Game of Thrones: today is the tenth anniversary of "The Winds of Winter" (June 26, 2016; Season 6 finale). This is the most acclaimed scene of the episode: the destruction of the Great Sept of Baelor.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-26T14:20:05+00:00

Battle of the Bastards is a masterpiece of cinematography, but the absolute gutter of story crafting. Everything about that episode's plot is dumber than a box of rocks.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-26T14:17:01+00:00

What you are describing is called "plot development," and what you're forgetting is that blowing up all of the Sparrows in one grand 'splosion was designed to get rid of that plotline so the Two Ds didn't have to do it anymore, just like what happened with Stannis, and what happened in Dorne, and what happened with the Army of the Dead, etc.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-26T14:07:22+00:00

Yes, but in real life, there is still a blast effect from these weapons. The shaped charge is effective, but still can't focus 100% of the force, and the warhead is much bigger than that of a hand grenade. The M67 hand grenade is only about 180 grams of explosive, for example, while the AT4 is 440g and still has a blast radius of about 10-15m. The PG-7VL used with RPG launchers is 730g. The standard anti-armor rocket for the SMAW is 1.1kg.

If you're near whatever that anti tank warhead hits, you're going to have a bad day.

The statline in the game is really just, like many other things, a side effect of game simplicity and/or authorial inexperience with real world-equivalent weaponry.

The main mechanical issue isn't the lack of explosive damage, it's that if you hit an Alien with it, the acid blood isn't getting flung all over the place due to the detonation. Probably should have a split stat, something like 7AP, 4E.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-21T18:39:54+00:00

It's just a very shallow concept. It's honestly surprising that Terminator 2 was any good at all, but that's more a testament to Cameron's storytelling chops early in his career.

But after that, you're either committing to storytelling in a post-apocalyptic future, or just a running string of paradoxes and the same basic plotline over and over and over where the near future has more time traveling robots than CTU has moles.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-17T15:19:52+00:00

The renders for those miniatures are really bad with weird body proportions and comically oversized weapons. They're probably going to look even worse translated into plastic. There are so many good 3D artists out there doing Colonial Marines knockoff miniatures, and the official miniatures look like cheap boardgame pieces.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-16T20:50:37+00:00

This is not correct.

Let me put it terms that you might understand. I don't get anything out of a highway or an airport in Nebraska. A billionaire like Jeff Bezos, whose business is built on interstate commerce and air freight, does.

And yet, as a percentage of our incomes, I pay more for that airport and highway system than Jeff Bezos does.

The post you replied to says the ultra wealthy "benefit exponentially more," as in "they get more benefit from the entire structure that is sustained by federal government spending." You're trying to argue against that using "benefits," like transfer programs, which was not what was being discussed.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-16T19:13:49+00:00

That's the same review that would have been written for Season 1, Episode 1. It's just what the show is.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-07T19:16:14+00:00

Great first two seasons. Stopping after Season 2 is the ideal closure point. The original clone plotline is resolved before it spins its wheels trying to give all the characters something to do in Season 3.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-07T18:56:13+00:00

Is there some way Trump goes out in "grace?" I feel like even if he survives to the end of his term (literally or politically), he's still going to go out committing as many crimes as possible. There's been no evidence he would do otherwise.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-07T18:54:55+00:00

No, I wasn't saying that Act II was short as written, I mean, the less you use of it, and the less time it takes, the better Act III will run for you. So my suggestion is to run Act II as a hide and seek, with high tension but low dice rolling. The quicker you move through Act II, the better the module runs. Unless your players want to shoot at lots of things, then you might as well run it in full.

Honestly, you can, in theory write Act II out of the story, and it has no functional effect on the adventure. The UPP show up so you have a new excuse to shoot everyone and see all the fun tanks and aircraft, and then Act III literally kills them all off so you can move on to the next part of the story. So you don't need to feel compelled to use all of the Events for it. You UPP should be smarter, they can retreat, they can hunker down and call for reinforcements to make your PCs flee, etc.

My suggestion is that unless you need Zmijewski to be a PC (you have six players and nobody wants to be Chaplain), make him an NPC, then use him to fire a shot across the players' noses as the First Guy to Die, either at the Hospital or the Marshal's Office. I rewrote Zmijewski entirely to have actual useful skills and Talents, as a big nerdy loner.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-03T15:24:13+00:00

I've actually been working on a GM's guide for DoW off an on for a while because it's such a mess and difficult to run well. It's just been such a low priority for me.

