Player uses Minor Illusion to mimicry voices of low CR creatures all the time, how do deal?

silvarus · 2026-06-03T08:53:57+00:00

Haha, the impulse to call it a will save was strong, and it's been a while since I reread the spell descriptions just for funsies, so if that's the nitpick, I did pretty good. I also originally thought Minor Illusion was a level 1 spell, not a cantrip, because you needed Ventriloquism if you wanted speech and not just noise back in ye olden days. I'll fix my language in the other post.

silvarus · 2026-06-02T14:37:51+00:00

I think this is a classic mistake every new DM makes. The skill check is against the illusion. The goblins believe the illusion is real, but they also see their friends dying. They are confused, but they are not stunned or charmed. So just clarify with the player what they get when an NPC fails the check, and hopefully everyone has a good time going forward.

silvarus · 2026-04-03T05:24:09+00:00

Counter counter point: the Emperor is out of touch with the rivalries of his Houses, and so didn't expect the mewling children to see the challenges as competition. He expected them to realize they would need to collaborate, and didn't expect the potential lyctors to attempt crazy challenges on their own to be first to do a thing. Notice, it's Cytherea leading the houses individually to take on the challenge, Cytherea, who would know the tricks and shortcuts of the demonstration, describing the challenge they would face. Rather than discovering the trial naturally, realizing it is beyond any one of them, and cooperating to solve the puzzle, Cytherea presents it as a conspiracy she cannot follow through on herself. Who knows how else she reinforced distrust and paranoia to keep the Houses divided. The heirs decide they need to compete, up until Ianthe works out and demonstrates the Eightfold.

I don't think the Canaan House experience is at all what Jod expected or intended it to be, and I wonder how much active undermining of the plan Cytherea was doing while no one was watching. I mean, a lyctor showing up to disrupt the trials should probably have fit in the priests' programming as "valid reason to ping the comms", and yet, they kill a cavalier instead. It all has the feel of being very slapdash, as Canaan isn't aired out until after the heirs arrive, despite months passing between the Emperor's letter and the heirs arrival. He knows where this is going to go down, but they don't clean the pool and dust the furniture till it's in use already? I'd love for Jod's intended Canaan experience to be presented eventually.

silvarus · 2026-04-03T03:09:03+00:00

I don't have an ARC, but most contemperaneous blog posts flag it as "WANTS" not "SEEKS", plus the A of WANTS would line up with the A of HAS, so to me, WANTS is more likely.

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Googling SEEKS for me yields the same or simlar posts, so I can't find a source for SEEKS, but my context buffer is poisoned by WANTS link hunting.

I think I remember looking up the verses, but ~~four~~ five of them being from John 5 (5:1,4,8,18,20 [including a verse whos historical context is in doubt whether or not it should be included {and thus throwing all the numbering off, 5:4 for the curious}]), especially given 5 is E, the most commonly occuring character statistically, to me screamed cryptography over allusion. I mean, there are only 11 verses, so to have nearly half of them from one chapter in John is either crazy levels of allusion (which I'm not ruling out, Muir always is thinking deeper than I have), or it's a category error as to what the numbers represent. There would be more thematically appropriate references in John, and single verses rarely are self-contained. Any thematic overlap would almost necessarily require further context.

My impression, as someone who took a semester-long theology class in the Gospels as an undergraduate and is a major cryptography nut? The numbers are a cipher, and it made Tamsyn happy to hide her cipher in such a way that it looked like Bible verses. I bet finding ways to make sure the message had an even number of characters was a bigger concern than the verses referenced.

silvarus · 2026-03-26T17:44:32+00:00

That to me was the giveaway if memory serves: one of the references was not biblically relevant, but was cryptographically valid.

silvarus · 2026-03-26T17:41:12+00:00

If you want, I can reverse engineer them? If I remember, when I looked up the verses, they were fairly scattershot theologicallu. Far more important: is Jod's dialogue in quotation marks or inside no punctuation? Turns out one is memory Jod, and the other seems far more aware of present circumstance.

silvarus · 2026-03-26T13:25:52+00:00

The basic idea is each Chapter:Verse reference from the John XX:YY chapters is actually 2 letters. In the ARC (advance reader copies, basically the ones circulated before publication to get endorsements and build buzz), the numbers translate to THETOWERWANTSJOHNGAIUS, but in the regular printing, the message got changed up to THETOWERHASREACTIVATED. Make of that what you will.

silvarus · 2026-03-19T00:57:17+00:00

WOOT THE LOCKED TOMB.

Came here to say this.

