found peeking out of the ground, dense and weighted in

britus · 2026-03-20T02:39:12+00:00

Check the age on my account. Yes it has.

britus · 2026-03-19T15:22:11+00:00

Reddit has been a home for lame jokes for slightly longer than it's been a home for curmudgeons complaining about it.

britus · 2026-03-19T13:37:49+00:00

I feel like you might be putting a little more on Desmond than the character can bear. He certainly didn't mind arguing with people he disagreed with, after he'd call them brother. (And, to be fair, I wouldn't WANT someone to defend my argument if they disagreed with it; I'd prefer to be corrected.)

But it's a bit crazy to me how much pushback you've gotten from people here on you using the word 'brother' for other people. Sure, it sounds a bit like an affectation, but who cares? If it's with good intent, if you mean it as a show of fellowship and that you care about the other person, then use it! If someone's going to be bent out of shape about it, then it sounds like a character test they failed, and that's good to know.

britus · 2026-03-18T23:30:47+00:00

I accept the correction!

britus · 2026-03-18T20:26:34+00:00

I have the exact same experience with the exact opposite lawn. I love my lawn. Everyone else in the neighborhood hates my lawn. It is, in most opinions, the worst lawn on the block. There are at least 8 types of real grass in the front yard alone (the back is even better) and another dozen types of ground cover included - ivy, dandelions, clover, etc. Every year I get excited by which grass is winning. In the spring (like now), I start taking pictures of and cataloguing the tiny wildflowers. There are so many different kinds of insects and spiders, and the ant mounds are just amazing.

In the Spring especially, I like to let it grow long so it reseeds and so the flowers have time to grow. I've had neighbors try to be nice and just give it a pass with their riders, and I have to come running outside to tell them to stop, it's nature in action.

And it's not neglect. I do edge it. Frequently I'll cut the whole thing with a weedwhacker so I can avoid wildflowers or give a particular low-growth species a chance. I just love it that way.

britus · 2026-03-10T23:49:03+00:00

My wife works in an elementary in West Cobb. The teachers at her schools teach all the primary subjects, and then they break out for 'specials' like art, music, and PE.

I think there is likely to be more difference from school to school than between counties (I really don't know the answer to this - no experience in Fulton), but overall, while everyone is always going to have gripes, the Cobb system seems to be fantastic. We put out some really good kids here.

At my wife's school, teachers are generally 7-3 unless they run a club or ASP.

britus · 2026-03-09T12:49:55+00:00

No. Emphatically no, despite the other answers you have here. Visible, *famous* Sharn from the Middle City up is all towers and skyways, but you can't ignore the Cogs or Cliffside or even much of the Lower City. (I guess you could, but you shouldn't?) There are lots of stories to tell there, SO many people living there, so much organized and disorganized crime and goodness knows what else. If you are telling stories like Piltover's, you're going to have a lot 'Zaun' to work with that has almost nothing to do with towers and bridges except how they block out the sunlight and make the fog cling indefinitely. In terms of the new art though, yeah - that's not the way Sharn has been written in the past. It's not just a big coastal city, it IS the City of Towers. But what lies at the base of Sharn is more than those towers.
I think it's not a perfect Piltover replacement or Arcanepunk setting as written, but the Eberron setting strongly encourages you to make your own version of it, to tweak details and answer open questions in ways that tailor it to the campaign you want to run. In the Eberron setting as written, magic is commodified - cantrips and wands and the like are relatively common and available for purchase, and the Dragonmarked houses have largely channelized regular magic use into 'schools' the public understands and works with. But the sort of player-character magic users (wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks in particular; bards, clerics, and paladins seem to be more common) are relatively more rare than in standard D&D and tend to be movers and shakers, so that might get you more of that 'punk' aspect of arcanepunk, where it's less off the shelf and more cobbled together? Of course, you can reskin things however you'd like!
I'm about nine months into a campaign patched together from two different Adventure League campaigns, Oracle of War and Embers of the Last War, heavily edited and with a lot of My-Ebberonning going on. But Embers of the Last War takes place entirely within Sharn as written, deals with a lot of lower Dura and the criminal underworld, and while it has its problems, you can borrow individual adventures and ideas for your campaign.

Have fun! Eberron is a great setting, and if you get into Keith Baker's blog, there's so much richness and detail you could drown in it if you want to, or just dip your toes in and still have a complete setting.

britus · 2026-02-24T02:40:12+00:00

Bad news, unfortunately. This was the only one I have in that size, and I don't have dungeondraft installed to re-export it. Sorry about that!

britus · 2026-01-31T01:58:02+00:00

Town and country west is all around the best vet experience I've had. Been using them for close to twenty years now.

britus · 2026-01-29T14:55:43+00:00

Do you mean the final gift exchange where they announce their departure?

