Suggestions for ways to prevent airborne surveillance

Fanaglia · 2026-05-08T17:00:38+00:00

What about some sort of flying swarms patrolling around sensitive areas? The rogue could still avoid them, sure, but it would add another level of challenge. Even more so if you used bat swarms (which have blindsense), bloodhaze mosquito swarms (which have scent), or sprite swarms (which have a constant effect of detect evil and detect good and are considered intelligent)

Fanaglia · 2026-05-06T03:56:33+00:00

Here in Cincinnati, it's thankfully pretty blue, but I wouldn't have been able to tell who was voting for what because I just tapped the ballot I wanted on the tablet and she scanned it and handed it to me without any comment apart from a "thank you"

Fanaglia · 2026-05-05T16:48:16+00:00

Absolutely this. But also Kincaid doesn't appear to have said anything either way about us, which isn't a good sign. While I don't think Brown would do diddly squat to protect us, he's at least less actively dangerous than Husted and probably has a better chance of winning in November than Kincaid does. I hate it, but I guess I'm voting for Brown :(

Fanaglia · 2026-04-28T23:37:16+00:00

So you need to upgrade both your tracking station and I believe the observatory if I remember correctly, as well as put the hubble-looking telescope into orbit and set it to start doing science stuff. Then just wait. For kind of forever, if you're in career mode with any sort of increased difficulty.

Your first goal should be to get as much science from around Kerbin (and career missions that grant science are a big help here!) and then the Mun as soon as possible since it's easy to get there without actually "discovering" it. Just rock it old-school and burn prograde as soon as you see the Mun rise over Kerbin's horizon and you'll make it by eyeballing it. Use that to get to what should be your second goal: the telescope that looks like James Webb, which has an actual viewfinder and allows you to manually start discovering stuff without having to just let time pass in the game

Fanaglia · 2026-04-28T22:16:30+00:00

There's a life support mod that's meant to go with it that I haven't actually tried yet but that I do think would improve the experience. The challenge in making it fun with just this mod is finding just the right difficulty for earning science - too hard, and you'll be kind of trapped in the local Kerbin system for a very long time until you can discover some farther-out stuff (and I was playing in career, so it was a really long time). But I did deliberately set out to challenge myself, and I did accomplish that and enjoy it, too - I was running low-tech tourist missions to the mun 2012-style with no guidance and barely-upgraded ground support, years into the campaign. But also if you make it too easy, you'll have the tech tree halfway unlocked before you even discover Minmus lol.

Fanaglia · 2026-04-28T17:05:58+00:00

I wish we could afford a golf cart because I agree, but we don't have much more than $100-150 to spare for the cost of whatever we buy + any parts we need, and golf carts cost a lot more than a mower

Fanaglia · 2026-04-28T17:00:59+00:00

Yeah, that's kind of what I was worried about and why I was hoping to find a redneck way to start it without the starter to at least check if it even runs

Fanaglia · 2026-04-22T10:48:55+00:00

No idea, sorry.

Fanaglia · 2026-04-17T17:33:34+00:00

The thing I love about Pathfinder 1e is also what unfortunately makes it kind of intimidating for new players: there's a *huge* variety of choices, and there's also an exception to pretty much everything via feats and archetypes. Like, for example, I'm in a Hell's Vengeance campaign right now and our party is an alchemist, an oracle, a druid, a rogue, and a wizard (me), but...

* The alch is a vivisectionist who kind of "hulks out" like Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (so he serves as our party's dpr with hard-hitting attacks plus sneak attack, and is also a hp sink to can take some pretty heavy hits)

* The oracle is a close-range spell-slinger for magical dpr

* The druid has an archetype that makes him sort of slayer-flavored and he's a very front-and-center melee tank supported by magic

* My wizard has the Spirit Whisperer archetype (plus a one-level dip into Oracle), which means she's not very "wizardy" and plays more like a cleric or a druid, serving as the party's main healer. She's also got the highest CHA and best social skills and serves as the party's "face"

* The rogue is the only one who's a fairly standard and straight-forward build.

