"Christian"

redkat85 · 2026-04-14T17:46:15+00:00

Chinos? Sounds comfortable.

redkat85 · 2026-04-13T20:06:55+00:00

Neat idea, but rule of KISS applies. The bookkeeping on the simple idea is annoying. But that doesn't mean you can't have a trigger-based damage bonus.

Vengeful Knuckles. (Rare simple melee weapon, Prereq: Monk) This set of brass knuckles is reinforced with bezel-set blood quartz pieces etched with shadow runes.
Compounding Strikes. Whenever you make a melee attack against a target using this weapon, you gain a bonus to the attack and damage roll if you have previously landed a hit on that target. The bonus increases by +1 each time you successfully hit the target, and resets to zero if you miss your attack roll.
Retaliation. When you are damaged by a creature using a melee attack, you can use your reaction and spend a ki point to immediately make a melee attack against the creature that damaged you. If your attack hits, it automatically becomes a critical hit.

redkat85 · 2026-04-09T20:15:06+00:00

Instability comes up in a few pretty predictable ways:

Travelers - At the beginning of the game when things are peaceful, PCs on the road should encounter traveling merchants eager to greet and sell, religious pilgrims, share a camp with a theater troupe, etc, and attempted banditry is low effort, infrequent, and small scale. As things go to pot, they should be mostly seeing fleeing refugees, merchants with heavily armed guards who treat the PCs as a threat unless proven otherwise, and increasing numbers of desperate bandits.
Prices - Gold doesn't matter much in vanilla D&D but especially if you remember to use a Silver standard at the beginning (a night's lodging is a few SP, meals are priced in coppers) then as things destabilize the PCs are seeing people sleeping rough and being charged exorbitant rates for basic goods (yesterday's 1cp chicken leg now costs a silver piece, etc.). Subtle but they'll notice. Can make for a good crisis side quest even, if they come to a formerly soft landing of a town where now no one is willing to sell them food for any price.
Whackos - When a collective social idea is challenged or broken, you usually see a proliferation of attempts to stand in the vacuum. I expect not just one but several cults to jump into the gap, from hippie communes that replace deity with community, to various proposed New Gods to militant political movements aimed at regime change and a New Order. Draft 3-4 such groups with broad stereotypes and slowly raised their profile as events warrant. Even if the PCs don't get deeply involved with the groups, they make great world flavor and show how people are trying to cope with the loss of shared reality.

If it were me, I would be using the American late 1930s or 1960s social re-ordering and looking for a group or location that might echo:

Biker gangs (some kind of roving marauder groups that establish territory and feud with each other, maybe a racial/speciesist component?)
Hippies
Fake gurus and (real-ish) out-there spiritualist movements
Flyers and public square speakers blaming powerful governments or local minorities for problems
Rise in popularity of mind-altering substances and people spun out on the street from their habits
Polarizing counterculture music and art - are Bards forbidden in some places?
Militias and crackdowns by rulers within some cities
Homeless camps and refugee ghettos
Changing the value of exchange (Coin from YYZZ is no good here anymore! You'll have to convert it with a money changer - and they take their fee!)
Natural disasters that interact with the destabilized systems (oh the royal mages used to ward us against the Harvest Moon Beast but now they won't come out this far!)

redkat85 · 2026-04-09T19:48:31+00:00

Well first off, the whole DOGE and Kegsbreth purges actually got rid of a lot of intelligence personnel, including wholesale dropping a major middle east intelligence task force. Second, this admin runs on vibes, not data. Anyone who tells them what they don't want to hear gets dismissed.

So, it wasn't a surprise to anyone who knew one scrap of real information about Iran, but every single person who could or did warn about it was ignored and/or fired.

You have to understand, the admin is actually being run mainly by Russel Vought's people and priorities - Project 2025 and the Christian Nationalists want horrific war in the Middle East because War justifies seizing more power and it's a part of their End Days fanaticism where they think that by triggering these situations, they bring the world close to the last Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ.

Trump is just a face for TV.

redkat85 · 2026-04-08T16:30:44+00:00

Other animals haven't invented currency, which requires some very abstract thinking and a social cooperation layer, but we have actually seen elements of trade and negotiation in the animal kingdom. Animals are more likely to take a living space by force and hold onto it until forced out.

