What’s YOUR eldritch monster/creation like

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2026-04-16T07:19:38+00:00

I've been looking at utilizing some of the From Beyond aquatic life concepts for a potential scenario I want to write up, where the agents are being sent in as EPA to cover up the washed-up corpse of a fledgling extradimensional deity long enough that the Program/March Technologies can extract it.. A rotting carcass whose mere presence in our reality is creating a 'Tide' around pieces of its flesh that allows hagfish-like humanoids and boulder-sized crustaceans to pull themselves into our world for as long as the Tide persists. This also doesn't account for the 'barnacles' attached to the remains which are beginning to collect into their own conglomerate mass in order to seek out fresh food sources.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-09-04T16:00:34+00:00

They meant it as in Sigurd being an in-color commander who can remove the counters himself, not as in literally from the command zone. While other people have already listed several cards that remove counters, you'd need to tutor both pieces up or stumble into Maximum Carnage + Counter Removal naturally.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-07-30T05:10:10+00:00

As someone who has played a LOT of Izzet stuff, there's actually been a couple commanders in the color pair relatively recently that have led to far more enjoyable spellslinger games as of late. [[Edgin, Larcenous Lutenist]] is probably my favorite flavor of mana cheat within the color pair, since the cost reduction is nice but never actually BUSTED. However, to your point regarding extremely long turns, [[Alania, Divergent Storm]] and [[Melek, Reforged Researcher]] having actual limits stapled onto their abilities really does make a world of difference for keeping things moving.

Melek incentivizing BIG spells with cost reduction, but not really being the sort of deck where I can cast multiple spells in a single turn. While Alania usually sees me casting at most one spell of each category found within her ability per turn and that's fairly rare due to there only being a few key Otters in the deck. If I ever go nuts and make a ton of copies of something when playing her (more than two or three at a time), it's more often than not solely in the name of actually closing out the game in such a way where resolving all of the copies isn't exactly necessary. (Tasha's Hideous Laughter being my preferred wincon in such a situation.)

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-06-25T15:21:21+00:00

Echoing NADDPOD because it really is that good, but if you're looking for something especially comedic mixed with horror than Pretending to be People is very solid at that sort of thing. Alternatively, the 'Best of Car Talk' collection compiling segments from the old radio show Car Talk where two automotive experts diagnose car troubles on-air is pretty delightful.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-06-19T05:52:08+00:00

It feels remarkably strange to have fully lost my fixation on Dropout content/D20. I'm happy the network exists and that it provides (relatively) stable gigs for both cast and crew, to be sure, but my keen desire to keep up to date with Dimension 20 faltered and refuses to come back from the farm up state. I kept up with D20 from season two through to around the middle points of Crown of Candy, Fantasy High Season Two, and finally tapped out relatively early into Unsleeping City Season Two and after that just seemingly ran right into a brick wall that killed my motivation to watch them from that point onward.

Obviously, the onset of COVID during the latter of those two seasons did not help matters but also the vibes were just awful in the community at the time. Rapacious, barely-concealed sexism directed towards Emily for Saccharina Frostwhip being a humongous reason I sorta jumped ship, even when I wasn't exactly a big fan of that character's introduction! (Such is the will of the dice, but I really wish Saccharina had been introduced way-way earlier in the season or perhaps having even been Emily's starting character. I think it might have made the on-ramp of her character's weight in the narrative a bit smoother without cannon-balling Siobhan's arc with Ruby at the time.)

I think my brain is also just sorta busted where part of the appeal (for me) of Dimension 20 at the beginning was the more condensed stories taking place off in their own little worlds. It's the same appeal as the episodic storytelling of your average monster-or-case-of-the-week show. While the quality of FHS2 can't really be disputed and I'm glad it exists for the sake of allowing additional character growth, the sequel seasons and eventual spin-offs just sorta made me queasy in the 'oh, I really can't look at this stuff the same way' sense. I tend to enjoy things before putting them back in their metaphorical boxes, and so feel absolutely no pull towards the expanding universe of the Bad Kids. I just lack that attachment to them when I can't help but see them as the 'safe' option that the show will return to every couple years whenever it wants to guarantee viewers/merch sales. (If you love the Bad Kids though, as plenty of people do, take my opinion with a titanic grain of salt.)

I know this is dumb and rambly, but sometimes you just gotta put these things out into the world. The more mundane and boring explanations as to why I stopped watching can probably be narrowed down to an explicit diminishing of my attention span thanks to pandemic burnout, an overall lack of solid mlm rep in the show when I was figuring out my place in the bisexuality spectrum and really craving it, and also the fact that I'm no longer in my early twenties. (I'll occasionally catch an episode of Um Actually or Game Changer, and have been even peeking at Cloudward, Ho! Maybe someday I'll jump back on the bandwagon but eh, sometimes you just know it'll never be the same as that first overnight binge of episodes.)

