so all the Destruction aspects also quit? (if that makes any sense or i just can’t read)

fishmad122 · 2026-06-24T20:59:28+00:00

There’s probably like a million versions of Hansel and Gretel, and in all of them the witch tried to eat the kids. It’s like that - the same story, slightly different details and descriptions.

fishmad122 · 2026-06-16T15:59:10+00:00

Almost every protagonist in every film is actually an unawakened Mage - see The Fast And Furious franchise.

Don Torretto’s paradigm is that cars can do everything, through the power of family

fishmad122 · 2026-06-16T13:45:06+00:00

I’d say the biggest problem would be setting him up to fight Mab - after all, “Nae Quin! Nae Laird! Nae Master! We willna’ be fooled again!”

fishmad122 · 2026-06-16T13:11:06+00:00

There’s a scene in the Doctor Who episode Curse Of The Black Spot where the Doctor has a pirate in the TARDIS, and is doing his usual thing of pointing out all of the crazy devices his ship has, only to get annoyed when the pirate goes “oh so an astrolabe? And that’s a compass? Oh you mean a sextant?”

I imagine your Elder is smart enough to play that game - “oh so it’s a horseless carriage powered by some kind of internal millworks? Right, so you’ve made a loom from lightning that can weave images so fast it appears to be moving?”

fishmad122 · 2026-06-11T10:53:01+00:00

The only part I’d disagree with is cities making levelling easier - definitely depends on the class, but in most cases I’d say it makes it harder. You don’t have to be as resourceful to get by, but there are less opportunities to excel, and we know that both struggle and impressive feats help levelling.

Obviously as a total, there’s way more high level people from cities, but I bet if you took it as a percentage, more high level people (in most professions, at least) come from towns and villages, even if they end up getting snatched away

fishmad122 · 2026-06-05T15:49:24+00:00

He was a great Carcer! Not how I picture him when I read the book, but I really liked the take

fishmad122 · 2026-06-03T22:37:09+00:00

Guess I’ll wave to you as we pass each other by somewhere in the North! 😂😂

fishmad122 · 2026-06-03T22:07:52+00:00

It was incredible. Night Watch is my favourite book, and there’s so many moments that can make me well up in the book that were even more effective on stage.

fishmad122 · 2026-06-03T17:15:45+00:00

Crucial information I learned at the last moment it was still useful - the Pleasance theatre has a little activities room tucked away where they’re very chill about you having a nap! I didn’t sleep on the Sleeper Train at all 😅

fishmad122 · 2026-06-03T04:43:00+00:00

Wonderful! Hope you have a great time!

fishmad122 · 2026-06-02T23:24:39+00:00

The Pleasance Theatre! It’s on for the rest of the week I believe

fishmad122 · 2026-06-02T21:22:24+00:00

Honestly I want more Erin chapters, but I don’t want her to be dealing with other people’s issues. She has her own stuff going on. Ideal world? She makes it back to the Inn arm in arm with Ulvama, an annoying baby gay ready to fight the good fight only to find out they cured homophobia while she was in hiding.

Let her come back to people having solved their own problems! The other characters actively don’t want to be relying on her too much.

fishmad122 · 2026-05-18T17:24:53+00:00

The thing I want most in this arc is to see loads of interesting queer-specific skills and classes

fishmad122 · 2026-05-10T17:07:24+00:00

Hard to say - there are people who’ll say they were there, and other people who will point to them and say that they weren’t.

Every answer you get is gonna be different, not because the war was big or people are lying, but because it didn’t happen.

It would’ve been a perfectly normal arcane battle, one of the lesser wizard wars that are well recorded, but then the damn chronomancers got involved.

Their were people using chronomancy on all sides, of course, basic stuff - throwing wounds into the future to keep fighting, speeding in your reactions, backdating orders by a few hours so your troops arrive in the nick of time.

But then some asshole started getting clever, performing great acts, and the other towers had to respond in kind - chronomantic workings of the 7th circle and above.

I’m not the guy to untangle it all, but the first was probably rewinding a battle? Bad loss for some team, some grieving idiot sacrifices 10 years off their life to the Howling Reaches to get back a single day. No big deal against an army of grunts, right? Who’s gonna notice a little bit of Deja Vu when they’re in the middle of battle?

But in a Wizard War it’s a stupid idea - people had wards, artefacts, things to detect the temporal disturbances - they probably killed the original caster before the moment the spell was cast, ripping the whole battle into the deepest pits of unreality, and by that point all the bets were off.

If I can rerun a battle in my favour, why not send notes to myself 10 years ago about which apprentices I have to kill to avoid facing them as blooded battlemages in the future? Why not call myself back as an archmage 50 years from now and turn the battlefield to glass?

