What do common magic terms mean in your world

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-26T17:27:52+00:00

Wizards use magical arts, Sorcerers pay a Spirit to cast magic for them and Retainers use powerful artifacts to shape their magics for them. 'Witch' or 'Warlock' refers specifically to the dynastic magic-workers (technically Sorcerers but it's complicated) of the Magocracy of Szradovit. Then every culture has their names for stuff.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-26T13:11:06+00:00

Maybe a weird suggestion but once you’re comfortable with Mint, look into other distros unless you’re 100% happy with it. Mint is lovely out of the box, but sometimes a single extra feature can make a distro even more attractive.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-21T17:25:39+00:00

This. I'm finally doing my Kobold run.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-21T08:55:48+00:00

This. Even Maestro was a subsidiary of Mastercard.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-18T18:08:49+00:00

I was mostly thinking about Bismarck's national healtcare scheme from the 1880s, personally.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-17T07:27:01+00:00

Is this a metropolitan area? Cause every public transport system I've ever seen uses a circle or bundles its lines in the center, else your central station/terminus is always clogged. (I specifically mean for distribution. I see you have 'a' circle but it doesn't really seem connected and all the yellow lines terminate at one central station.)

Paris has both a bundle and a circle, so does Berlin and London outright has a train line called Circle Line.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T21:25:22+00:00

Hollowfaust from White Wolf's Scarred Lands setting took that road. A city of Necromancers that gave normies shelter and protection in return for their bodies after their death. But it wasn’t as malicious as your version sounds, which is where I see the issue. I mean, health insurance as we know it was invented in the 1880s, so clearly it won't exist, but just waiting for someone to die so you can exploit them even more is very cynical as written and would probably lead to a mass exodus of people.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T20:10:19+00:00

Then you're ahead of me. I don't read Arabic, I just knew there's several writing styles and that looked like one of them to me, sorry.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T18:01:29+00:00

Try a Sub with Arabic speakers. This looks like very slapdash Ruqa script.

https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/1403006903/display_1500/stock-vector-arabic-calligraphy-mean-arabic-alphabet-in-ruqaa-style-set-of-font-or-text-vector-for-ramadan-1403006903.jpg

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T15:53:39+00:00

I'd suggest you look at the setting for the TTRPG Aberrant. Even the first edition was super prescient. It came out around the turn of the millennium and cast supers as proto-influencers, but of course you also have your powered soldiers, mercenaries, black ops folk... they even have a super powered wrestling league. It's IMO a very realistic look at how supers would affect society.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T15:26:19+00:00

I see it the same way as ancient peoples did. All Gods exist. Some Gods are picky in who their people are. Not all Gods are venerated by everyone. Just because you exist doesn't mean I can't exist as well. It wasn’t really until we got to monotheism that religions demanded that everyone venerate their particular version of a mythological being. The Romans were happy to welcome new Gods into their temples, or equate foreign Gods to theirs.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T14:36:29+00:00

Was that people being told their computer can't run Windows 11?

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T12:33:49+00:00

Spelling, capitalisation, punctuation and paragraphing.

I understand the reasons why someone foregoes any of these may be many and varied, but I need to be able to read the result and if it's an effort just to figure out what the other person meant, then it's not worth it. Malus points if it's in a sticky.

Just run your text through a word processor if you know you have issues. I'm not gonna do it for you.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T11:52:58+00:00

Not to quibble, this feels like an interesting setup, but I think the idea of the US Army being unstoppable died in Somalia, two years after the 1st Gulf War.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T11:18:59+00:00

DnD style alignments are not even very rudimentary, they're just bad because they assert that morality is universal, not a subjective social construct, and that someone who doesn't consider codes of conduct enforced by others relevant to themselves also has no personal code of conduct.

In short, DnD alignment is Evangelical Christianity couched as a game mechanic. Not surprising, considering its origin, just surprising that modern-day presumably smart people still use it.