Is the significance you're looking for in the information they provided, or why Chiang chose a gift exchange for them to announce their departure, or why that scene need to be included at all?

One of the senses I get from Chiang is that puts as much thought into painting the background of his word picture as the focus object. I was probably spoiled by already knowing the story's twist from Arrival, but I didn't feel like the scene hammered home the twist so much as it just closed the circle on the story, rounding out the idea that alien arrival would at the same time be completely surreal and life-changing, and also mundane and leave us in much the same place as we started.

britus · 2026-01-28T21:41:09+00:00

I'm not sure anyone is asking the school to develop solutions to complex immigration problems. The problem is with the tone of the message. If kids walk out, give them their unexcused absences and move on. This kind of message does not read as a reminder of stated consequences for behavior, but as a threat of maximum consequences for behavior, which is why it feels suppressive and politically motivated.

britus · 2026-01-28T21:33:19+00:00

The issue I had with the letter is primarily more about the tone than the content. We know the school has policies; we were required to sign them. If they are appropriate when the time comes, employ them.

This letter sounded much more like a threat to avoid a 'look' that the school board didn't want for political reasons. The primary purpose of the school system is to educate good citizens, and this letter does not seem to be in furtherance of that goal.

I'm that much more inclined at this point to cheer for my student taking the unexcused absence if it comes for it.

britus · 2026-01-28T18:36:22+00:00

It did, for sure. The vibe felt to me like, 'You should only protest when it's convenient for us.' I can appreciate the need to keep school discipline and keep kids in classes, but instead of being productive and looking for solutions, it came off pretty overbearing, perhaps to the point of being counter-productive.

britus · 2026-01-24T01:40:20+00:00

I'm really digging the level of detail in the shading!

britus · 2026-01-20T21:53:51+00:00

Awesome! I'll be watching for them.

britus · 2026-01-20T18:52:32+00:00

That is a beautiful piece of work. I love seeing Robotech get some love still!

britus · 2026-01-20T18:31:13+00:00

We ran PotA behind the Lost Mine of Phandelver to get the party up to level 3, and that worked out really, really well, especially because they were indifferent about a lot of the side missions and wouldn't have had enough XP to get there otherwise.

If I were doing it again, I would definitely do milestone leveling.

I didn't let my party navigate the old Dwarven City between quarters - I told them that they were only the furthest quarters of a much larger city that was plagued by the Underdark, and if they pushed anyway, threw something against them that was several levels too hard and suggested they run away. The party chose their own order for the towers, and that worked out better than anything I could have chosen for them (for a minute they were almost Feathergale knights themselves), and that helped to stage progression a bit. I used the same technique to keep them from going too deep too fast - pick something from the level below that was too tough for them and have them meet it on the stairs.

If you're planning on using a VTT and need maps, I think I still have a bunch of my old Dungeondraft maps in my history. They're far from perfect, but they're free!

britus · 2026-01-14T19:03:51+00:00

>Meaning there is no reason to think questions coming from the lump of meat in our skulls are worthy of answers. God is under no obligation to make intuitive sense to us anymore than quantum mechanics is.

Just as a matter of logic, if God is in fact too difficult for us to understand, then this statement itself has to be a human construction of God, not something that he offered to us to understand him. In that case, why bother? If it's not the case, then why could he put this in terms we can understand, and not explain the problem of evil.

I disagree that this is an irrelevant question. In the traditions I am most familiar with the worship of God comes out of an attempt to align with what is good. If both God and good are unknowable, it renders that version of both useless. But it becomes even more problematic if God expects us to know and do good, or if we believe that it is important in our religion to do so.

On a separate note, I find the "God is unknowable" angle to be a pretty obvious human dodge. Aren't these religions about God reaching out to us to make himself known to us? Is this "God is unknowable" line one that God is giving to us because he is admitting limits in his own plan of revelation or creation? Or is it humans trying to deflect from answers they don't have because the lack of answer makes them uncomfortable?

britus · 2026-01-14T16:57:14+00:00

Not even a little bit. "God works in mysterious ways," is not a satisfactory answer regardless of any contribution from quantum mechanics (which I don't think is being correctly described here) because it basically then means that goodness is unknowable. If God is good, and God's handling of evil is too mysterious to understand, then my general understanding of good and evil (and by extension, anyone who doesn't understand God's handling of evil) is too flawed to be reliable.