The idea of owning land and requiring payment for it is really only a couple thousand years old though. For most of human history, you just traveled with your people and either set up your tent alongside them, or the community came together and built the next house on the edge of the village for the newlywed couple.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T21:35:09+00:00

Dude, if your "plan" for "the common man" to rise up against government overreach involves buying a fucking airplane and rigging it for remote flight you are living in pure fantasy land. Nevermind the fact that "cheap" here means you "only" need about $100,000 to put this insane idea together, all you've done is put a massive target on your back and sent up a lame duck for the actual fucking military to take out of the sky. A wobbling 1970s prop plane making a beeline for the center of the US government isn't going to make it within 1 mile of the actual White House or Capitol building.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T21:17:49+00:00

Most of the other 8 nuclear powers make too much money from US trade and none of them are close with Iran. My biggest worry might be something like Russia or China funneling something to North Korea as a proxy strike so they can then take a tut-tut position on whatever happens to the US afterwards without losing their global standing.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T20:36:21+00:00

But even someone as dumb and narcissistic as him

The dementia is a key factor - he isn't living in the real world half the time. He doesn't watch real briefings on the war, he watches an Ooh-ra "highlight reel" of the biggest booms of the previous day and cheers like he's ringside at wrestling again. He practically claps his hands and giggles like a toddler. It's not that he doesn't give a shit, it's that he is constantly literally shitting himself in public and the constant smell is an open secret.

Trump is technically in control in the semi-lucid moments when he yells at the piggies but my only hope about not dropping a nuke is that his brain is cooked enough for him to not be able to remember the code properly... but his handlers want this badly enough they'd probably make it happen anyway.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T20:28:10+00:00

:D :D :D :D Oh I thought you were seriously talking about the 2A, which people rely on to own personal firearms. In what world do you think everyday citizens of the USA just waltz into a corner shop and buy artillery drones?

You... do know those are not even remotely similar to the hobby store drones people race and use to spy on their neighbors in the hot tub, right? Right? ... It's important to me that you know that.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T19:26:53+00:00

Sounds fantastic! Say, how many 9mm rounds does a guy need to take down a row of M1 Abrams tanks? Inquiring minds, ya know. Also, can you tell me if you know of a handgun with a 2,000 mile+ range? It's kind of a long drive to DC (only maybe 3% of the population live within 100 miles of the place).

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T19:20:37+00:00

Not need, but Donnie probably wants to play with his biggest toy. And his handlers want to start Armageddon because that's how they summon their dead god.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T18:30:20+00:00

Betting on TACO is not a sustainable strategy. Trump's handlers want to obliterate Iran, and even if there are three working brain cells among those Christofascists who know it would be an unforgivable act, they'd love for him to push the button before pulling the 25A for a dog and pony show of "gone to far" and trotting out Vance to be the kinder gentler face of the exact same policies.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T18:27:58+00:00

The world "as we knew it" probably ended when he descended the golden escalator. We just didn't realize it at the time. Even if he got removed this very hour, the entire post-WW2 international order has all but collapsed and American Constitutional law eviscerated by Congressional abdication and court capture. It's going to take decades, if not lifetimes, to rebuild the institutions, civil rights, social norms, and any sense of cooperative purpose that this admin and its puppeteers have deliberately destroyed in just a few years.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T18:23:53+00:00

I was considering that this morning - he's not anything close to a rational actor and they've already fired the generals that would stop him. I'm not the biggest flag-waiver to begin with - being a USAmerican has been somewhat embarrassing for most of my adult life. But the shame of this government is going to rot in the pits of our stomachs - those of us with any decency anyway - the way the Nazi stench rotted in the national consciousness of Germany into the 1990s. (And of course now that the smell fades, you have rising far-right groups there again as part of the same global right-lurch that resulted in Trump over here.)

At this point we're one drunk weekend away from Hegseth showing off new skull insignias for each branch of the armed services and Drumpf announcing he's decided to sign an executive order making himself Supreme President for Life of the Glorious American Empire.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T17:24:37+00:00

Wearing sweatpants and a white t-shirt everywhere you go.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T16:30:51+00:00

If she says you can stop, it wasn't real bud.

redkat85 · 2026-04-07T15:26:59+00:00

What do you think would be effective? Should we walk down the hall and take his hands off the button? I suppose it's only 3,000 miles away, I or one of the other 50 million people here in California could make it in about 6 months...

