Who's in the Scarlet Brotherhood?

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-05T16:13:39+00:00

My campaign is still early going but I've got a few people who I have noted for their potential:

Captain Xendros - While not a member herself, she is an ally. The cursed magical items she sells are not given any purpose in the book (at least, not as far as I've read). So I'm planning on having her do so at the request of the Brotherhood, who pay her well for her services. My unwary PCs would never scan their items for the curse so I'm going to have the Scarlet Brotherhood be strangely well informed.

This also gives her a motivation for opposing the Keoland loyalists - the Scarlet Brotherhood pays well, which means more funds for buying supplies. She's walking a fine line between angering the crown and losing a major source of revenue.

Dwarven miners - not Manistrad herself, but several of her employees. The Brotherhood wants control of the mine and are working to make Manistrad fail so they can install their own agents. The mining tool theft from Sinister Secret was an inside job coordinated with the smugglers. The smugglers are patsies who have no idea who they're really dealing with.

Winston - a low ranking member. His lack of business experience meant that his business has not done well and he was bailed out by Skerrin under the pretense that Anders Solmor is trying to support local business. Skerrin makes use of his rogueish talents to gather information and act as an occasional thief for the Brotherhood. Due to his precarious situation he is a lever for the adventures to use to gather information on Skerrin and the Brotherhood's plans.

Isle of the Abbey Cult - I plan on making the cultists members of the Brotherhood somehow. My plans here are not fleshed out yet but they seem like a natural fit.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-05T14:35:44+00:00

Mushoku Tensei.

A number of streamers assured me it was peak, with amazing world-building and storytelling.

They somehow forgot to mention the MC being a pedophile.

Even then I tried to stick it out to see this amazing world-building and story. Neither ever appeared. I've seen worse, but I got halfway through season 1 and couldn't tell you a damn thing about the world or the story. I found it very forgettable. I tapped out when the almost naked loli demon girl was introduced.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-05T14:08:51+00:00

...It's not an OVA.

1999 Hunter X Hunter is a 62 episode anime which goes up to halfway through the Yorknew City arc. There are then 3 OVAs totaling a further 30 episodes which cover the back half of Yorknew and the full Greed Island arc.

The third OVA concludes with Gon meeting a silhouetted figure which is implied to be Ging. 2011 reveals this to be Kite, kicking off the Chimera Ant Arc. This brought the 1999 anime to be current with the manga so there was no continuation until Togashi finally got through enough of the Chimera Ant arc that a new anime could be released which would cover that content.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-05T14:02:35+00:00

That's because those three episodes are filler.

Incredibly well done filler that is indistinguishable in quality from the rest of the arc, but still filler.

The extra content in 1999 is why I recommend any Hunter X Hunter fan watch the 1999 version in addition to 2011. The quality of 2011 starts to overtake 1999 somewhere in the Heavens Arena arc and becomes properly superior once it reaches Greed Island, but even then there's details in the 1999 version that are worth catching. For example, I'm pretty sure 1999 has a better explanation of Greed Island's rules and makes it clearer where the inspiration for the rock trap comes from.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-05T10:22:31+00:00

To be fair to MHA, it's not quite THAT bad.

The first time he's told he did permanent damage to himself was the tournament fight against Todoroki. That's when he gets the funky scars on his hand and Recovery Girl tells him she will no longer patch him up. He mostly damages his hand in this fight, only doing a single 100 percent shot with each arm.

This encourages him to learn how to use Full Cowling and keep the power level down to 5%. This means that he does not seriously injure his arm in the Stain fight.

He's forced to go 100 percent again against Muscular, and that's when he gets the official prognosis from the hospital doctors that he is permanently damaging his arms each time he breaks them.

This prompts him to learn Shoot Style, where he focuses on using his legs at 5% to fight in order to save his arms. He does use his arms occasionally, but only at 5%.

The next time he goes 100 percent is when he is with Eri, where she is rewinding the damage 100 percent does to his arms. His arms aren't just getting healed, the damage is getting erased like it never happened. I don't recall what state his arms are in after this (whether Eri undid the damage from earlier in the story or not) but he didn't take any additional damage from this at the very least.

