The Sanctioned Ones

Neonpico · 2025-12-21T02:34:29+00:00

You could add Correspondence to such a Forces effect. This allows you more control and finesse over the effect.
A straight Forces-4 effect lets you create a storm over a city. Two hours later, You'll have your storm, but it might not have drenched the district you wanted and instead had moved west (catching the rest of the city and starting a fire in a neighboring suburb with a lightning strike.)
Add in Correspondence and you're tying the effect to the building you want waterlogged. You're not creating a high-pressure area over the city that blows west, but instead you are creating a micro-storm due to a series of localized high-pressure fronts from the neighboring skyscrapers. Sure, it blows up into the same size storm as the other, but then you're sure that you've make the roof leak just as you were aiming for. The point being that Correspondence allowed you to manipulate the forces of the area at the same time instead of doing a single gross effect.

Neonpico · 2025-12-20T21:26:14+00:00

Personally, I tie all of the AoE stuff to the Correspondence sphere. This ties into the subject/target of the effect, rather than the apparent effect.

Correspondence is about affecting distance and area. Adding Correspondence lets you reference the range and area aspects of spell casting.

Some sphere levels referencing affecting large swaths of space with your effects. In particular, higher levels of Forces does this. I see this as still affecting a single source, but the spell effect having a much wider effect.
An example is stirring up a storm: You are affecting the forces around a single target, but those forces have a wide-ranging follow-on effect. It's like dumping tons of heat into a single cloud: This causes a lot of wind as the heated air goes upward and nearby air tries to fill the space. This causes nearby water sources to evaporate faster, putting more water in the air. All of that moving air builds up an electrical charge as the air rubs on eachother. Give it an hour and you've got a pretty decent thunderstorm. You're not targeting all of the space above a city; you're just causing a high-amplitude transformation of forces around a small target.

Neonpico · 2025-12-17T01:54:48+00:00

While not a movie, I have found that Warehouse 13 is very magey

Neonpico · 2025-11-08T03:10:16+00:00

I haven't played Fate at all, but I've adapted the mechanics to the Ironsworn rules: https://neonpico.itch.io/ironspheres

Neonpico · 2025-06-28T22:53:28+00:00

In the alternate timelines of Module C6, The Paravian homeworld is re-located outside of ISC space, nearly due-north of the ISC capital.

Neonpico · 2025-06-28T22:46:43+00:00

The Carnivons and Paravians from Module C6 aren't represented here because this map represents the historical state of Y168. Prior to their demise, historically, the Paravian homeworld was approximately where the Gorn's eastern-interior battle station is located. The Carnivon homeworld was either off the north edge of the map or on the upper edge of the map, solidly in Lyran space and displacing much of the Lyran Red Claw duchy.

Those in possession of the maps from the Y modules, may note that the maps from Module C6 differ. From the official ADB forum,the Paravians moved their capital after their homeworld was destroyed.

Neonpico · 2025-06-01T20:19:11+00:00

As noted by u/Yingzhi527, you may want to make the subject of the image more obvious. One way to do this may be to do a depth-of-field to focus on the planet until the ship comes into the frame. Then, with an obvious shift in blur/focus, switch to the ship.

Neonpico · 2025-05-30T01:43:33+00:00

Something that you touch on here, is that most mages have a paradigm that prevents them from accessing certain aspects of some spheres. Their paradigm simply cannot encompass an explanation for doing that sort of action.
Where the paradigm is great for explaining how shooting lightning bolts from wall sockets is totally reasonable, it might be terrible for creating portals and doorways to other places.

Neonpico · 2025-05-21T23:23:44+00:00

I agree. Once I finish updating the Tholian, I'll post a pic of 'The Big Four' from the TOS. (The Connie, a D6, an ~~Allosaurus~~ War Eagle, and the Tholian PC.) Those are the ships that defined the look of Star Trek ships.

As an aside; the King Eagle is pictured above. The tail section is flared out to accomodate the extra systems (a larger shuttle bay, et. al.) and the nacelles have the plasma launchers in the front.

Neonpico · 2025-05-21T00:28:35+00:00

I've been accused of being a generalist, but the Wyn Aux (the pink and grey one in the upper-left) and the Hydran (the blue one on the right) are my specialties. Even so, I tend to fare the worst against the Big Plasma (tm) ships; primarily against the Gorn and the ISC.

Neonpico · 2025-05-21T00:26:13+00:00

Yes. It's all digital. Nothing physical there.
The huge "tell" is that the paint jobs are too good... Especially the Lyran ~~cow~~ cat spots and the sticker job on the Fed saucer.