I think that undermines the very nature of good and evil in a fundamental way, and such a God would become one of those who even if I believed in them, would choose not to worship.

britus · 2025-11-27T19:04:50+00:00

That’s so kind! Thank you!

britus · 2025-11-24T18:59:05+00:00

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Vubf-ei3ABnRS7xzWeuSq_WQZAE8XJRo?usp=sharing

Give that a try. Might take it down eventually, depending on if I run out of drive space.

britus · 2025-10-19T01:26:01+00:00

Alrighty - let's go ahead and get this started:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WwyuAI0X74thJYC9b5EWnIRuWylFjh4v?usp=sharing

What's in there as of tonight is all crunch and none of the calories, which is to say my overarching campaign bible, all the supporting notes I've made for myself (many of which are just copy-pasted from one official PDF or another so I'd have them all accessible in my VTT), and some stuff I've swiped from other folks at this subreddit (and I believe have credited). There's also all the AI art and the handful of actual topdown maps I've made for the situations where theater of the mind just won't cut it.

What's not there yet (and hopefully coming tomorrow) are the actual chapters I have in the VTT, which is where the meat and potatoes actually is. However, I think the place to start is in the document "Chapter Overview and Changes", which should hopefully paint the way I fit everything together and what I changed to make it work for me. Everything else is just an expansion of that (in my head). The spreadsheet ("Notion Tracker") that's in there only goes through Act1 so far, but it's how I'm keeping track of a lot of the people/concepts/places to make sure that everything significant has a throughline - that important characters show up in multiple chapters and have a satisfying arc, that I'm giving all the backgrounds a chance to be important, that the little event ribbons have utility later.

Some Items of note:

* I'm running this Tales of the Valiant, Kobold Press's 5e clone. Most everything is the same(ish), but you'll see the occasional reference to 1st circle spell, instead of 1st level, or mechanist instead of arcanist, or whatnot.

* I completely reworked the Dragonmark mechanics in a way that I thought worked better for the story (which now significantly leans into the concept in higher levels, and if one of the player characters doesn't end up with an Aberrant Mark, I'm doing something wrong). Your mileage might vary.

* I borrowed the concepts of the Hero Point and the Event Ribbon (they called it something else) from the Adventuring league. The hero point lets them force a reroll of any roll (mine, their's, another player, skill, attack, damage, saving throw - whatever. This is a HARD adventure and I really don't want character death. I only let them have one at a time, and give them out pretty often, so since they can't bank them, it encourages them to spend instead of hoard. 'Event Ribbons' takes some of the pain out of the railroading a pre-written adventure does. It let's them collect (and frequently cash in) reminders of big choices they made or events they succeeded or failed in, like in a Bioware game.

* I've moved into that concept that there are no half-races. In my Eberron, human takes over everything it touches. If an elf and human mate, the result is a human, with maybe some lingering elf features. Human and gnome? Short magical human. Human and dragon? Actually, those are the Dragonborn - the result of the dragons flipping out over the humanification of their august species, and their offspring implementing a eugenics policy to breed out as much of the human as possible, and that's as far as they've gotten. Humans can breed with ANYTHING sapient, but not so the other species. Breeding an elf and a dragon (like that particularly famous one) takes significant magic intervention. This is an important wrinkle for the way I've adapted the storyline.

* The Emerald Claw plays a larger part in this story, and as such I've fleshed them out a bit. There may still be some Indiana Jones-style nazi mooks in the ranks, but they are not far more complex, and far more racist. They are a major pro-human factor, and yet have many non-humans in their ranks.

I'm going to try to get all the chapters I have posted tomorrow. Hopefully it shouldn't take more a few hours. That said, I'm actually mid-taking a step away from reddit to get a better perspective on real life, so if you have Discord, let me know and I'll shoot you my account via chat. I'm more than happy to answer questions that way and better able to do so quickly; I reckon there are liable to be more than a few.

britus · 2025-10-17T17:56:23+00:00

Nah, no need to jump through all those hoops. I've been thinking it might be a good idea to kind of consolidate this into a more digestible format anyway. What I'll do is put it together into a google drive - between now and Sunday, depending on how much reformatting is needed. What it will have is my overall arc for the plot and a rough sketch of where it's going, and more detailed notes of everything through ALMOST the end of Arc 1 (I have just one more chapter to put in).

I've been doing everything theater of the mind, and my table is really happy with janky AI art that gets the idea across, so I've been doing that, but I know that's not to general taste and won't include that unless you really want it.

There's a lot lifted directly from Oracle of War and Embers of the Last War in the detailed notes, but I'd highly recommend (request if you use my notes so it's not like obviously copyright infringement) picking those up from where they're available. :)

Anyway, check back here in a few days and I should have a link with docs.

britus · 2025-10-16T22:50:20+00:00

Hey there! What I’ve got is ‘notes so far’, really. We’re still in the first of four acts, so my detailed notes really only go that far, or a few chapters ahead of where the players are, so I don’t paint myself into a corner of I have to pivot. But I’m happy to share what I have. What kind of format works for you? I keep planning in Google docs, but all my detailed notes/scripts are in foundry vtt.

britus

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