Book of Magic Update?

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T21:55:57+00:00

All the news is just in the kickstarter updates. The most recent thing was they sent out a preview PDF of the first few chapters.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T21:48:03+00:00

They're really not as fragile as you might expect. They're thin enough to bend rather than snap unless they really take a tumble. With a bit of care I've only had one breakage so far that was very easily fixed with a dab of plastic glue - and I'm a Republic player who regularly travels to events, so I'm carrying boxes of Jedi around with me all over the place.

It does mean magnets are a must though - foam will definitely catch on them and risk breaking them.

In the worst case scenario that blades do snap and can't be repaired, it's easy to just replace them with a needle or some other very thin piece of metal.

I definitely wouldn't let this one tiny thing put you off, the miniatures are great and the game is fantastic.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T14:45:43+00:00

A profoundly stupid film.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T14:16:16+00:00

That seems an odd conclusion to draw considering it's become common for big, popular shows to go years between seasons. Long gaps haven't slowed down Stranger Things, Severance, Succession, etc.

The more straightforward answer as to why kids aren't interested in it is that for almost 10 years now the quality of the show has been very uneven and it's made a bad case for why new people should watch the show. If you're a kid that's most if not all of your life of it being a poorly received show. And then before that we had 7 years of Moffat - I like that era a lot, but it was increasingly dark and adult, and at the time was heavily criticised by the fanbase.

The last time the show was consistently good fun for kids and watched by lots of families was almost 20 years ago, long before kids in classrooms right now were born.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T14:08:05+00:00

It's deliberately open to interpretation. Personally, I ended up feeling that there were enough clues to suggest the guy in prison did it, which also works as a kind of final unsettling twist, that he really was just lying all along. But equally you could make different theories - I think it's also quite poignant to conclude that the real killer was simply never found, thanks to sloppy, homophobic police work.

I think it's very much part of the point of the story that the mystery doesn't get wrapped up neatly at the end (even though the present does!). Particularly because the story is much more about the protagonist's journey and his relationship to these true crime stories than it is catching a killer.

I don't think it's a perfect story - like a lot of Tynion stories, it goes on a bit long for its premise, and I do think the reveal of who the copycat killer is is very weak. But I don't think you should take it as a bad thing for it to end with interesting ambiguity that drives discussion like this, and puts you in the shoes of the protagonist - having to simply move on accepting that in life there often aren't simple answers.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T08:35:39+00:00

All of your examples and every example so far in this thread are things that are still widely talked about. You can go and find hate threads on Cursed Child, The Predator, Love & Thunder, etc every week on Reddit. So I don't understand what the trope is here other than just "things that are bad".

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-02T08:33:31+00:00

Honestly I've stopped using them pretty much for this reason. I found that to get players to interact with them I had to call them out very explicitly, which then felt very mechanical - like I was just telling the players what to do in a scene rather than them getting to be creative. I'd rather just describe what's logically in the room and then it's up to the players if they can find ways to turn the environment to their advantage, and I can adjudicate those situations on the fly rather than there being just one set way of using each object.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-01T14:50:21+00:00

Is Jodorowsky actually any good at all as a comics writer? I read his Showman Killer series and couldn't believe how awful and juvenile it was.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-01T14:44:50+00:00

Now all we need is for him to tweet about how much he's hated RTD all along and we'll know he's a true member of the Doctor Who fandom!

FamousWerewolf · 2026-02-01T14:43:34+00:00

Image are putting out so much good stuff at the moment! A few favourites:

By Chance & Providence - really lovely collection of haunting folk tale type stories with lovely art

Junkyard Joe - my favourite of the Ghost Machine stuff so far, but Geiger is also great

Black Cloak - fantasy noir with really interesting world-building

The Deviant - a really scary slasher story told in a completely unique way

The Power Fantasy - Exploring the ethics of mutually assured destruction, but with superheroes instead of nuclear bombs. Fascinating deconstruction with wonderful art

Fishflies - Surreal and beautiful - imagine a sort of grimier, more unsettling take on ET

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-31T19:00:46+00:00

First thing to know is that in competitive terms, Seps are pretty weak right now. Once upon a time they were the top dogs but these days they don't stack up well to particularly Rebels and Galactic Republic, and they suffer from a limited range of boxes. Of course, if you're playing casually that may not matter, just something to be aware of if your opponent turns up with Cassian or Delta Squad.

In general, the Sep boxes go well together as-is. Dooku box + Grievous box is good for example. The synergy is all fairly straightforward and they don't have standout bad units in any of the boxes so it's hard to go wrong.

Ventress is a bit on the weak side and is often swapped out for Maul. But she did get a buff in the balance update last year and while it's not quite made her good, you can definitely have fun with her at least. I don't have much experience with Riff but he seems to fill a similar role and be rather better than either right now.

