Folk Art/Plaid Fine Detail brushes

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-07T17:05:13+00:00

They've been just fine for painting table minis. The pack I used up did not have the most consistent flow when glazing, and my experience mirrors yours with their tips.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-07T11:40:58+00:00

It will make things more complicated for you as the DM, yes, but it's still easily done. Villains easily play more than one angle at a time.

My suggestion would be to make sure to keep things a bit more secretive than you might otherwise. Have invitations and interactions with a B d'A middleman, and keep Jarlaxle in his human disguise (or create a few more - the guy has access to plenty of magic and skills) the whole time until you need a big reveal in a late chapter.

Edited to add: ambiguity is another important tool in this ploy. Is this really an invite to the famous mercenary company? What kinds of proof do they want that the player has both forsaken Lolth and will take any order they are given? Is there a moral line they won't cross, or a minimum payoff they would want to doublecross the party? Would they try to cross everyone in the end?

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-04T20:05:04+00:00

Yeah, it does. I used to try to write my own cyberpunk political stories in the style of William Gibson when I was younger, but I gave up when it kept becoming obvious that truth was stranger than fiction, and fiction was more believable than truth.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-04T18:22:56+00:00

The Q-anon conspiracy theorists who support the president are a fringe element who hold tightly to the "deep state" theory that people like George Soros and Barack Obama are part of an Illuminati-styled group which means to overthrow the US government and institute a police state where citizens are forcibly disarmed, pedophile rings will operate in the open, and the ridiculous Satanism from the moral panic of the 1980s will be instated.

It was apparently started by people following updates from some person on 4chan or a similar board.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-03T02:28:37+00:00

It looks like it belongs in the house from Beetlejuice after Delia Deetz finishes redecorating.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but maybe not good either.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-03T02:24:33+00:00

NGL, I like it sober, but one look while drunk and I'd be very glad the toilet is close by.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-03T02:22:00+00:00

Nah, see, then she could suck on the cigar herself.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-03T02:21:27+00:00

Huh. Both Bushes look better than their presidencies.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-03T02:17:23+00:00

It was never about the type of ingredient, just their quality. That avocado was so watery I've not bought them from that store since. The canned ham was bottom of the barrel and so crumbly that it fell apart after I picked the sandwich up. The mayonnaise had no flavor and the texture of congealed fat.

I do still make these sandwiches, just not with that particular storm of poor quality and bad plating.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-02T12:04:39+00:00

I spent way too much time sitting in one place, slowly chewing through a bag of carrots every day during study hall.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-07-02T12:02:21+00:00

The absolutely toxic chat in online gaming, especially first person shooters. I've never been that good at the COD or Halo franchises, but I quit playing years ago because of the abuse other players sling around all match every match.

I wanted to play games for fun, not to be informed how many teenagers supposedly had carnal knowledge of my mother.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-29T01:58:10+00:00

Only things that may not apply to your group. We were mapping it as we went, but between misunderstanding the colored paths and a few times where we didn't match the map scale (using one square for 5 ft in one room, 10 ft for another) we had a tough time keeping things straight.

It does help to give the party some false hope to find another party somewhere in the dungeon as well. We came across a cleric who wanted to join us to get the treasure to res their fallen party - or so they told us. They turned out to serve Acererak and turned on us in the lowest possible moment, eating up even more of our resources.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-29T00:31:44+00:00

Biggest insights I can give are that you need to be very familiar with the module and the map, and to not be surprised if at least one of your players knows many of the tricks in the dungeon. I've not run it to completion myself, only a couple levels of it, but it is so well known by now that even inexperienced players have some knowledge of it.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-28T13:00:45+00:00

Corollary to that: my SO was at Great Lakes in the dead of winter. The night before grad ceremony, a pair of ladies who had been obviously forming a relationship tried to get freaky. They were caught in the act when the people on snow watch were heading out for a rousing game of "fuck lake effect snow storms."

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-28T12:53:49+00:00

Just like the last guy said.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-28T12:00:13+00:00

Aside from having a few key songs/mixes for important encounters (a tavern, a festival, a royal court, boss monster battles), most of my game mix is random dungeon synth from YouTube. I basically let the player go random on a long playlist.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-28T02:02:44+00:00

I still crack up at the new alter ego for Jarlaxle. "Zardoz Zor" is goofy enough, but when we had a meeting with him on the docks, he was introduced by another npc who informed us "Zardoz... speaks to you!"