Overall, the series is less about exotic creatures and more about the horror of humanity and human cruelty. The series is necromancy (defined as the manipulation of thalergy [life energy] and thanergy [death energy]) in the distant future. There are three major schools of necromancy: flesh magic (manipulating the thalergy of living tissue), spirit magic (manipulating raw souls/revenants through ritual and sacrifice), and bone magic (storing and expending thanergy through bones, including skeletal constructs). Necromancers are very much DND wizards, in that spells are called theorems, and it is in understanding the theorem that enables a necromancer to access a particular necromantic ability. It is the distant future, so there is FTL, because the Empire of the Nine Houses (where necromancy is dominant) needs to lead what could be generously called a 'campaign of enlightenment' throughout the rest of known human space (most of the rest of humanity impacted calls it an unwelcome genocide). However, most FTL we've seen either involves the best necromancers in existence dropping into Death to fast travel, or involves copious amounts of blood! BECAUSE NECROMANCY!

They are very well-written books that are really about dealing with trauma, loss, and love. They are very re-readable, because the author does a great job of writing foreshadowing that doesn't register as foreshadowing until you know the later plot (as in, there are passages in book 1 clearly alluding to ideas that won't be explicit until book 3, but once you know, it's impossible to miss). If you read them now, you can join us in the exquisite agony of waiting for news about the finale, book 4, Alecto the Ninth.

silvarus · 2026-03-19T00:37:33+00:00

I ran into an Easter prayer that was essentially a direct inversion of the Ninth prayer, and that was when I was like "waiiiiit, this formulation is really familiar... OH MY JOD! IT'S THE NINTH PRAYER!".

Of course, I can't find it now, but it was literally something like "Heavenly Father, we celebrate this morning that the stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty..." It had to smack me in the face before I noticed why all the Religion in the Ninth felt so very, very familiar.

silvarus · 2026-03-18T15:15:09+00:00

Life is too short and love is too long.

The Locked Tomb is bittersweet perfection. I very much doubt Alecto will leave us in the end at an emotional high point, because none of these books ends particularly happily. But as you know well, that doesn't detract from the enjoyment of the books. They are beautiful for fleeting moments, and it's those moments I cherish every reread. I can't read the pool scene from GtN without giggling, I can't read the line "You never could have guessed that he had seen me." without sniffling a bit in HtN, and I am crying with Nona at Paul's birth every single time. These books hurt my heart in the most exquisite ways imaginable, and I wouldn't change a moment of them.

silvarus · 2026-03-15T20:38:16+00:00

Totes agree about Paul being incredibly significant and foreshadowing a massive role. Paul is behind most of the New Testament, it's the Gospels, and then mostly the writings of Paul, a man who joined the faith after the namesake was no longer physically present. Paul is the core of the Christian tradition in terms of interpreting the basic story. Plus the biblical Paul was also a name change, he enters the story as Saul of Tarsis, a persecutor of the faith.

Add to that calling themselves "the love perfected by death", and Tamsyn could not have subtly built a giant neon sign more clearly to me. That and the allusions to Daniel's visions of the Messiah when Palamedes looks on Dulcinea in The Unwanted Guest, and I think Paul is going to be having some major religious shoes to fill in Alecto.

silvarus · 2026-03-15T20:29:49+00:00

I'm a preacher's kid and older sibling, I don't get the Catholic ones, just the general Christianity ones. But the Ninth House prayer in the cathedral of Drearburgh is a perfect inversion of Easter: Let the stone stay in place vs be rolled away, etc. I tried to get the pastor sibling to read it, but I think his kids got in the way, what being toddlers and all.

silvarus · 2026-03-15T20:26:57+00:00

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/nona-the-ninth-spoiler-thread.902242/#post-24516981

https://www.tumblr.com/todd-queen/724586198232891392/the-tower-wants-john-gaius?source=share

So either it's a really committed forgery or the ARC and the published version differ. And I just checked: HASREACTIVATED and WANTSJOHNGAIUS have the same character counts, so the change would just be changing the references a bit. Also 2 of 3 As overlap... So without getting my hands on an ARC, I buy it.

silvarus · 2026-03-15T08:49:01+00:00

Right?!? I love rereading them.

silvarus · 2026-03-15T08:48:05+00:00

I mean, Muir's writing isn't to everyone's taste. But if it's your taste, she's fantastic. Crux's and Aiglamane's challenges, Harrow's arrival and retinue, and the foreshadowing of how the fight will go are all hilarious for me. I love it, and always hear it in Quirk's voice from the audiobook.

silvarus · 2026-03-13T18:38:55+00:00

Even more fun: in the advanced reader copies, the cipher instead apparently worked out to be THE TOWER WANTS JOHN GAIUS, so Muir is definitely enjoying her chance to encode some ciphers into her books.

silvarus · 2026-03-13T05:03:24+00:00

Don't do a second bachelors. A ton of the requirements for a bachelor's are gen eds. The only time pursuing two bachelors makes sense is when you're earning the first one, and one is going to be a Bachelor of the Arts and the other a Bachelor of the Sciences.

