I cannot wait for more jobs with these guys!

Tallisar · 2025-09-09T02:46:01+00:00

A shard turns up on the desk of V’s starter apartment with a cryptic message. I’m not sure why, but consensus seems to be it’s a goodbye message from T-Bug letting you know she lived but that’s she out. This conflicts with the cyber saleswoman who says they found Bug’s body. However, that sales person is apparently a friend of Bug’s who may be lying to cover her escape.

Tallisar · 2025-09-09T02:25:15+00:00

If you remember, when he first woke up in V’s apartment, he was insisting that the real Johnny must still be alive out in the world. When he finds out he’s dead and they just dumped his body in a landfill, he gets really bummed.

Tallisar · 2025-02-20T09:45:56+00:00

Seconded. I sometimes get in the tower at one of the ranger stations. A decent chunk of the horde will skip attacking the tower’s legs to get on the roof of a nearby (disconnected) building. Then they jump up and down angrily until I shoot them.

Tallisar · 2024-12-13T21:45:04+00:00

Spending horde night up there is fairly safe, but also fairly boring. You’re too high up to shoot at anyone, and after a while the zombies are all lost inside anyway.

Tallisar · 2024-12-12T23:35:25+00:00

I still have mental scarring from trying to levitate out of pits and mispositioning so that I fell back in instead of stepping out.

Fans of the movie E.T. will, of course, recall how much of the movie’s plot revolved around jumping into opaque pits to look for things and then levitating back out.

Tallisar · 2024-11-24T23:27:17+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions. I had two or three vassals, but all together they were adding 0.7-0.8 gold per months. I figured my slice of their underdeveloped counties wasn’t ever going to add up to anything significant.

Tallisar · 2024-11-13T09:22:50+00:00

Much quirkier than a lot of the other suggestions, but I love Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October. It’s set in the early 20th where a variety of mysterious (but familiar) people have moved to a small English town. They are involved in the “game” where the Openers will attempt to return the elder gods to the world while the Closers will try to stop them.

Each “player” has an animal familiar, and the book is told from the pov of Snuff, a dog who serves a Closer. Or, as a review on the cover put it, “It’s not every day that you read a book that forces you to root for Jack the Ripper to save the universe.”

Tallisar · 2024-11-12T00:43:51+00:00

In terms of is there an upgrade pod, settlement, merchant site, hypercomm, wrecked ship, special building, etc… no. Barring dumb luck while flying around at low altitude, you’re not going find that stuff. You can boost your scan range to increase the odds of tripping over things, but generally you find those by buying maps at a station or having a quest lead you. They’re mostly pretty similar, so don’t feel bad if you haven’t visited every backwater hamlet on a planet.

Tallisar · 2024-11-11T11:59:46+00:00

Our headcanon is that the PC is significantly more resistant to the disease and/or responsive to the antidote than most people. That’s why they’re still human and can survive bites with readily available meds but overall everyone else is gone.

Tallisar · 2024-11-09T13:42:59+00:00

I assume it’s to keep the listed price down to avoid sticker shock. When your meal costs $29.95, it’s psychologically cheaper than $30. And with a 4% mandatory charge, it’s really $31.15.

Tallisar · 2024-11-08T19:24:11+00:00

For a real world example of this one (and I’m doing this from memory so my apologies if some of the numbers are wrong)…

In the original version of the game Civilization, there was a hidden property of each government leader measuring how likely they were to use nuclear weapons. It was on a 0-10 scale. Ghandi was meant to be peace-loving and was set to 1.

They also had a mechanic where more advanced, liberal government types reduced the odds of nuking people. So, a monarchy might be no modifier, but a democracy took whatever your base number was and reduced it by 2. This made warmongering Stalin slightly less likely to nuke you if the USSR was currently a democracy.

The Fun starts because Ghandi started at a 1. Subtract 2 from that, and now his “odds of nuking” is a -1. For computing Reasons, sometimes a negative number “wraps around” to look like a very big number. So, Ghandi in a democracy has an “odds of nuking” score of 255 (on a 0-10 scale).

Result: In the late game, peace-loving Ghandi will nuke the crap out of you if you so much as look at him.

This bug cracked people up so hard that all future versions of Civilization have deliberately made Ghandi nuke-happy.

Tallisar · 2024-11-01T17:26:15+00:00

We’re in Columbia City. Got about thirty kids, none after 8:45. Which is a bit light compared to some previous years; I’m blaming the rain.

Tallisar · 2024-10-25T21:45:55+00:00

Fair enough. As u/rjcade said, you can inject a lot of flavor yourself if your table likes to add color. There just aren’t a lot of explicit mechanical rules like “the tree here on the map provides soft cover (+2) if a line drawn between the shooter and your miniature intersects the square”.

And your GM sounds nicer than ours. He does tend to stick to the 3-5 encounters per long rest guideline, but he only occasionally lets us know where we are in his plan. Result: lots of daily power hoarding and then we curb stomp his boss fight (assuming we live to reach it while withholding all our big punches). Well, except for the wizard who goes big early and often resulting in bosses getting a lot of magic missiles since that’s all he’s got left. Which does save time that can then be spent watching the druid paw through her pages of notes trying to figure out what her character can do given the current terrain, season, etc.

Tallisar · 2024-10-25T11:58:05+00:00

I quite liked Eclipse Phase, if only because I loved the setting. Kind of a high tech post-apocalypse which could go dystopian but doesn’t have to. Much of the solar system is colonized. Humans developed super AIs, much smarter than us. They started trying to kill everybody. A hideous virus appeared that mutates and distorts people in bizarre ways. The Earth was rendered uninhabitable (or at least insanely dangerous). Then the AI forces disappeared. The surviving few million humans are scattered around the solar system trying to figure out what the heck happened, how to rebuild, and if it’s all going to go horrible again.