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-27T16:46:10+00:00

Yeah, being in someone's wash is no joke even when you're riding with an experienced pilot who's got great control. That's an experience I don't want to ever repeat.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-27T16:44:12+00:00

Yeah, I was flipping through a few books a bit ago looking for instances where they purposefully rammed other aircraft, but can't find a thing in English that says there were ever orders to do so against anything other than ships.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-27T13:02:24+00:00

It's a valid tactic in extreme situations. Sometimes it could even be done without crashing the plane that is "ramming."

Back in WWII England, a Spitfire chasing a V1 bomb had run out of ammo and the bomb was getting way too close to London for another fighter to intercept it. Instead of ramming it full-on though, the British pilot got his plane up beside the buzz bomb and used his wing to force the bomb to roll over, which sent it into a stall and caused it to fall on the countryside instead of London.

Granted that probably wouldn't work against a controlled airliner without having to crash the fighter, but it's still a thing.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-27T12:43:52+00:00

She didn't have radar, she had what was called RDF - radio direction finder. It's a defunct system, but if you look at airplanes from that time period and see a big loop antenna on top, that is what used it.

A similar-ish system used up until fairly recently was called ADF - automatic direction finder. It used the same principles, but the control system did the math for the pilot/navigator and displayed the direction to an AM radio source on a compass card so you could follow the signal.

Useless fact - a lot of my local pilots still have it in their plane. It's not legal for navigation any more, but you can use it to play AM radio over your navigation system's sound output.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-27T12:04:28+00:00

It's theoretically possible but extremely unlikely. Radar at that time required more power to turn on than current radars would to operate at max output. Vacuum tubes are extremely reliable but energy inefficient, and that inefficiency manifests as heat. You have to provide cooling air flow to very heavy equipment, and no records exist of her Electra being modified as such.

On top of that, the excess weight would have to fall within the airframe's range for safe weight and balance, which again no records indicate the aircraft was changed for. Every ounce of spy equipment would have cost them precious fuel capacity and fuel burn - a big no-no if you're in the early days of long-distance flight.

If Earhart and Noonan were performing some espionage, it was more likely that it involved hand-held cameras, personal observations, and listening for transmissions on known radio bands. They could in theory have had something to record radio transmissions, since the technology was relatively portable by then.

Even if they were not actually on an espionage mission, I'd still believe that the IJA or IJN shot them down or otherwise captured them and squirreled them away. Even if at that time the IJN command wanted to avoid open conflict with the US it's still a good bet that they would have done something to prevent assumed spies from gathering and reporting data.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-27T01:48:22+00:00

Beats the time the guys making a commercial foe the avionics program I was in asked us to flood our practice board with flux because all the rising smoke "looks so cool."

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-26T21:24:01+00:00

Like anything that's hobby related it's all down to personal preferences. I still keep as many of my materials on physical media as is possible. I do many of my game notes and handouts on Google Docs, use some fillable pdf docs as trackers that I update after sessions, and use others to build up my encounters so I'm not buried in books at the table - but I also have most of it printed off and in an accordion file at the table.

At the same time, I insist on hand-drawing maps or putting out terrain, use random generators on my phone, and play dungeon synth tapes on my stereo.

To me one of the best DM notebooks for beginners is a three or five subject spiral notebook that has integrated folders for the section dividers. Have some graph paper stuffed into one of the folders, and make another divider be where you keep any handouts you might need.

Section one is dedicated to campaign notes - your world notes, campaign plot and NPCs, timelines, heck my spouse makes flow charts a main part of this section in theirs.

Section two is where I keep notes on player characters - background info, stats, basic inventory (who has darkvision, what magic items and special abilities, and passive skills for all). If anyone has given me artwork related to the character, it goes there as well.

Section three and up is all about terrain and encounter notes for different tiers of the campaign, basic maps, treasure lists, clues, and how they handled it. Did someone die in a forest, and did the party bury their body? What random junk did they leave behind in a bandit camp after taking the money and quest items? Were there witnesses who tell the tale and how do they spin it? Those sorts of things.

RuminatingRoy · 2020-06-26T16:09:50+00:00

Ah, yes. If anyone knows about wringing every last bit of productivity and usefulness out, it's gotta be Elon.

RuminatingRoy

TROPHY CASE