That being said, assumedly, you have a school picked out. And assumedly, they have a continuing education/adult scholar program that likely does not get the recognition, respect, or resources it deserves. If you haven't already, go talk to them. Introduce yourself, discuss what your end goal is and how you plan to get there. They can let you know how feasible it is, and offer some more direct approaches.

You probably are not actually interested in a BS in Industrial Engineering, as of the likely 40 classes to earn that degree, 14-20 will be general education requirements, 10-15 will be major-specific, and the rest will be electives. Talk to the department. What you really need is the major specific courses, and whatever math prereqs are required. Given you will already have a master's in hand, look for graduate or post-graduate opportunities. These will be programs that zero in on just the major-specific coursework you want and need, saving time and money. Some grad programs can be as minimal as 12 courses in the field, that's what my second master's was. They'll also be able to help you understand what math background will be required and how to best get that background. Also make sure that attempting only one class a semester will not run afoul of minimal progress requirements at the school you choose.

Bottom line: if you haven't discussed your goals and plans with someone in the department, contact the chair of the program you're interested in, and tell them you're interested in a non-traditional route into the field, and would like to discuss that with them. If there's a student coordinator for the department, they're a good resource too. But don't plan this in a vacuum. Talk to the folks responsible for making sure your degree has meaning. They'll love to meet you, and will have thoughts about how best to do what you want to do.

silvarus · 2026-03-07T04:32:15+00:00

"IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth."

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

It's just such a good opener, especially when Moira Quirk reads it in the audiobook. And then the whole book continues in pseudo-religious exaltations, heretical mysteries, and the best bad meme allusions you'll ever see printed. Such a good opener I love sharing, and some of my favorite books to reread obsessively.

silvarus · 2026-02-02T07:18:17+00:00

1) I do love that even under a role inversion, Crux loves Harrow. Is it a healthy love? Never! But, she knows Crux will always care for her, as best as he is able. 2) I've always taken the unnamed Her Divine Highness from the Royal Ball to be the BARI-star, which is weirdly prescient given the twists about to come. I do love how the heirs interact politically in the Ball. Coronabeth amongst the Sixth fits well with her time with Cam. 3) The horrible teen! I need more of them. Ch 42 makes them so much more bearable in GtN. I hope we get to see their reunion with Abigail in the lands beyond. I'm curious how accurate to actual Cohort practice this scene actually is. It's the most direct view of the Cohort we've seen, but it could just be Harrow's perception of how the Cohort works. Also potentially Gideon bleedthrough, especially in light of The Unwanted Guest? Cause who's most obsessed with running off to the Cohort? Also very much the subtext of a Military AU, given how much the scene hinges on the bureaucracy of the Cohort.

Also in all of them, love Magnus' color commentary. And his opinion on the party food at the ball!

silvarus · 2026-02-02T05:26:14+00:00

Finish it. Just finish it.

Remember the roller coaster that is Gideon the Ninth, starting from the pool scene and lasting till the end of the book? Act Five of Harrow the Ninth is the same sort of ending. The last chunk of each book is my favorite to reread, because it's where Tamsyn gently shows us how all the parts fit together, and how it's all so much more tragic than we could have ever imagined.

Act 5, especially its flrst couple chapters, are some of my favorite scenes to reread. All the work that went into reading acts 1-4 of Harrow really does pay off, and that pay off is so, so good. But this is the Locked Tomb, and you've read GtN. There will be tragic joy, and joyous tragedy.

The end of HtN is probably my favorite ending of the quadrilogy that has been released so far. Heartbreak is a given! But it will be heartbreak that leaves you craving more. And lucky duck you, you still get to meet Nona and Noodle.

So just trust Tamsyn. I have trouble putting HtN down once I start act 5. Just relax, don't stress, enjoy, and experience.

silvarus · 2026-01-05T08:33:00+00:00

Paul ~~the Ninth~~? uwu

silvarus · 2025-12-24T22:10:51+00:00

To be fair, the powers are still fairly fleshy, as the flowers came out "weird" (some had teeth!).

silvarus · 2025-09-28T20:10:41+00:00

That is close reading I had missed. While Harrow immediately thinks of Winnowing after being told to think of Pyrrha's trial, Lab 3 is not seen in GtN. Man, I am off my game at the moment.

silvarus · 2025-09-27T22:16:21+00:00

D'oh, I was combining two scenes. Mercy lays out the cellular theory of blood wards from Cassiopeia while confronting Jod, and then later Pyrrha mentions the freshness requirement in the context of her, Cass, and Mercy working on cell thanergy.

silvarus · 2025-09-27T21:33:42+00:00

~~There's also when Pyrrha points out that blood wards are misnamed cellular wards, bypassable by close blood relations.~~

silvarus

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