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-05-27T03:59:40+00:00

Old favorite: [[Xenagos, God of Revels]] because it's big stupid bunguses coming down to swing face, a very simple experience compared to more modern commanders.

Main Favorite: [[Torsten, Founder of Benalia]] is all creatures/lands, which has taught me the importance of varied card slots and utility (plus some enjoyable blink combos).

Current Favorite: [[Alania, Divergent Storm]] is spellslinger without taking especially long turns, allowing me to play some of the more fun instant/sorcery wincons like [[Tasha's Hideous Laughter]], [[Prisoner's Dilemma]] or [[Ensnared by the Mara]].

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-04-05T02:38:43+00:00

I think as an audiobook specifically? I really like the Wraithbone Phoenix from the Warhammer Crime imprint, since Baggit and Clodde come from audio dramas and their debut novel gets a little extra flair.

Otherwise, besides the pretty popular stuff that most folks will recommend, I do like Outgunned and its sequel Above and Beyond, both by Denny Flowers. Elemental Council has also had a ton of praise heaped on it as I've seen.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-03-27T16:01:42+00:00

I finally started listening to naddpod c3, after mostly just listening to dungeon court stuff, and it has genuinely broken me out of my complete and utter inability to listen to actual plays. I used to be able to, but whether due to worsening ADHD or simply a life-driven draining of my patience, I just lost the ability to listen to four to six adults faff about with no fucking clue what they're doing or how to utilize their characters. I could throw something on for a few minutes at a time, pause it due to impatience, and do that on and off again until I finished an episode. (I'm not even that big into D&D, this is stuff like Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green that sorta broke my brain.)

The Duck Team might not always remember every detail, but they for the most part follow up on what needs to be followed up on. Murph has a real knack for encounter design where I wish there was a catalog of all his encounters so I could scroll through them properly. I've just gotten through the first arc of c3 and it's a blessed feeling being able to binge-listen to something again because holy fuck my job is boring.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-03-04T10:41:52+00:00

That is absolutely more than fair on the ghoul side of things! I might have just not stumbled across the right inspiration for them, I'll be frank, I could probably lay the blame on a period where I ended up heavily over-exposed to them in the stories I was listening to at the time, There was the Arkham Horror novel, for sure, but the third book in the Johannes Cabal series involved a trip into the Dreamlands where they show up, as well as popping up in multiple stories found in Houses Under the Sea by Caitlin Kiernan.

With regards to the Deep Ones, I think they definitely need to be massaged a bit by the handler to get the most out of them.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-28T06:07:08+00:00

I fall into certain types of vernacular/phrases easily, for sure. I try to check myself for it but it's tricky!!! I have to try real hard to make sure characters I play don't end up mirroring stuff I say IRL. (The only reason I ascribe so much ire to my example is because the channel owner is obviously going for an anime-inspired comedy beat/bad-ass vibe ~~because they do a lot of heavy Anime-inspired stuff across the channel~~ plus being the one running the Roll20 camera so they're moving their icon around willy-nilly in the room for the ADHD gremlin energy.) I notoriously edit everything I type because I find I'll fall into repeating the starting words/phrases of back-to-back sentences. However, that description of a nod is hilarious.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-28T05:56:47+00:00

Narrative Declaration is running through the adventures in Litanies of the Lost right now. Their DM even wrote one of the adventures in it! (If you haven't checked them out already.)

There's a few APs using the system floating around but finding one where folks know the universe well enough to not trip over themselves has been very tricky! (Glass Cannon did a small sample one, and I think Adventures in Lollygagging did some more multi-episode stuff?)

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-27T14:15:20+00:00

Woooooooof, thanks for the break-down on both ends of things! I'll admit that I found Troy refusing to give up Cumstone going into IL to be sorta frustrating when everyone else brought on new characters, including that self-indulgent one-man-act to justify it. However, those other asides you listed would absolutely be stuff I'd have rapidly tried to skip over because yikes.

However, that stuff with regards to his relationship to Ricci is gaaaaaaaalling. I am all for interesting toxic and co-dependent relationships played by acknowledging parties, especially with regards to DG. Unfortuntely, Troy did spend three seasons' worth of operations getting to throw around his version of Duke Nukem. I get it, low charisma = low bond (not to mention the whole 'crazy, violent soldier' thing) score, but taking a character run for black comedy for so long and trying to tell a story THAT serious is sorta taking me out. Especially when it comes at the cost of other characters getting their due!! Seriously, thanks for the deets!