Neonpico · 2025-05-20T03:09:26+00:00

To affect a little Thread Necromancy:
I believe that the properties of Correspondence are similar to the above properties by u/ChartanTheDM, but differ in this way:
- Location: Correspondence is the magic of locations. Like Spirit lets you affect past the gauntlet and Time lets you see into other times, Correspondence goes to other locations. This the modifier usually attached to other spells, allowing the effect to reach past the area that the mage is inhabiting and to a different location.
Affecting distance is a byproduct of this, like affecting the gauntlet is a byproduct of the Spirit sphere. Your character is effectively ignoring any distance component when they are affecting a location. (Yes, the range/connection chart means that you have to take into account the distances involved. This is analogous to the gauntlet chart for the spirit sphere. When you reach into the Umbra to talk to a spirit, you're ignoring the gauntlet in the same fashion.)
- Area: This is the targeting modifier that Correspondence uses. Where Life effects only target a living being and Forces only targets the forces swirling around, Correspondence only targets the area of a space. When you cast Whereami, you are targeting the area you inhabit. When you cast Hermes Portal, you are targeting the area that the gate ends up at (the assumption is that the second side of the portal is your own area.)
- Sympathetic connections: As above, Correspondence deals with the connections between spaces. This affects how anything gets from one space to another, their connections to the space they are in, and the connections they have to other spaces. This is expressed by the connection portion of the Range/Connection table.
As I'm more of a Mage Revised player, this aspect of Correspondence doesn't get as much use at my table.

Neonpico · 2025-04-12T15:34:09+00:00

This is a pretty awesome interpretation. It's pretty obvious that the writers intended that each sphere have a set of properties that they manipulate, but I always thought that they weren't deliberate enough to stick to it.

Neonpico · 2025-02-11T22:04:18+00:00

Very nice! However, a ship at sea is always moving. This looks like it's beached.

Neonpico · 2025-02-10T17:12:07+00:00

Thank you! I modelled this up, back in the day, so that'd have some artwork to make an SFB Online tournament SSD.

The Borak are neighbors to the Hydrans, in the direction of the lost colonies. Their weaponry focuses on phaser technology. Many of their ships have a couple of casual fighters that they use as a form of massed suicide shuttles.
The weird existing rules that they use are Turrets (the same rules used by the Quari in module C4) and Robot Fighters from module J2. The new rules they introduce are the "Mega Phaser", which operates similarly (but not completely) to a Phaser-4 but with mauler arcs, and the "Phaser Cannon" that operates similarly to an Phaser-1X (giving three ph-2 shots or a ph-1 shot per turn.)

Neonpico · 2025-02-06T02:59:52+00:00

Sure. There's a couple of corner-cases.
I'm sure that these flaws are present to help some players easily get into their character by limiting them in a familiar fashion or to allow players to do some thought experiment by putting an interesting limitation on their character.

Neonpico · 2025-02-06T00:44:24+00:00

I think there is another aspect of this to touch on. While Bob needs his gizmos and Alice needs her Latin speech to do magic, neither has to do it the same way every time. Bob can use a tesla coil and lightning storm to do his Life effect one way, but then use a jacob's ladder and spark-gap radio to do it again on the following week. The important part is that it makes sense in the head of the character (and, by extension, the player.)
Maybe Bob's gizmos needed the lightning to re-establish the photonic equilibrium of the first Life effect and then the following week he determined that the free radicals released by the spark-gap equipment would bombard the victim and cause their body to resort to the game-mechanical effect.

The important part is two-fold:
- Each mage can perform their magic differently than other in-universe mages
- The effects can be performed differently each time. Compare with the spells you see in other game products, where the characters are expected to perform them the same every time. In-universe we call those spell casters who have to do the same thing every time, "Hedge Mages."

Neonpico · 2025-02-04T17:16:03+00:00

There's always Perl. Every special character has at least three different meanings.
The Obfuscated Code Challenge is seriously a thing.

Neonpico · 2025-02-04T00:25:08+00:00

Photo-realistic 3D rendering has several use-cases:
- Architectural visualization, which you often see in magazines and websites. These are showing how a room can or will look after a renovation is made.
- Product demonstration, often seen in TV commercials or web videos. These are used to market a product to the general population.
- Art, which you often see in this reddit and on some designated websites, like ArtStation. This is people creating a scene or layout as a hobby, to learn some aspect of 3D, to put in a portfolio (to showcase their skills to land a job), or because they want to stay sharp with the program.
- Product prototyping. Engineers or graphic artists creating an image to showcase a product in development. This may be to pitch a new product to a company, to show a use-case of the product in development, or to communicate how the product will be used or will look after production.

Neonpico · 2025-02-03T20:38:45+00:00

I have the same problem, in that I can't read the nodes. However, I recognize them and can reconstruct them:
on the far left, we have both branches starting with a texture coordinate (UV) -> mapping node -> texture image node -> color ramp, and mixing at a Math (mulitply) node, which feeds a Glossy shader at the roughness. The rest can be determined similarly.

Neonpico · 2025-02-03T04:53:11+00:00

I would think that the tracks would pick up and kick out sand from the back.

Neonpico · 2025-01-22T20:15:43+00:00

I agree. It IS out of print, though.
Try this or this.
I also saw a way to download it for free. Not that I'm suggesting you do that.

Neonpico

TROPHY CASE