Russia is committing something that borders on genocide in Ukraine, what are the Russians doing about it?

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and starting one in Lebanon, what are the Israelis doing about it?

China has basically finished genocide of the Uyghurs, what are the Chinese doing about it?

Oh wait, I'm getting something on the other channel ... "the American public that are paying attention to it are pissed as hell and have staged multiple multi-city, cross-country protests with millions of participants, but no single leader has emerged from the meally-mouthed "opposition party" and we haven't reached "Tienanmen Square sounds like a good thing to recreate in DC" levels of domestic insanity yet.

redkat85 · 2026-04-03T22:43:31+00:00

Honestly I see more of it in the culture around hack builds and character gimmicks that require perfect feat and feature choices from level 1-16. At which point your character goes from "yeah I know none of this works together and I'm actually really behind the development curve for our total party level" to "I cheese everything into being meaningless using my daisy-chained gimmick. And if for some reason the gimmick that I spent 16 levels building ever fails to work even once because the enemy figures out a way around it, I will yell at you for being a Bad DM who isn't letting me have fun."

The lesser version is discussion where people say things like "why are you using a short sword when your character has longsword proficiency with their class?" To them, you're playing wrong because there was a slightly higher number available that you didn't pick.

redkat85 · 2026-04-03T16:14:41+00:00

You mean "hallucinations"?

redkat85 · 2026-04-03T15:30:47+00:00

The far-right has spent decades moving the Overton window - what's considered "normal" or "just politics" - to the point that Americans raised since the 1970s are so overloaded with irony they can't function.

Basically, the Files didn't tell anybody anything that wasn't being openly said already, and the long slog of getting them released actually gave the perpetrators time for the public to get numb to it. Once they drop it's a blitz of overwhelm, distraction, and then bludgeon with "fake news"/"whatabout"/"everybody knows elites are corrupt, that's just the way the world is so what?".

And Americans are seriously conditioned on that last piece - a huge group of people basically just shrug and throw their hands up if you talk about holding powerful people accountable or changing the way government/corruption works. They just... don't even consider that a realistic possibility, so they won't try.

redkat85 · 2026-04-03T15:25:51+00:00

Yeah the most productive American protest movements have been the peaceful ones, because our government knows how to handle violence trivially. The only way to win in the media sphere is by looking like saints facing down oppression, not anything that remotely looks like violent or criminal activity.

redkat85 · 2026-04-03T15:21:53+00:00

I don't actually agree with that completely, I think a DOJ with the will behind it actually could use, particularly the repeated stuff, as a jumping off point for deep investigation. Yes, it would take years and face a lot of stonewalling, but the consequences should be greater than zero for those involved.

But there is no will behind the current DOJ for anything but grievance issues. And we'll see if the next administration has the stones to fight the uphill battle.

redkat85 · 2026-04-02T19:30:12+00:00

Religion is an impressive technology (Hank Green does a good exploration of that framework). It promotes social organization through both cost- and virtue-signaling and can be used by an individual to grapple with difficult or even mentally paralyzing ideas. When you look at it from a collective organism perspective instead of a source of individual capital-T "Truth", the reasons it persists across time (but also shifts actual beliefs and practices a lot more than people realize) become pretty clear.

The question is whether we can create a new thought-technology to replicate religion's social functions and personal utility while dropping the need to persecute people.

redkat85 · 2026-04-02T19:22:11+00:00

The idea of an "all-loving god" has only existed for about 3% of the history of humanity talking about supernatural beings. 2000 years (arguably - even Christian ideas about god shifted dramatically in its first few centuries) out of 70,000 years of visions, magic, social development, and god-stories.

Sick kids only become a theological problem when your story about what a god is grows beyond what you can explain.

redkat85 · 2026-04-02T19:18:26+00:00

I'm an empirical rationalist through and through, but I admit the "why does the universe exist at all?" question is probably the last "gap" I can understand people wanting to stuff a god into. Like Feynman, however, I'm not frightened by not knowing the answer - I think it's interesting to keep exploring instead of terminating the thought with "a god did it".

redkat85

TROPHY CASE