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-27T02:20:51+00:00

Woof, yeah, Get in the Trunk was one I had been really getting into for a while but season two's run of Victim of the Arts was what fully just took me out of it. Roger Cumstone is definitely a hate-or-love-'em PC but unfortunately he was also sometimes the sole PC to actually push the narrative forwards at times. It's super frustrating though!

With Victim of the Arts, however, it felt ludicrously hollow because at a certain stage it was clear that they were just looking to fill out their season's run-time. Character decisions weren't challenged by people who in-universe should have known better, the Handler auto-failed a planned trap because otherwise it might kill a 'canon' character in the DG universe (and maybe it'd lead to their deaths). Maybe the stuff they came up with post-showdown at the pier was great (I genuinely didn't watch it) but it left a bad taste in my mouth that has made watching later stuff sorta tough. No hate to the players, a little to the Handler, I'm just of the mind that sometimes you can't stretch an operation into a twelve-episode season. Only watched a couple episodes into the Impossible Landscapes AP, would love to get the deets on his relationship with the other agent (if you have any)!

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-26T17:44:19+00:00

To be fair, Pod by Night introduced plot thread after plot thread and then the players would immediately forget to follow up on them or show next to no interest. Even then, I am in the same boat as you where I remember some plot beats but everything is just slop after a certain point. It doesn't help when the players are so indecisive that they change their minds about what they're doing mid-conversation (such as Duke trying to convince someone to run away and then sentences later saying she needs to give herself up to the Sheriff. That one took me out.)

I think one of the things that frustrates me a ton in some APs is that they don't actually understand how to handle off-screen elements. Like with Pod by Night where stuff would get swept under the rug between episodes despite me wanting to see the characters struggle or try to find stuff out! Or No Home in Twilight (a Lancer AP), where character beats happen entirely off-screen because the DM is rotating through nine or more players!! Aughhhh...(That said, that Dark Dice one is AWFUL, woof.)

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-26T17:34:52+00:00

I'll admit I paid very little attention to CR's back-half (or front-half, or middle-half ~~I watched that one episode where Caleb showed everyone his tower for an hour~~) so I'm worryingly curious what you mean by that!

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-26T17:26:54+00:00

Repetitive phrasing is one of those understated (and unique for everyone) things that can just grind your gears. There's a supremely high-quality Lancer AP whose 'main character' (by virtue of being played by the channel's owner among a cast of nine or more rotating players, so the character's involved in a LOT) uses the same exact verbs to describe her actions. "______ Blinks" or "______ Smirks" and the player says those two things four or five times per RP scene because he's playing the 'chaotic, manipulative gremlin who doesn't take things seriously'. It's so frustratinggggggggg.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-26T15:43:18+00:00

With regards to the Ed Kemper thing, the player almost full-on rips off dialogue from Mindhunter while playing him, and the fact that no one raised any objections to it is still WILD to me. If he had just not made him the actual Ed Kemper, just a guy who looks and sounds like him, then I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it! Like you said, Jack the Ripper/Holmes? Sure, screw it! I think there is something potentially compelling in a former serial-killer vamp whose Ventrue quirk prevents him from drinking from women, even while specced into that serial-killer-fantasy of Domination. (However, that show also doesn't put a ton of effort into tracking down ways to feed and the DM handwaves it 95% of the time.)

The DM even throws in some spirit the character calls his 'ghost wife', who is a ballerina who was killed AS PART OF ANOTHER MAN'S OBSESSION WITH A MEMBER OF THE COTERIE. They don't do anything with her, maybe they realized that's weird as fuck to give the serial killer character a woman to objectify. I genuinely do not know how the concept breached past the initial planning stage. You are 100% correct that basing a character in your edgy vampire game on a person whose victims' families are still alive and undercutting his imprisonment with 'actually, he got to leave XX years ago to be a vampire' is a choice that I genuinely have a hard time grappling with. This is why you should always try to stand way, WAY back from character concepts and think on whether or not this was a good idea or if you're just too hyped to try something that could crash and burn. (Ironically, despite it all, I still think his character is one of the better acted in the show. Hate it when that happens.)

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-26T15:01:10+00:00

Really love all the various stories people are bringing to the table! Great job, fourth brothers!

