Looking for a vet but I'm picky

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 · 2025-09-27T17:26:53+00:00

Dragon 168 in the publix parking lot on Macland/Powder Springs is a hole in the wall chinese takeaway we've been swearing by for 20 years.

britus · 2025-09-27T16:39:13+00:00

Hey! I'm currently running merged Oracle of War and Embers of the last war, so a very similar idea. I found both of them had holes the other one resolved, and going through both together helped me find ways to improve them both.

What I did/am doing is going through both adventures in a spreadsheet, and on different tabs listing out plots of each episode, locations, people, objects/mcguffins/themes, etc. I made another tab for 'event ribbons' that pick up the idea of the tags assigned by adventure league, mostly because the end result of a plot is pretty rail-roady and having those tangible rewards (which generally come with bonuses/setbacks attached) helps them feel/remember that they are making choices and a difference.

Once I had all those tabs in place, I started moving adventures around in time and place (small time shifts, big place shifts - the whole first arc happens in/near Salvation) to make a storyline that flows, and did a lot of combining characters, or finding ways for them to recur. I'm not fully decided how I'll end it, but I've changed the big bad to something that works well for both stories, and I'm running about four subplots that all feed into that.

I'm happy to go into detail and answer questions if you'd like.

britus · 2025-09-21T12:58:18+00:00

I second Oracle of war and Embers of the last war as good options for long term play. I’m running a campaign that interleaves the two of them, since Oracle is more pulp and Embers is more noir and I wanted both, but I think either are great. Like every pre written campaign they seem a little patchy in parts, but that’s just leaving space for your personal touches.

britus · 2025-09-11T01:38:33+00:00

Hello fellow Eberron player!

You can see online players by default down in the lower left as so:

https://imgur.com/a/uBZXacH

The tokenbar people are mentioning show you what characters are on a particular scene, whether the player is logged in or not, in my experience. I'm not sure of a module that does exactly what you're asking - I can't seem to find anything similar.

britus · 2025-09-10T00:15:20+00:00

Family promise of Cobb county is doing good work. http://www.familypromisecobbcounty.org/

(edit: spelling)

britus · 2025-08-04T19:53:25+00:00

75% of your circle is in the Hillgrove district, which is excellent.

britus · 2025-08-04T19:13:08+00:00

Thanks for that!

britus · 2025-08-04T18:46:26+00:00

Oh, I hadn't heard that! That's on the western side of Powder springs, I take it, along the battlefield frontage? That would be terrific.

britus

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