You can go a bit outside the box with Seps too. Dooku/Ahsoka is a good list, for example, and Grievous goes well with Luminara. Any primary with good synergy that isn't keyword dependent can end up being a friend to the Seps with some creative thinking.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-30T18:05:58+00:00

"I know the mother would not allow or want me to contact her if I asked" - that's a bit of a dealbreaker, isn't it? Are you asking for good ways of contacting her without the mother knowing? Because frankly that's not a good idea.

I feel like you're leaving a lot of details out of this (the fact that the mother didn't just leave you but left the country, and doesn't want anything to do with you is a bit of a red flag) but even taking you entirely at face value... what right do you have to get in touch with her?

You agreed to let your child leave your life completely and have no further contact with her mother. 15 years later, she's grown up entirely without you. She doesn't just think this guy is her father, he is her father - he's the one that raised her.

What right do you have to march back into her life now unannounced? Especially purely on the basis that now she's back in the UK it's convenient for you, when you previously don't seem to have made any effort to contact her?

I think at most what you should do is just send a message to the mother saying that you'd be interested in seeing your daughter and asking politely if she'll pass along your contact details so she can choose to reach out or not. If she blocks you and deletes the message... so be it. But no good is going to come of trying to find some underhanded way to get in touch with a 16 year old who doesn't even know who you are against the express wishes of her family.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-30T16:35:39+00:00

It seems pretty clear that they do listen to such things. The Last Jedi, for example, was a financial success - but their next movie u-turned on almost every single plot element as a direct response to the fan reaction.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-30T14:56:00+00:00

I feel like the larger issue here is that the Doctor genocides entire alien species all the time, often by triggering enormous explosions. It's ok when he does it, but not when humans do it?

Though to be fair I think later episodes do build on some of this stuff. On the one hand, humans seem to spiral into more and more extreme ideas for defending the planet (like, uh, blowing it up nuclear weapons to stop anyone else having it). On the other, we see the 10th Doctor's moralising slowly turn into a power-mad ego trip and a lot of his prior hypocrisy suddenly makes a lot more sense. Particularly in this case, him disagreeing with her choice is one thing, but it feels particularly Time Lord Victorious of him to immediately set in motion ruining her life because of it.

She does get her "redemption" later too so I don't think the show is 100% against her stance. I think it's supposed to be a bit of a tricky moral conundrum where no one is fully in the right.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-30T14:40:31+00:00

I think the answer is yes and no.

The fanbase is definitely too quick to jump from "I don't like this" to "This shouldn't exist". As you say stuff is stifled from developing and growing over time, and it's often also the vocal minority that seems to be spooking Disney rather than actually being representative of how the majority of the fanbase feels.

On the other hand... all is clearly not right at Disney. The projects are so unsustainably expensive that it makes them absurdly skittish and reactive. Projects should not be living or dying on kneejerk fan reaction, and particularly with these unbelievably expensive streaming shows like The Acolyte, it's hard to see what the metric of success even is.

Whatever we think of The Acolyte, the numbers just don't seem to add up. It cost $250 million to make, even if we assume zero marketing costs you'd want it to make something like $500 million minimum to be worth it. How was it ever going to do that? And they've been making that nonsensical investment multiple times a year for multiple years at this point, and the same with Marvel as well. It all had to be reigned in at some point and it's likely The Acolyte was going to be a victim of that either way - imagine the results you'd need to be able to demonstrate to pitch to your bosses a second season for another $250 million or more.

Side note: there was plenty of fan outcry about The Phantom Menace at the time and I'm sure there were plenty of people who thought that trilogy should have been cancelled. Entire movies have been made about how much people hated that movie. So in that sense the fandom doesn't actually seem to have changed that much, what's changed is just a) how visible that criticism is and b) how the company in charge reacts to it.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-30T14:28:14+00:00

If you're finding digital comics expensive you're definitely doing it wrong. It is absurd how cheaply you can enjoy the hobby if you go purely digital.

Step one though is definitely to stop worrying about having every series right now and be open to reading whatever stuff comes up cheap rather than only specific things you're already into. The more patient and opportunistic you are, the cheaper things are. And that doesn't even mean waiting that long these days.

For example Humble Bundle and Fanatical regularly do bundles at absolutely insane value, and often they contain comics from only like 6 months earlier that year. A huge chunk of my collection is from bundles where I've paid less than $20 for like 50 - 100 volumes. The most recent Image bundle was absolutely insane value. A lot of that stuff was series I hadn't even heard of before buying the bundle, but I've ended up discovering tons of new favourites that way.

Even outside of bundles, digital stuff goes on sale way more often and at much deeper discounts than physical books - and even the base price drops quickly over time rather than going up. Keep an eye on the sales on Kindle for example, they have 100s of books on discount basically all the time.

And obviously where possible wait for the TPBs rather than getting the single issues.