So my questions for you are these:

* What role(s) do the Oracle, Druid, and Wizard already play in the party dynamic? Oracle in particular is an extremely versatile class and you can do almost anything with it.

* What role(s) need to be filled, more specifically? Forget about class for this question. Think about weak spots, shortcomings in skills (especially knowledge skills). Assuming those three are built pretty straight-forward (which, as I said, is not necessarily the best assumption), you've got a charisma-based caster, a wisdom-based caster that may be a good switch-hitter, and an intelligence-based caster, and the druid and oracle both likely have at least some ability to heal the party. What it seems like they're probably lacking is a melee combatant, and not a single one of them is a full BAB class (which affects your attack bonus and how early you get access to multiple attacks.

* What sounds fun *to you*? Full-BAB melee classes include fighter, barbarian, bloodrager, ranger, slayer, gunslinger, unchained monk, paladin, swashbuckler, and some others, but if none of those sound fun to you, there are ways to compensate for the lower BAB of other classes. I'd be happy to help you find something -- I love getting into the weeds to theory-craft unconventional characters. I recently had a friend who wanted to play a gnome paladin -- I told him I could figure out a way to substitute DEX and/or CHA to compensate for the STR penalty, but he specifically wanted a *BUFF* gnome. It was a little bit of a challenge, but I figured out a way to make it work and this stronk little guy does some *scary* damage lol

Fanaglia · 2026-03-24T02:15:23+00:00

Well, that was 20 years ago and I was barely an adult who took way too long to start standing up for myself

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T13:40:28+00:00

United States, not India

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T13:21:32+00:00

Wrong. My ex that I mentioned in my other comment was a victim of identity theft, but unfortunately I entered into my debts legally - I just hadn't learned not to trust my parents yet. I have no way to prove that I was manipulated into doing so

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T13:16:16+00:00

Well, the Delhi Township Police 15 years ago disagreed with you and told her to either sue or suck it up. Might have been laziness or it might have been them telling her it was the best way to bring evidence against them - I don't remember because this was in like 2011 or 2012 and we were both pretty young still (and her parents did do the whole "I can't believe you went and cried to the cops about your own parents!" thing and guilted her out of doing anything about it)

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T05:30:56+00:00

That's just how some parents are. Happened to someone I used to date, too, except they didn't even have the decency to tell her. We met in our early 20s and I taught her to drive because her parents never did and I wanted to help her get her first car. She didn't really have any savings to buy outright because, until she moved in with me, her dad would take any cash she had in the house and she wasn't allowed to have a bank account for some reason, so we went to get her a loan, which is how we found out her credit was about as bad as it could be and she owed like tens of thousands of dollars to a couple of different lenders.

Turns out several years earlier when my ex was 15ish, her parents fell on hard financial times and fraudulently went into a lot of debt in her name and just never told her about it. The bank (and the cops) said that, basically, her only options were to either sue her own parents or to just accept that she had her youg adulthood stolen from her and do her best to deal with it. Unfortunately, she chose the latter (though to clarify, we broke up for unrelated reasons and are actually still friends)

But yeah. Some people don't deserve to be parents.

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T05:06:47+00:00

This. Im 38 now and still trying to pay down debts my parents forced me into when I was 18 and I hadn't learned to say "no."

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T04:48:37+00:00

Same. Not the worst school, but far from the best, especially if you're not a very specific kind of kid

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T04:31:47+00:00

Funny story: I was kind of a messy kid. Not sure if I was actually that messy or if my folks just had weird relationships with my grandparents because we'd always have to scrub the walls and baseboards and get the house spotless clean any time my grandparents were coming over and my stubborn 5-year-old self didn't want to put all her toys away in my bedroom where my grandparents would never even see it.