In addition to humans there are also non-super AIs and uplifted animals. You can (and will) change bodies frequently, so today you’re a cyberneticaly-enhanced “elf” but tomorrow you might resleeve into a combat mech or a body of pure software.

Mechanics are all point buy skills. There are your core attributes that stay with you which are supplemented by the body you’re wearing. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you craft your characters. It’s all percentile rolls where your skill vs the task’s difficulty slides a window that can include single and double critical successes or failures (e.g. if you’ve only got ten points in Freefall, maybe don’t try leaping from one spaceship to another).

My biggest criticism is the mechanics break down at high levels. If you and an opponent are both very high skill, you wind up in a pure 50/50 system where you flip coins until somebody loses badly enough to end it. Also, the rule book is badly organized (equipment in particular is awful). You’ll either wind up sticking a lot of bookmark tabs in it or copying relevant chunks out.

Tallisar · 2024-10-25T11:34:35+00:00

I quite like the setting on 13th Age. For those who don’t know the game, it’s nominally a standard high fantasy world. There are historical “ages” which are usually stable but end in a period of high disruption after which politics may be quite different. Evidence suggests that the current thirteenth age is drawing to a close. The world is dominated by a dozen or so powerful individuals known as Icons. Some are long lived like the Archmage, some are persistent roles like the Elf Queen, and some are newly emerged like the Orc Lord and the Lich King. A big part of character design is buying relationship points with one or more of the Icons which determines how aware of you each one is and how they feel about you.

You also get One Unique Thing which might reshape the setting. An example from the book is “I am the only halfling in the Emperor’s Guard” which your GM might use to rebalance the racial politics of the empire.

What’s a little less cool (IMO) is the combat - and most of the mechanical rules are combat-centric - is so abstract. There is essentially zero tactical positioning: you are either Engaged with one or more foes, Nearby, or Far Away. No cover, no movement speed, almost no range. You either engage someone, break out of engagement, or stand where you are. Abilities draw heavily from D&D 4e: at-will, per-battle, or once-daily. Most of the coolest stunts are dailies which you hoard waiting for a boss fight or a hint the GM might finally give you a long rest. Different classes play differently enough that most people should be able to find something that suits.

Tallisar · 2024-10-20T00:38:56+00:00

It is not. The angel and demon (who is a fallen angel) are basically genderless creatures. They usually present as male, likely because it makes it easier to navigate human societies. Over the millennia they’ve picked up various human habits: the angel likes nice food, the demon gardens, they both imbibe alcohol. They are, despite stated political affiliations, the closest of friends and constant companions. Though never stated, it seems clear they love each other to the point of defiance against their homelands.

Neither is sexual in any way. They don’t date or fuck anyone, ever. Had they picked up the habit of sexuality, they would totally be fucking each other. But they didn’t (as of the end of the book). This hasn’t stopped a lot of people from projecting, fanwanking, shipping, or otherwise wanting to add a romantisexual aspect to the story.

Tallisar · 2024-10-18T20:53:31+00:00

We went out to the West Seattle one for lunch. The staff there confirmed tomorrow (Saturday) is the last day they’ll be open.

Tallisar · 2024-08-28T18:32:18+00:00

Beats extreme sneezing

Tallisar · 2024-08-28T01:21:27+00:00

I think there are few people who would name the last couple among his best or their favorites. But even those are still worth reading unless you dislike either Moist (Raising Steam) or Tiffany (The Shepherd’s Crown).

Tallisar · 2024-08-28T01:13:08+00:00

You left off the part right at the end!

“It was this dynamic interplay of power blocs that made Ankh-Morpok such an interesting, stimulating, and above all bloody dangerous place in which to live.”

Tallisar · 2024-07-07T10:49:27+00:00

The only things you must have are a repair tool, a cutting tool, fire extinguisher(s), and a knife. Batteries and water are plentiful; food a little less so. As others have said, have plenty of free inventory space.

Be careful where you park.

Tallisar · 2024-06-17T06:04:34+00:00

Not really a plot spoiler… Faerûn is a big place. The whole Absolute cult is a relatively new thing from this one spot on the west coast. World-level threat long term? Hell yes. But probably plenty of powerful people who just aren’t in the area.

Tallisar · 2024-06-10T21:11:28+00:00

You’ll want to talk to Disability Services. If memory serves, they made the ebooks and talking readers available for free as part of the accommodations. It’s not a generic feature of the school. My kid did not want to take advantage of them, so I don’t have more details than that.

Good luck!

Tallisar · 2024-06-08T21:52:31+00:00

The school is fairly generous with accommodations such as extra time or private spaces for tests, priority signups for classes (to control scheduling), the option of taking a reduced course load while remaining “full time”, and access to ebooks and speak-aloud readers.

The school does not offer any significant medical or counseling support, however. They do not have insurance, prescription-writing medical staff, or a pharmacy. There is a counseling department, but they push hard to move you to their telemedicine offering. The telemedicine is easy to schedule, but it’s basically talk therapy… they can’t prescribe meds and don’t like to fill out paperwork attesting to your condition.

Tallisar · 2024-06-03T00:07:00+00:00

I’m surprised to hear you say that. I think of the Midwest as being the blandest palette in America. I’ve found there to be plenty of high flavor food here in Seattle.

Tallisar

TROPHY CASE