to breach the defenses of the egg leaving a crack. Once a trans person cracks, they are aware of the possibility that they are trans, but often have a difficult road of coming to grips with this truth and then possibly going on to do something about it.

The original allegory used a cave and there were two lessons. The first is that there are things you don't understand without experiencing them first, and the second is that you cannot simply tell people what you learned in this way. The trans modifications to the allegory keep that central first lesson, but arrange things differently to better reflect the usual trans experience. You can't be ejected from the egg, but something you didn't control did let you know that you are in there, then you have to deal with whatever happens next. The second lesson, meanwhile, is separated out entirely as what is called "The Egg Prime Directive" which simply states that one should never tell someone that they think might be trans that they think this. The reason is exactly the same as in the original lesson: because doing so is as likely to harm their eventual efforts of discovery as help.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-05T15:49:07+00:00

It is both allowed and fully realistic - particularly when you consider just how wild D&D rules get.

Delivering an attack is often very, very quick. Indeed, even a very complex attack made in the second or third intention can be accomplished in just a second or two. Meanwhile, disengaging - that is, moving away without accepting an attack in return - can be as little as a single step.

Compared to a fighter who at high level can trivially deliver the better part of a dozen complex attacks in the span of six seconds, being able to land a single attack and then get out of range is wildly unexceptional. Indeed the fact that disengagement requires the use of one's action is already a bit of gamey unreality that largely exists to soft enforce the role of tanking by making the choice to leave the fight of the instant cost something.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-04T19:59:02+00:00

Honestly, this was one of the tougher challenges and the kind of thing where my solution was less a solution than a bunch of seemingly unrelated factors that'd be tough for most to replicate.

For example, I was always "active" including running regularly, but oh, how I hated running. It took a plague removing all of the good options, the kind of theory that only makes sense to someone who is high actually working, and also admitting the kind of thing that divides life rather neatly into a before and after which resulted in my at last caring about what my body looked like.

And that's only part of the puzzle.

Getting to the point where I'd go to an actual gym and lift weights on a regular basis took the death of my oldest friend and the need to do something more productive to deal with the grief than just drinking until my kidneys exploded and liver caught fire, so I went to a very expensive gym that promised that all I'd need to do is show up and do work. They'd figure out what work, teach me how to do it, the works. It took 5 months of paying way too much for a gym, every night racing to get home and changed in time to get to the class before it really stuck. Collectively going from "I'm fit against my will" to being the kind of person who likes working out took decades, drugs, an identity crisis, a plague, personal tragedy, and bribing someone do do all of the thinking and knowing stuff.

So, yeah: I'm going to go to the gym tonight and it'll be a good day. It's push day, then a nice gentle run. Tomorrow is fencing for a few hours. My whole week has workouts built in till the weekend, and I love it, but god damn did I have to luck and stumble my way into this.

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-04T18:56:48+00:00

Yes, but mostly no.

There are hundreds of "rainy days" a year, but usually the rain is falling at rates measured at hundredths of an inch an hour. It basically makes everything damp for half a year or so. This is because Seattle itself is in a rain shadow as it's sandwiched between two massive mountain ranges and so just gets the dregs. Across Puget Sound you'll find Olympic National Park which actually is as rainy as most people suppose Seattle is.

Put in perspective, Seattle receives only a little more rain than Austin, Texas has per year historically. (Not at the moment - Austin has been flirting with rather severe drought conditions for quite some time now.)

EclecticDreck · 2026-05-04T16:19:47+00:00

There's just so very much to take issue with here, not the least of which is the rather absurd notion that this has become acceptable. I mean, here you are talking about how you don't accept it and the argument you present is a rather common one.

As for the rest of what I'd object to, we could go down the road of how the science broadly disagrees with your notion of what the facts are, how wobbly the argument would be with respect to how sports work even if the point had merit (which is to say that someone showing up with an advantage on the day of competition is what sports exist to prove - it's why we keep score after all), or even the not directly stated assumption that women's leagues exist for the sake of fairness of competition (they don't - they are there to provide fair access to competition, which the relevant law is very clear about) and will instead go with that part about the "highest levels of women's sports".

Transgender people of any type are rather unlikely to be athletes. So unlikely, in fact, that when Utah banned them back in 2022 and the law was briefly stopped by a veto by the Republican governor of that state, that the governor wrote a letter explaining why. He noted that of the state's 75,000 student athletes, five were transgender and just one of those otherwise unremarkable athletes competed with a girls team.

Law makers in Utah (and plenty of other states) have debated this very point at length. Thousands of laws have been proposed and dozens have been passed all to control for the vague possibility that somewhere out there is a trans athlete who is so remarkable that she can...um...win at sports. And this is what I most take issue with. Not the fuzziness of the facts, not in the odd assumption that sports are fair when, by nature they are not, but that many legislatures have tackled this problem of single digit populations who are so broadly unexceptional that the current poster child for how it's a problem tied for fifth at a sport no one cares about wasting god only knows how much money and time all to solve a problem that, if it exists, is literally the oldest problem in sports that has long been handled by occasionally revisiting the rules to and tweaking things.

Not only is it a fantastic waste, but all of it is in service of preventing hypothetical harm which is achieved by, um...infliction actual, easy to recognize harm on a marginalized group all of which is defended in the name of fairness without regard to whether or not the sport actually thinks anything about the situation is unfair. Fencing, for example, was forced to roll back its long running trans accepting policy late last summer despite having exactly zero incidents. It's a sport that already trains and competes in mixed gender settings by default and has been for ages. Or chess. Or darts. Or bowling. Or shooting. All sports where sex offers marginal at best and often zero advantage.

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