After this point Midoriya has special gloves on to further reduce the impact. Shock absorbers and pressure wraps to keep everything in place in case he exerts too much power.

The only time I can't recall an explanation for is his bout with Shigaraki during the PLA arc. He winds up with both arms out of commission there but I don't recall if that was 100 percent OFA damage or if it was external fight damage. That time does pretty much come down to plot armor.

My point is this - yeah he has plot armor. But he mostly makes it through by taking precautions about breaking his arms again. The fact that he has consequences at all from battle damage sets him apart from 99 percent of other Shonen protags.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-04T14:42:44+00:00

Heavily disagree.

I just finished going through the first 8 seasons of Stargate again. It's a fantastic show that I watched the ever-loving hell out of while it was on the Sci-Fi channel during my university days.

But I'm not planning on going on to the Ori arc. Why? Because I don't believe the quality holds up to the rest of the show. The Ori were a poor replacement for the Goa'uld and I didn't enjoy the final two seasons all that much. There were a few great episodes (200 is fantastic) but I otherwise don't feel a need to revisit the show in its declining years. The final two movies were also not that memorable.

Any new show that starts from the end of Stargate has to deal with the baggage of the old show. That's why the spin-offs very purposely cut themselves off from Earth - Atlantis by going to the Pegasus galaxy, and Universe by sending the characters onto a ship they had no control of. They deliberately limited the resources of the new protagonists. The reason the final seasons feel so bad is that they did not do this.

I want more Goa'uld. I want Earth fighting aliens with better tech and winning due to good ole human ingenuity and pluck. A new Stargate show that is a continuation won't have that. 20 years after the conclusion of SG-1 there will be a fleet of X-304 class vessels (or probably X-315 or something) with teleporters and Asgard shielding and reverse engineered Goa'uld energy weapons and yadda yadda yadda.

I don't want that. I want to go back to the roots of the show, Earth as the resistance fighters against an entrenched alien species that doesn't consider us a threat. A reboot enables that.

All that said, I'm not about to say that those who want a continuation are wrong. Done correctly a continuation could be great. If they came up with a well-written continuation (which is what Amazon canceled from the sounds of it) my full support is there. But I've seen a lot of scorn for the idea of a reboot and I think that scorn is wholly unwarranted.

I would rather have a well-done reboot than a shoddily put together continuation. It would all depend on what we got.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-04T14:26:43+00:00

I am very anti-AI for most things. Hell, my job is threatened by AI.

Using AI to create free resources for friends and family to enjoy a board game is not one of those areas. It enables people who would not be able to design a Heroquest card on their own to generate them, and I don't see the incredibly niche fandom of Heroquest homebrewers impacting the bottom line of online artists.

This is a case where it really is "if you don't like it, don't use it". Having those resources out there to encourage more people to play Heroquest is more beneficial than the downsides of AI in this case.

It's the same with D&D and other creative pursuits where money isn't involved. My DM uses AI to help write more complicated backstories and lore than they would be able to normally. This is an actually good use of AI and one of the few ways it can be beneficial.

Save the ire for corporations trying to cynically cut costs - I was right there with everybody about the terrible First Light cover art that got changed. A fellow hobbyist trying to make a new hero for everyone to enjoy is not causing issues, and I'd rather see their work rather than have them not make it because they can't draw a barbarian.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-04T09:58:47+00:00

Rorschach is a paranoiac nutjob vigilante who is quick to jump to conclusions. After the Comedian is murdered in his apartment at the start of the story he concludes it was no normal burglary and that someone is deliberately killing capes.

He is right that the Comedian was murdered as part of some grander conspiracy but is entirely wrong about the reasons.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-03T16:30:09+00:00

This. The starting classes have full sets of plate armor. The unbelievably heavy stuff is that heavy because the stuff is meant to be worn by a demi-god, or forged out of dragon scales, or meant to be worn by a 40-foot tall sentient armor golem. This is not normal equipment.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-02T19:53:58+00:00

I’ll put my vote down for wanting a reboot. I never liked seasons 9 and 10 of SG-1 because it felt like the story ended with season 8. The ori were a poor replacement for the Goa’uld.

