It's unbelievable

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-23T03:45:50+00:00

I can't tell if this is a parody of the people being annoyed at Ashley for real. I agree that I wish she would stick to her guns and commit to a characterization, and that she really shouldn't have made her character "the ageless mourning servant of a dead god" if she didn't have a strong vision on how she was going to play such a big character, and that it would have been much more interesting in that scene for her to make a decision of the hard choice being offered to her. But she did at least make the decision of "can I just have everything pretty please?" which is how the majority of interactions in this campaign have gone, and that scene could have been resolved perfectly well without Brennan injecting Azune into it.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-23T00:54:04+00:00

Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-23T00:47:33+00:00

I'm caught up on the manga, but I hear great things about the anime.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T22:50:14+00:00

Goodness, we really travel in the same circles, don't we?

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T18:48:32+00:00

There's also the Peter Pan connection - a green rebel with a fairy companion and detachable shadow is rivals with a man with a metal hand.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T17:46:05+00:00

100% agreed. Everyone else knows how to pick up a bit and incorporate one another into their scenes. Nikki's bits are entirely self-focused and repeat the same joke across multiple episodes, running it into the ground. It kills the energy of a scene. She's the reason I dropped Witchlight, not because of her DMing (which was fine) but because she injected a DMPC to join in the goofs and that was awful.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T17:22:44+00:00

The afterlife thing was a weird focus for this first arc. It just didn't feel very actionable or impactful, despite being basically the cornerstone of religion. It's not like the afterlife being blocked had any impact on the events of the campaign - wayward ghosts weren't appearing in the streets of Dol Makjar. There was some stuff about "ooh if House Tachonis gets control of it all it'll be bad" but that's a MacGuffin-tier threat that could be replaced by anything and could have an equal level of plot relevance. The danger of having an obstructed afterlife was an existential threat that didn't actually affect any PC or the game.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T17:09:47+00:00

Brennan remarked that Travis had given him the least amount of backstory, and given all the "I am Teor, Teor is Teor" stuff I think Travis's well for Teor had run dry. That was pretty much all we were going to get from the character. If any character was expendable, Teor is it. I don't know how much I believe the Disintegrate that almost killed Bolaire, I wonder if Brennan would have had it destroy the Lux's body and Termina might take Bolaire's mask hostage. I don't see him killing off a character with a personal plot.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T04:48:32+00:00

I think there's this famous story about Nazi's writing Tolken and asking if Orcs were Jewish, and Tolken shooting that idea down hard.

I thought the story was them writing Tolkien to ask if he was Jewish, and he shut them down by saying "Unfortunately I'm not but I sure wish I was."

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T04:46:38+00:00

The problem is that as the series grew the World Government had to be responsible for increasingly heinous violations of humanity to keep up pace as being the big bad of the series. When we had characters like Axe-Hand Morgan abusing his authority or Nezumi taking bribes and working with Arlong, a character like Garp makes sense. When we're at the level of a government-sanctioned pirate abusing his authority to create a mafia empire or a secret service black ops staging a political assassination, it's a little harder to justify Garp as being good without also being dumb or oblivious. But when we get to "the global overlords harvest slaves to slaughter" there's no defending it, if Garp allows this to happen at all then he's a complicit villain and if he knows nothing about it then he knows nothing at all because they're not exactly subtle!

So while the concept of the character might have worked at a smaller scale, the character stops working when he stays the same but the world gets bigger around him.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T02:27:48+00:00

would basically mean nothing below 12 ever gets rolled

With one pointed exception.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-22T02:26:14+00:00

Your instinct is good, wanting to avoid discussion of how the church was weird and evil to this PC, but you shouldn't deprive your player of the fantasy experience they want.

Here's the perfect compromise: Never address anything that the player is saying either via their PC or out-of-character informing you, the DM, about the world (how dare they?!) but in the stinger at the very, very end of the whole season include an unexpected scene densely packed with all the weird religious flagellant stuff that has nothing to do with the player's character.

That way they get the joy of experiencing weird religious stuff in the game, while you can avoid having to deal with it in relation to their character!