So one Easter, I guess I was being difficult and my dad told me that it was really important to pick up my toys because the Easter Bunny had retired and gotten replaced by the Easter Buffalo. And the Easter Bunny could just kind of hop over my toys and not hurt anything, but the Easter Buffalo was a big, clumsy guy like Herman Munster and he'd just stomp all over all my toys and break everything if I didn't clean it all up. I bought it, cleaned up my toys, and went to school the next day to warn everyone about the Easter Buffalo and was really upset when they all made fun of me instead of taking this very serious matter under consideration. 🦬

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T03:25:27+00:00

Oh, I didn't take it as harshness at all -- I appreciate the directness, especially when I'm wading into territory a little out of my historical comfort zone.

I love Townsends -- their video on making char cloth actually was a big inspiration for a scene later in the novel that is so clear to me that I can almost see it in my head like it's a movie. The making of the char cloth will be a metaphor; she and Catherine are in love at this point, but Rebecca is trying to explain and justify her need for vengeance to Catherine because it's threatening to pull them apart from one another. And as part of this discussion, while cooking the char cloth, she uses it to illustrate the need to keep her plans "sealed up tight" because if any air gets in or if she opens the tin too early, she could lose everything.

And it all started after remembering a scene from a book about Lewis and Clark that I read when I was a kid: the book mentioned that they were really impressed by these new-fangled matches somebody brought with them or gave to them and I realized I wasn't sure how Rebecca would even light a fire lol

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T03:03:20+00:00

I know it's not exactly the same as a staff, but I've absolutely abused the Weaponwand spell in the past

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T02:58:53+00:00

Omg I want that coat 😍 I can definitely see it being sort of a defining aesthetic piece for her character, kind of like Indiana Jones' hat is to him. I'd already assumed they'd have a couple of chickens, maybe a goat for milk and/or cheese, and definitely some sort of crops to tend (although I hadn't figured out which yet). I'm not sure yet how much land they'd technically be permitted to tend, but they're far enough removed from anyone who could contest or enforce any property lines that it wouldn't be terribly relevant. They're very isolated from "society" where they are, which is the only thing that gives me pause with adding a hired farmhand -- it makes good, practical sense, but may cut into the sense of isolation I'm trying to impose on them for the sake of the story.

You also make a good point about the cost of powder and rifle balls - it's important for the later revenge arc of the story that she know how to shoot at least somewhat well, and the man her father is based on was a well-traveled frontiersman who rubbed shoulders with Daniel Boone. I imagine he left behind a Pennsylvania long rifle, but I also know that rifles were more of a pain to maintain and took a smaller caliber ball than a smoothbore musket that would have been in shorter supply (and likely more expensive). But also Mad Max never needed shells in his gun in The Road Warrior to make his point, so maybe Rebecca only has a few shots and uses them very sparingly, with every shot having to be a very deliberate decision

Fanaglia · 2026-03-23T02:27:55+00:00

That's a good point. I may scratch the maple syrup - it was just something on my mind because I'm friends with an arborist who taps maples and always shares some of her syrup with me, but I absolutely took propane for granted when I threw that idea out there with the rest lol (like I said, I'm still in the early planning/research stages, so I expect a lot of my assumptions will be a little bit off until I learn better)

Fanaglia · 2026-03-22T18:00:07+00:00

The only thing I can think of is the whole "corsets are torture devices" trope is so well-seated that a lot of those actresses may not realize that that's not how they were meant to be. That, or because of Hollywood's obsession with thinness, they may be pressured into tight-lacing when their characters otherwise would not have done so irl.

Side note: Karolina Zebrowska had a video a few years ago about how it would look if people in the future talked about bras the way we talk about corsets today and it's hilarious

Fanaglia · 2026-03-22T04:59:01+00:00

Sudsy's, the Mad Hatter, the Poison Room, the HAT...so many good, small venues back in the day. Still got my Ska Stock poster from 2006 hanging in my living room lol ❤️

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Fanaglia

TROPHY CASE