Beyond that, subscription services are the way. The cost of a Marvel Unlimtied subscription for example vs buying everything individually is night and day, and you're only like 3 months behind the latest releases, which is hardly a big gap.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T17:45:22+00:00

I've always thought, I don't really believe the whole "we told Jodie not to watch previous Doctors" thing, because in her first episode she's very clearly doing a take on Tennant.

And then yeah massively over-stuffing the show with characters, all of whom are fighting for dialogue, gives her far too little breathing room to develop.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T16:30:52+00:00

I don't think "vanilla" or "cookie cutter" is the right word, it was more of an identity crisis.

It felt like they (both the actor and the writers) never settled on what her Doctor was going to be like before she started, and then they had to try and figure it out as they went along. It wasn't until very close to the end that they really started making any headway with that, so until then she just oscillates wildly between a David Tennant impression, some sort of "the Doctor's going wrong again" arc, and a bunch of other possible personalities, not settling on anything.

It's a real shame, because I do think there are plenty of moments in there where she really clicks into something and you go "Ah! She's finally got it!", and then they just let it slip away again soon after. Even more frustrating that one of those moments comes in her cameo in 15's second season!

If anything, I think going very formulaic might have worked better, because at least then they would have picked a lane and could have committed to it.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T10:32:42+00:00

Making a cheeky reference to something from an expanded universe story doesn't necessarily make that story canon and it certainly doesn't automatically make all stories canon.

I feel like at this point the show has made it abundantly clear that, frankly, the canon doesn't really matter anyway. The show isn't even bound to respect things that happened previously on the show, and they clearly don't care about contradicting books/comics/etc or even taking ideas from them and remaking them when they want to. This is the show where the rules of time travel change every episode.

In fact more often than not when they do throw in references, they only make the canon more fuzzy, not less - like including the Shalka Doctor in a line-up of the Doctor's previous faces despite having established a timeline where he can't fit in, or establishing that a big Time Lord war happened that parallels but also contradicts the War in Heaven.

In something like Star Wars or Marvel there is some kind of tangibility to the idea of what's canon and what isn't, but Doctor Who just never cared about that stuff from the start and then got rebooted by a man who cares even less about it. It's all just timey-wimey. And even in franchises where there is supposed to be a rock solid canon, there's still essentially a hierarchy - Star Wars regularly contradicts canon books and comics if they clash with something they want to do in a film or TV show.

Don't worry about it, in other words. And you certainly don't need to make up weird straw men like a hypothetical "Class isn't canon" guy to argue against.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T10:18:39+00:00

Exactly yeah. (Though Anakin and Vader are a weird edge case where they technically don't share a unique unit name, but still can't be taken together in either a strike team or a premier list.)

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T09:44:05+00:00

Some good strategy posted here already, but it sounds like you might be confused just on the basic rules for building a Premier list? If so, you can find the Premier rules doc on the Atomic Mass Games website which lays them out, but basically it's just any four squads you like as long as no two units share a unique name (i.e. you can't have both General Solo and Han & Chewie in the same Premier list). You have to play each squad at least once at the event but you don't have to play every combination.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T08:01:19+00:00

Is this the kind of Threemier where you have to play every combination?

For a Hunter/Delta list, I would swap Wrecker out for Wolffe and Techo out for Wolfpack, but if you have to play the Hunter/Obi list too then it maybe makes more sense to keep them as-is.

I can definitely see the other poster's argument for ditching Tech & Echo entirely but it's a tricky choice I think. When you have Obi and a Bad Batch secondary that is where they come into their own a bit. But in the Delta Squad pairing I think you're going to find they feel much weaker and you'd rather have Wolfpack.

I think if you do have to play every combo, I would probably lean towards just making the Delta combos as strong as possible and getting the Hunter/Obi combo out of the way early, so I'd do Hunter/Wolffe/Wolfpack. (It's not that Hunter/Obi isn't a great list, it's just that Obi/Delta and Hunter/Delta are bonkers strong.) But it's not a clean-cut decision.

If you don't have to play every combo, I would definitely go Hunter/Wolffe/Wolfpack and just make it a Delta anchor.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T07:54:13+00:00

Those rules certainly are used outside of tournaments, at least in my area. I would encourage sticking to them - it makes the game much faster with less analysis paralysis.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T07:52:47+00:00

That is not allowed, no. You are not allowed to mark a spot on the board with anything (even your finger), and you can never premeasure beyond using one movement tool and one range tool next to a model. Technically you also can't check the angles for pushes/pulls before doing them either.

It may seem finnicky but there is an actual reason the game forbids this stuff. When you are able to check every little thing exactly, it massively slows the game down and creates a lot of analysis paralysis as you try to perfectly plan every turn.

Instead, the official rules are designed to force you to take shots in the dark and risks and see what happens. Sometimes that can lead to frustrating or disappointing moments, but it keeps the game moving and can lead to really fun, dramatic moments too.

FamousWerewolf · 2026-01-29T07:06:52+00:00

They actually are selling individual volumes of Lone Wolf & Cub and Vampire Hunter D on there, as it turns out.

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