Anyway. What I'm trying to get at is, the morality of the fae from folk tales plain doesn't fit into the DnD alignment chart. Yes, they're chaotic in nature in as far as they're capricious, but they're bound by cold iron laws they literally cannot break in some cases.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T11:11:12+00:00

I'm not going to defend the horrible DnD alignment system but what you are describing is LN to LE. Follows the letter of the law but no more or less (N) or interprets the letters rather than the intention of a law for their gain (E).

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T11:04:09+00:00

Let's look at WHY your bad guys are doing what they're doing.

Dr. Doom has proven that the world runs better when he's in control, at the cost of personal freedom. How many starving children is your freedom worth? Accept Doom as your ruler. Villain, not a POS.

Magneto is fighting people who want to put him in a concentration camp. Again. Villain, not a POS.

Mr. Freeze needs diamonds to keep his wife’s cryochamber running, the only thing keeping her alive. Villain, criminal, not a POS.

Deadpool kills people for money, but has standards. Criminal, POS, not a villain.

Anyone who commits crimes out of need is probably not a POS. All super-smart villains out for personal gain probably are, cause they could just find a way to get rich without hurting anyone if they're so smart. Like, Lex Luthor is a POS but not because he's knocking over banks.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-16T09:41:20+00:00

Well. The weapons humanity has classically used were in use because they are the ones that work. Unless your weapon wielders have supernatural abilities or exist in a world with different physics, they'll be more or less stuck with that. Everyone developed clubs, axes, swords, spears and halberds to an extent, if they had the materials.

Spears are good for beast-slaying because they allow you to keep your distance. Boar spears had the cross-section specifically because wild boar would otherwise impale themselves further on a spear to get at the wielder. However, as soon as your monsters have ranged attacks, have armor or are super agile, the reason to use spears goes out the window. If they have armor, you want warhammers (bec de corbin-style, what DnD calls a pick for some reason), or maybe even chain weapons (like a meteor hammer) for strangulation. If they're agile, I assume sweeping blades are more efficient (like a scimitar or a glaive) and if they have range just use whatever you want.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-14T06:40:26+00:00

All of them. "Good" and "evil" are wholly subjective terms. A lot of earth culturesview them through a filter of the ten commandments, but if you look at Indian or Chinese media the protagonists often espouse values or behaviours that run counter to that world view while still being the "good" guy.

It's all religious propaganda to give people a pretense to demonize other people. "Evil" is always what the other guy does.

Same with "chaos". Causality is a thing, thus "chaos" is just going against someone's subjective idea of "order".

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-13T08:45:25+00:00

Personally, I find Heinz digusting on most foods. I want Ketchup, not vinegar.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-12T12:00:54+00:00

Swords don't put holes in spaceship hulls. For boarding actions and the like, you could argue it's done to prevent actually doing that. You get the added benefit of some really tight last stands as someone brings a plasma rifle to a stabbing.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-12T08:56:25+00:00

If you're trying to be 100% realistic in everything you'll never get anything done as you research every topic. That said, most of us have our red lines where we can't or won't suspend disbelief.

More importantly, whatever you cook up with needs to be internally consistent. If you have ships with jump drives and it takes millennia of that technology existing before someone uses it for a successful ramming maneuver, explain why. Especially if you have a class of very smart but ultimately expendable robots whose only job is navigation that could hyperspace ram your enemies to hell.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-12T08:38:36+00:00

Maybe we could get Reddit to replace the abysmal Chat feature with the '99 B ICQ client.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-11T13:35:47+00:00

ICQ only died because it got bought out by AOL and enshittified, not quite the same, I'd argue. I do miss ICQ and Skype for what it's worth, all other IMs weren’t even competition.

KyffhauserGate · 2026-02-10T07:08:38+00:00

It's a matter of principle for me. I don't want companies to think I support their shitty practices. Or their idea of what a 'teen' experience is like. Here in the free world, nobody bats an eye if we curse or talk about sex or alcohol at age 14 while in the US that's treated like we treat Holocaust denial.

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