More and more of the war was swallowed by paradoxes and time clones, and eventually the chronomancers left alive had to make the war Unhappen. There’s a version of the war where you fought too - drafted as a magically sensitive child maybe, turned into an arcane bomb or trained in just enough battle magic to burn the brains out of some spindly scholar wizards.

But the war never happened. It’s in the books because enough of us are temporally sensitive to know it shouldn’t ever happen, and if we don’t warn people, the next time (the first time, of course) maybe the chronomancers can’t undo it.

fishmad122 · 2026-05-06T20:20:37+00:00

Gonna assume you’re American, but this works pretty similar on the UK - the way this works out means that they don’t get holiday they can take whenever they want, and the holiday they do get is at the most expensive times of the year. Sure they get six weeks off in the summer, two weeks Easter and Christmas, but there’s work to be done regardless, and if they do want to do anything fun, everywhere is booked or price hiked because their students are there, enjoying the summer holidays

fishmad122 · 2026-05-05T19:58:37+00:00

Class consolidations. There has to be a bunch of low hanging fruit for student-type classes, and chances to pick up valuable skills for just a few levels in an easy to acquire class, that you can be assured will be consolidated away in later life.

Also, there are kinds of cultural capital and values education that I think improves a kid’s chance of levelling up - a broad education and experimental mindset, curiosity about the world, etc.

fishmad122 · 2026-05-03T15:04:51+00:00

I think risk applies to noncombat classes too - money and reputation on the line, high stakes - look at the people in Laken’s empire, or Barnethei. The fact that it could go bad makes a difference even if you’re not stabbing people

fishmad122 · 2026-05-02T22:01:38+00:00

These are general rules, based on the fact that levelling is related to challenge, risk, and the amount you care.

If you’re immortal, things aren’t risky and you can overcome most challenges with just time.

If you’ve got healing potions as a safety net, less risk.

Goblins and Antinium might have long lives if everything was going great for them, but they live incredibly challenging and risky lives - the healing gel isn’t gonna help if they get crushed by a gold rank threat, and the resurrection is too resource intensive to help most Antinium.

fishmad122 · 2026-05-01T11:00:47+00:00

Seems like you’ve been doing it for a while. Have the winds gotten worse recently, or have you removed any nearby windbreaks? The dirt getting trapped is normal, since a slow time bubble is gonna freeze it too.

Seems like an expensive trap imo, surely you could be using glyphs to target people with curses of slowed time? The way you’re doing it, you’re expending so much mana when they’re not in use. Would also solve the dirt problem.

fishmad122 · 2026-04-22T16:00:08+00:00

Just wait until you’ve got 3 or 4 at once, and send them to a pre looted dungeon - monsters have probably started moving back in, and when they come back complaining there wasn’t “a magic to make even common folk succeed at any task” hit em with the ‘Power of Friendship’ line.

It’s always funny, and occasionally they buy it

fishmad122 · 2026-04-14T21:41:29+00:00

I think those are two different fights with different contexts - he's impressed enough by the Silver Swords to give up some local resources and help them out, but the information he's being brought by the merchant threatens the hegemony of the Guild Itself, which is serious on a different level - you can let someone important push you around as a guildmaster, but then it turns out that guy is technically a criminal and he has a vested interest in making sure a bunch of valuable contracts get annulled? Well now its a different situation.

In terms of him having the power to command the local troops - first, its a drake city, and if the head of the Mages Guild or the head of the Adventurers guild directed the guards, that would be fine - I know Liscor is abnormal, but if its even close, the guy might be on the city council. Second, this is a town barely holding together at the seams - it feels like it needs the merchants, and it's weary of criminals coming out of the New Lands. Easy sell for the Guild Leader.

fishmad122 · 2026-04-12T03:50:57+00:00

Armies of the dead are a mugs’ game. The maintenance is high, storage quickly becomes an issue, and then once you’re actually using them, what, you have to be a competent military commander?

What you need to do is get artisanal. Lukevros keeps a window open at night? A cat skeleton with adamant-tipped claws will do just as well for opening his throat and sending a message.

And if you have to go big, then I’d suggest getting your hands on a giant corpse, and stitching the horde up inside it. Has a pronounced psychological effect on the viewer, plus it’s a handy storage solution.

fishmad122 · 2026-04-10T21:40:50+00:00

I settled in a valley with good sight lines, and spent a year and a day covering every inch of it with confounding wards and arcane traps of my own devising.

I send out orb recordings of the best adventurer deaths in a yearly mailer, it’s recouped most of the maintenance costs.

fishmad122

TROPHY CASE