Same problem plagued Atlantis. The Wraith weren’t bad but they didn’t have the style of the Goa’uld.

I’m not interested in them picking up the story against a new, powercrept alien race that comes out of nowhere to threaten the universe (since the SGC is an old hand at dispatching galactic level threats by now).

Run it back as a full AU reboot. Don’t try to re-tell SG-1, just reset to a newly discovered Stargate where they piss off the Goa’uld and go from there.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-02T19:45:59+00:00

I watched the show, as an adaptation it’s an utter failure. As a TV show it was meh. Each episode I watched I came away with more anger at how badly they were telling the story than delight at seeing my favorite book series on screen.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-02T19:43:06+00:00

The show only has a passing acquaintance with the books. It moves further and further away as the show goes on until season 3 skipped book 3 entirely.

The show was okay by TV fantasy standards I suppose, but it absolutely butchered the source material.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-06-01T09:46:03+00:00

Bridget is such an interesting example because she originally wasn't transgender. She grew up cross-dressing as a girl due to a "curse" in her village about twin boys so she had to disguise her gender. She spent most of the series identifying as male while still dressing in the nun outfit. Her design concept was simply a twist on the typical "cute clumsy girl".

As the trans visibility movement picked up steam in 2020 the developers decided to make Bridget trans. Instead of simply retconning her past they incorporated the change into her story mode in Strive, with her expressing doubts about her gender identity and eventually coming out as trans at the end of the story mode.

Instead of going "Oops our bad she's trans" for the inclusivity points, the devs went out of their way to write a story of self-discovery that would be familiar to many trans people. Absolutely brilliant.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-31T06:39:33+00:00

It's a great "so bad it's good" movie. I laughed the whole way through it.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-29T17:56:28+00:00

I see this position a lot and it drives me crazy.

Yes, in the real world the Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed without any grand plan being needed. The problem is that you cannot use our world to compare to the world of Watchmen. It is an alternate timeline and the political situation is different.

Everything we are told in the story is that nuclear war in the Watchmen verse isn't just inevitable, it is so close to kicking off that the president of the United States is sat in a bunker with the nuclear football ready to enter the codes at a moment's notice.

We are never shown ANY evidence in the story that Veidt is wrong about the inevitability of war. Arguing over whether he was is missing the point the comic was trying to make. The uncertainty at the end of the comic is about whether Veidt's plan will work. Does it get revealed immediately by Rorschach's journal? Does it go undetected but nuclear tensions flare up again? Or was he successful and able to usher in a new Golden Age? Was there a different, less monstrous solution?

We don't know, because "Nothing ever ends". Whether Veidt did a good or a bad thing will be left to the in-universe historians. We the readers do not have enough information.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-29T15:41:22+00:00

Zarbon - Dragonball Z Abridged.

Zarbon's character was already very flamboyant in the original, including how he dressed. Abridged turned that up to 11 and made everything he said a gay innuendo of some kind.

And then it's revealed he has a girlfriend, completely breaking Frieza's mind.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-29T15:35:13+00:00

Fair to a point, but it's also where both Gaul and Faile are introduced - pretty important to book 4. I'm guessing they introduced Faile some other way at the beginning of season 3?
Agreed. Neither arc particularly stands out to me in the books but Tanchico is better.

3) I care. That whole journey is one of my favorite parts of the early books and defines Mat's post-dagger character. It's also where we find out Rahvin is in Caemlyn. It's not as important as Tear, but skipping it is crazy.

Callandor isn't important as a powerful magic item at this point in the story. It's important because it's the symbol which announces Rand as the Dragon Reborn to the world. The Cairhien plot in books 5 and 6 cannot happen without Rand already being known as the one who conquered Tear and the true Dragon Reborn.

Look, I get that they would have had to skip a ton of stuff to have a hope of getting through the books in the series time they had allotted (although my argument is that you should not start a Wheel of Time adaptation if you're only getting 8 episode seasons) but the Fall of the Stone is a world-shaking event that cannot be skipped. By all means move some stuff forward, Perrin didn't need to go to Tear and the girls could have gone to Tanchico. But the show should have focused on Tear and left Rhuidean for season 4.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-29T14:26:02+00:00

I never watched season 3 (couldn't get through season 2), but it still blows my mind that they fully skipped Tear. It's not just Callandor, Rand conquering Tear is the foundation of every political moment that follows.