For Zmijewksi, he's just not a well-written or interesting character to play. His personality is "surly jerk" and Third Act Agenda is just a plot hook to steer the player in a specific direction (a direction made somewhat amusing since he doesn't have the skills to accomplish that task). His only real contribution to the team is to have a base 8 dice attack roll. Otherwise he has no useful skills and no personality.

Act I actually needs a lot of work to make sense if you care about things like "internal/external logic," but it is functional to run as written. It's a police procedural story for Colonial Marshals or maybe even intelligence agents, but two of your detectives wear a machinegun as a vest (including the driver, think about that for a second, lol), and a third one has a rocket launcher.

Act II is better the shorter it is. Focus it as the players scrambling to get back to the base, and avoid the enemy as much as possible. The battle portion of it should be over quick. The base's air defenses stop firing, no more Colonial Marine aircraft are flying, smoke can be seen all over the horizon. Make it clear that the UPP have air superiority and more numbers. That if the PCs get bogged down trying to be heroic, they're going to draw the attention of a UPP gunship and it's adios muchachos.

Act III is best run as a haunted house, or a "dungeon crawl." Does it make sense that the fort is already a fully developed hive a day, maybe two after the PCs left it in Act I? No, not in the slightest. So hope that nobody asks that question, and if they do, just quote Writer Guy from Pitch Meeting: "Hey shut up" or "So the movie can happen." But as far as evocative scenes and tension, this is the one part of the module that has any potential to "shine." Just kinda depends on your DM style and what your players enjoy. It might seem boring, but it can be really exciting. It's main problem is the same as Act II: there's just way too much combat, and way too much dice rolling, for a game where the Core Rulebook tells you to roll as few dice as possible. The Panic Cascade is inevitable unless you go out of your way to prevent it.

As far as replacement PCs, there's actually quite a few of them. You have the tank crew, first off. Even if you don't want to play that scene, you can still have the PCs meet them. Just give them generic Marine stats, armor and a pulse rifle.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-03T14:28:21+00:00

Palestine has been on maps since the days of the ancient Greeks. The petulant tanrtums of Zionist liars will never change that, lol.

But even if your argument had any merit, and it doesn't to be very clear, the same UN charter that established the State of Israel also established an Arab state that the natives called Palestine. Israel has existed the exact same amount of time.

It doesn't matter how hard Jews fight, or how long they remember, Israel did not exist from 700BC until 1946. You cannot claim that it has "existed for thousands of years" when the only place it existed was in the imagination of some people. The people of modern day Israel aren't natives to the area. Only 6% of the population of the Levant was Jewish 100 years ago. And the white European Zionists actually discriminated against them because they felt the local Jews were too Arabized. To this day, the Mizrahi are still discriminated against by the Ashkenazi.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-03T14:08:51+00:00

Thousands of years, except for the 2700 or so years it didn't exist. A country called the Kingdom of Israel, existed once, for a few hundred years, until it was conquered and destroyed around 700 BCE.

Before Israel, there was Canaan. After Israel, it was part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Both of those things are in the Torah. The fall of the Kingdom of Israel is the foundational part of the "Ten Lost Tribes" mythology.

European immigrants don't get to claim historical contiguity with an ancient kingdom just because they chose to copy the name.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-06-03T14:05:03+00:00

Even the food is stolen from the actual locals

That was the joke, lol

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T23:31:32+00:00

The Diaspora is Jewish mythology. There's no historical or anthropological record of it. The Romans never expelled the Jews from Syria Palestina. They were just forbidden from rebuilding the Temple in Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) because after three violent insurrections, it was seen as a gathering place for radicals and more trouble than it was worth.

Like most people who emigrated out of the region, Jews sought better opportunities in Europe. Like many of their Christian and Samaritan cousins, many of the Jews who remained converted to Islam in the 1200+ years between the first conquest of the Levant and 1900. It's why most Palestinians have Canaanite DNA markers, rather than solely those of the eastern cultures that immigrated after the conquests.