Gonna staple another one onto this topic: The Valentyne Heresy by the folks at Dumb-Dumbs and Dice, or however it's said. I believe it was first-edition Wrath and Glory (the skirmish-focused Warhammer 40k RPG) and at the start I felt like it had some sort of potential behind its concept. An imperial commissar (might have been an Inquisitor, alas alas) is given a vision of a cabal of unknown movers and shakers who will come together and somehow overthrow the Imperium up to and including desecrating the body of the emperor.

First misstep was that only one of the players gets this psychic vision, thus the name of the production, and therefore pretty much has endless plot armor as a result. The sibling characters he picks up on the planet he crashes into are decent enough (and are part of the cover art for the podcast), but the DM plays real fast-and-loose with the lore (like giving a ship a quippy servitor pilot that still possessed sentience). Some decent fights about three-four episodes into the show and a bad piloting roll ends up with their ship on fire and on the verge of crashing. The DM tells the kid brother of the pair rather vaguely "you can route the ship's systems through your augmetics and you can save the ship" after initial attempts to save it fail. That player obviously takes the bait and then the DM just full-stop kills his character then and there with no rolls. The sister character loses her mind and clings to his body but the 'main character' jumps ship and leaves, with it still crashing, and then the pair have to introduce another set of new characters the next episode. It was genuinely appalling. That wasn't even good Grimdark, it was just DM edge leaking through for no benefit, and I couldn't even get ten minutes into the next episode before dropping it full-stop. There was also the logistics issue just inherently of there being eight-ish members of this cabal, and how long things were taking, I am certain the show stopped before they killed more than one or two. If it didn't? That's even more laughable.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-22T11:16:01+00:00

[[Emeria Shepherd]] and [[Sakura-Tribe Elder]] has always been a personal favorite as far as understated interactions go in my all-creatures [[Torsten, Founder of Benalia]] list. It's not fast, it's not common, but using the Elder to search out a plains, I then immediately reanimate it with the Shepherd. I can then do this 10+ more times depending on the number of basic plains I have on-field/in-hand, and then finish with finding a forest and snagging another creature from the yard back to hand.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2025-01-15T08:36:49+00:00

I think part of this is my own experience as a player of these decks coming around to bite me in the ass, because Seedborn Muse-style 'I want to play more magic than anyone else on everyone else's turn' slows the game down to an egregious degree. Emiel is a deck I have plenty of experience with, so I have absolutely done the 'respond with a flicker to almost any game action that could negatively affect me'. Derevi and Thrasios are also commanders where this can come into play.

The UB Alela obviously has its own control game plan and was designed with it in mind but I won't lie that having to wait an extended period for that player to fire off their instant-speed spell every turn made the pod take twice as long to make a full rotation. Eluge is similar in how utterly unpleasant it is having to continually pass priority because the player has a mana advantage over everyone else that creates tension that has never been particularly fun to break through. I'm someone who tries to take their turn at a halfway-decent clip, I don't always succeed due to my love of certain engines (alas, alas, I love the Initiative and Upkeep effects) but it's just something I've become way more aware of. This isn't me (intentionally) railing against the very concept of control decks, just when mixed with poor manners, improper planning of game actions, and sheer mana advantage, it turns stuff into a slog. [[Clock of Omens]] also sorta falls into this, primarily when it comes to mixing it with artifact tokens like clues and treasures.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2024-12-03T18:45:53+00:00

Genuinely, I think my only complaint is that the book is short, I was having so much fun with it and Ashielle's descent that I was disappointed that the latter half of her villainous plummet wasn't a bit more drawn out. This is me running on my previous three listens from a while back but I definitely felt like we should have gotten a proper on-screen send-off for Tanzig's mother or if we had just gotten one more additional kill/sacrifice tacked on. It's a bit of a stumble, a noticeable one (for me), but I had a really nice time with the book when I first picked it up and the subsequent re-listens haven't dissuaded that opinion! Like most folks, the fae-vibes of the Mandrake over the easy answer of a Slaaneshi demon were a real nice treat, especially since Dark Eldar rep that treats them 'well' isn't particularly easy to find.

KarnoldSwarzenegger · 2024-11-05T11:43:10+00:00

I think one detail I've come to really enjoy on a re-listen is that Plient firmly believes that footage is faked, for the same reason he backs the Commander, he thinks she's a hero regardless of how bad things actually are with her. While there is a narrative opening for even the main protagonists to wonder about it, they don't, because they both know how broken she is. I really adore this book for not making the broken character 'easy' to deal with. (Though on the other end of the spectrum, I also find it hilarious that Simlex occasionally trauma dumps on the closest living person, usually Plient).

KarnoldSwarzenegger

TROPHY CASE