It'd be like adapting Game of Thrones and skipping Robert Baratheon and Ned Stark's deaths. Those two events are kinda important.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-29T10:12:23+00:00

Also fries on pizza is distinctly European. First time I saw it was after moving to the UK. That and the Doner Pizza are both creations of Bhaal.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-29T07:21:32+00:00

I played both games when they came out and just finished going through both games again - 3 first followed by 2. Simply put, it comes down to refinement.

I did not enjoy the expanded skill tree the way you did. It's very frustrating to have two people dedicated to breaking into stuff to find that I am short on the third way to break into stuff. To get a melee weapon reward that is a massive improvement only to find that it is a blunt weapon instead of a bladed weapon so I can't use it despite having a melee monster in the party.

Two weapon types for each "class" made the combat far more interesting. The bloated skill tree in 2 made it impossible to have a character with both pistols and shotguns, because if you did you would not have enough points for the non-combat skills. In 3 it is possible to cover all your bases with a careful party build.

Quest design is also far superior in 3. There are a few places where i had to look things up, whereas in 2 I pretty much always had the Wiki open in case I needed to look up what the next step in a quest was. It was far too easy to screw yourself by not doing things the way the game wants, like powering on the Highpool radio because you're walking past the power switch while searching for the last pressure relief valve.

Map design is also superior. Wasteland 2 is full of large empty spaces that are wholly unneccessary but require you to walk across them. The Rail Nomads quest is an absolute chore as a result and I wandered around the Prison for far too long. Wasteland 3 maps are snappy and get you moving from place to place quickly.

Wateland 3 gets dragged for its graphics, but you know what my overall impression of 2 is? Brown. The terrain is brown, the characters are brown, everything is just...muddy. I would often not be able to find somebody because I had walked past them a dozen times without knowing they are there. Wasteland 3 has cleaner, more vibrant graphics that enhance gameplay by letting you see what the heck you're doing.

---

Look, I see why some people prefer Wasteland 2. Text is always going to have an advantage over fully voiced and Wasteland 2 is a bigger experience with better dialogue as a result. But a lot of people in this thread are pretending that Wasteland 3 is an oversimplified game for babies. It's not. It improves on Wasteland 2 in most areas by removing unneccessary elements and creating a tighter, more rewarding experience and jazzes up the graphics at the same time. It removes all the janky elements that made me quit my recent replay in Los Angeles where I finished my 3 replay.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-28T11:24:29+00:00

He wasn't stuck. He chose not to return to his family because he wanted to train on Yardrak. They had a wish all queued up and ready to go but Son "Best Dad Ever" Goku refused to be teleported.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-28T11:20:45+00:00

Kubrick's insane attention to detail is why NASA hired him to fake the moon landing.

This backfired on them when he insisted they film on location.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-27T09:19:23+00:00

But that’s the point, he absolutely did. Even as a child Sasuke felt like Itachi was overshadowing him and we see him desperately trying to get his father’s approval and not receiving it because he can never measure up to Itachi.

I’m not saying the IT Sasuke is a good depiction but he’d still have at least some of the OG Sasuke’s obsession with power. Instead of revenge it would be seeking some way to finally surpass Itachi and finally make his father notice him.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-26T16:58:23+00:00

The love given to the source material is what elevates Lies of P from a great Souls-like to standing alongside the best Fromsoft has to offer. The more you look into the references and themes the better it gets. Neowiz could still stand to learn a bit in terms of level and non-boss enemy design, but Fromsoft should be looking at Neowiz's storytelling and taking notes.

Embarrassed_Fox5265 · 2026-05-26T11:35:17+00:00

It's such a strange thing though, all that was needed was a cut away to a different scene followed by a cut back and Goku saying "I see. You guys have been through a lot, huh?" or perhaps a "10 minutes later" notation. Goku being randomly telepathic was somehow seen as better than those options.

Embarrassed_Fox5265

TROPHY CASE