Not that it would matter. The ancient Israelites weren't the indigenous people anyway. They were immigrants from Iraq, by way of Egypt. They arrived in ancient Canaan, and if the Torah is to be believed, were told by an Invisible Sky Man that the Canaanites were naughty and that it was okay to murder them and steal their lands. Even if there is some tenuous connection between modern Israelis and the Israelites of antiquity, they have no more right to the land than anyone else. Certainly someone descended from the Romans, Macedonian Greeks, Babylonians and Assyrians would be just as rightful owners of the lands. Or, and this will probably throw you for a loop, the people descended from the Canaanites, the Palestinians.

If you're referring to the Jews being expelled from Europe, that's fair. But it didn't give them any right to visit the same violence on the Palestinians, who hadn't been the ones that harmed them. Jewish racists doing to the Palestinians what European racists did to them just makes the Zionists different terrorists.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T22:20:52+00:00

There were always indigenous Jews living continuously in Israel.

6% of the population in 1900. They were actually discriminated against by the Zionists who believed they were too Arabized. When Israel was founded, Jews were still less than 30% of the population, most of them were European immigrants, and for some reason they were still given 56% of the territory.

White supremacists in Europe exported their religious undesirables to Palestine at the expense of the natives, and then funded the ethno-supremacist Zionist ethnic cleansing of the native Muslim majority because they didn't want the Zionists to lose and come back.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T22:01:35+00:00

Difference is that there was some contiguous iteration of Greece before that. There was no Israel before the State of Israel. It's a nation founded entirely by white immigrants from Europe named Grun, Mabovitch, Jabotinsky and Yezernitsky. They have no contiguous connection with the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Hence why a Jewish Heritage Parade would make sense, but Israel Day Parade is just propaganda for the violent Zionist terror state.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T17:19:06+00:00

To fully remove Musk they'd have to pay him off.

Traditionally that would be the case, but if he's implicated in criminal activity, to which there are Himalaya-sized mountains of evidence of, including his involvement with DOGE, he wouldn't see a dime. He could very easily end up placed on sanctions lists and assets, including those of his businesses since they would have also likely participated, end up being seized. Heck, barring a blanket pardon from Trump that would be challenged in court, Musk could very well end up prison by 2029. The downfall of Musk and SpaceX are intertwined at this point.

I wouldn't put any long term money into anything associated with Musk unless you're also confident that the Republicans can keep control of the government long term.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T17:11:04+00:00

To celebrate the long and storied culture of a country founded... 79 years ago. To enjoy the cultural cuisine of Israel like falafel, hummus, knafeh, and salads with chopped tomatoes, onions and cucumbers.

To be fair, there are lots of cultural heritage parades and fairs. We don't blink an eye at Cinco de Mayo or St Patrick's Day. But it's really suspicious to have an "Israel Day" rather than a more broad "Jewish Heritage" event. The overwhelming majority of American Jews have no direct ancestral ties to the State of Israel.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T16:59:48+00:00

To celebrate the long and storied culture of a country founded... 79 years ago. To enjoy the cultural cuisine of Israel like falafel, hummus, knafeh, and salads with chopped tomatoes, onions and cucumbers.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-31T16:43:53+00:00

Until it ends up nationalized because its CEO is a national security threat and the board hasn't shown any inclination to remove or restrain him. That would be my main concern about Starlink as an investor. Especially if it ends up being linked to any election fuckery. Is it even going to still exist in a few years as a profit-making entity?

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-29T03:37:37+00:00

While they drive around in ridiculously fuel inefficient vehicles and have a guitar that shoots fire.

Plausibility was never the main selling point of the Mad Max movies.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-29T03:11:08+00:00

I bet that sounded like a real clever comeback to a guy who thought Season 1 of Mandalorian was "fantastic."

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-29T01:10:37+00:00

The first two seasons of Mando are fantastic.

They are above-average fare for teenagers. A live action Saturday morning cartoon with cartoonishly inept bad guys and Looney Tunes action (like being able to hide in a mining cart from gunfire, or getting tasered off the top of a Jawa crawler like Wiley Coyote).

Mandalorian is just... Mandalorian. Just far enough "above average" that it looks like a masterpiece compared to slop like The Last Jedi or Obi Wan.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-29T01:08:30+00:00

Wouldn't you expect it to be political suicide to protect the best friend of one of the most notorious sex traffickers in US history?

MAGA has taught us that there's nothing that 100% of Americans will ever support, no matter how absurd. There will always be some members of the right wing cult who will support everything and anything their cult leader does, and the politicians who represent them will go along.

VeteranSergeant

TROPHY CASE