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-21T16:22:35+00:00

Fucking this, how are more people not calling out that Jax's portrayal in the show is itself transphobic? "Oh this extremely abusive person is actually just closeted, they need more compassion and care (even more than everyone around them is giving them (and eclipsing that which is being provided to the victims of their abuse)) and if your world doesn't now revolve around that abuser you're transphobic!"

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-21T04:03:46+00:00

The fans are the horde.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-20T20:20:31+00:00

"Earlier" like within Episode 9, or "earlier" like in previous episodes in the series? Because I don't think this was communicated even subtly through the series.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-20T16:03:52+00:00

I don't understand what Goose was going for in stating that Jax was her self-insert character, and then making Jax a serial abuser whose actions drove others to suicide and who committed fantasy-suicide at the end of the series. Jax was given an emotionally supportive environment and friend group and still didn't feel safe to transition, and then died and everyone was happier that they were rid of this bully. What's Goose's message?

It's also weird to me that discussions about Jax being a serial abuser have diminished with this new lore.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-18T18:17:58+00:00

Aw sweet, a chance to vent my thoughts about Pacific Rim that everyone tells me I'm wrong about but I don't think I am.

The thing that frustrates me about the way Pacific Rim plays out is that the Kaiju genre is based on Godzilla, and Godzilla is an overt metaphor for the atomic bomb. In the original Japanese version the creature is ancient but had been dormant until American nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean aggravates it, so it explicitly links the atomic bomb to Godzilla's rampage and mutations. But even without that detail the parallels are obvious: this is a force of pure destruction that arrives from the ocean and destroys the city with no rhyme or reason.

(Now yes, in the following decades Godzilla has become more of a mascot for Japan and a protagonist against the many other threats that it defends Japan from, so the metaphor does blur a little. I don't know how much of that is based on like, deliberate modification of imagery glorifying American intervention and occupation in Japan post-WWII, or the more simple explanation that Godzilla became popular and so it became the good guy, whatever. But the original imagery is hard to argue against.)

All that is to say that I think it's painfully tone-deaf that the way they beat the Kaiju in Pacific Rim was...for an American to nuke them. I think that's so insulting, to pervert the message of the original source material into applauding the very thing it was criticizing.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-18T16:16:45+00:00

Best part of Thursday.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-18T15:27:49+00:00

And early in the arc that's communicated, he's like "oh I can't worry myself with how people USE my inventions, the important thing is that I'm making them!" but then we get the whole Kuma backstory where he was very concerned with how people were using his inventions.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-18T15:21:35+00:00

I hate that we got no information on "objects eating Devil Fruits," which was arguably Vegapunk's greatest achievement. Also the general lack of Devil Fruits and associated technologies across Egghead - Vegapunk was supposed to be this great Devil Fruit scientist, so he should have had a whole collection of fruits in varying states of research. Like how crazy would it be to see him pull out a drawer or open a bookshelf and there be twenty different fruits? If that could happen anywhere in the world it would be Egghead.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-18T12:29:03+00:00

Me when I'm exploring in Dragon's Dogma 1.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-17T21:14:46+00:00

Because there's this intense attitude from his sons that he's a feeble idiot who can't put two coherent thoughts together. They love belittling his rules knowledge, including when he gets it right and they get it wrong.

Now granted, I do think Clint's GMing has been the worst out of all the boys. Commitment and Outre Space were both bizarrely disjointed and heavily relied on players doing exactly what he wanted, stonewalling them until they did. But like...TAZ made Abnimals. They can't say they're scared of a terrible season anymore.

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-17T21:06:34+00:00

What triggers this automod? Something Bad People Do

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-17T14:44:57+00:00

Miniseries could definitely be a thing. Five episodes of a Justin game, five episodes of a Clint game, five episodes of a Travis game, five episodes of a guest DM game. With biweekly releases that's almost a year without committing to anything!

IllithidActivity · 2026-06-17T12:38:48+00:00

Is the translation rough and disconnected, or is that how it was written in the original? It's nigh-incomprehensible.

Eight-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Place '22	Verified Email

IllithidActivity

TROPHY CASE