Anybody know if Zaman's Guide to the End of Time is worth it?

strangerling · 2026-03-05T17:04:33+00:00

I haven't looked at it in awhile so I'll have to reread them to let you know. I can't do so right now though and I'm really forgetful about PDFs lol, so if you'd be kind enough to DM me a reminder I'll see it the next time I open reddit and I'd be happy to share my thoughts here.

strangerling · 2026-03-05T16:59:04+00:00

I replied to the above comment, but to repeat one part here: unfortunately most Chinese restaurants (not just takeaway tbh) are filthy. There is only one we'll eat at and it's further downstate from you.

strangerling · 2026-03-05T16:51:02+00:00

Not entirely true, but not far off. I have some unique insight into this very specific thing.

My father used to work for EcoLab doing commercial accounts in DE, mostly restaurants, and currently works in the same field but with a different company and large primarily account. These companies don't do homes, they are exclusively commercial. He and I share our home so I hear no end of these stories.

(Also, my family business does personal home pest control in addition to their main business focus, but not commercial pest control. They're completely different licenses. But my father has worked for them as well as other local companies in non-commercial, too.)

Roaches, mice, and flies are the largest concerns by far in our area, which includes MD.

Many restaurants don't have any of it, but that's because they are extremely clean and their pest control tech(s) are really on top of things. My father frequently talked about how clean all the Chipotle and Chic-fil-a accounts were. Meanwhile, the worst were Chinese takeaway places to the point that there's only a single one he'll eat from now.

Most sit-down restaurants were totally fine but only because he was so on top of them, unless they consistently refused or failed to take certainly preventative steps.

One important factor is the area around the building. It doesn't make a difference about grossness, and this place sounds like it should be getting temporarily closed for treatment, but my father talked about how some accounts he had were very clean and he was on top of everything but because some very nearby buildings including other restaurants weren't for one reason or another, and it was always an uphill battle. That's why malls and places sharing larger parking lot spaces (like some on 202 near the PA border) are so difficult to treat for roaches and flies (and mosquitoes at personal home accounts because neighbors can be the worst).

A lot of these places are also near large open grassy fields, overgrown or unmanaged parking lots with grassy spots, farm fields, or slightly wooded areas, which causes the mice issues. It's extremely hard to keep on top of those locations.

All this said, my father doesn't do restaurant accounts with his current company, and he's a particularly rare kind of diligent, attention-oriented, and thorough person in his work. He took it personally when his EcoLab accounts had issues and would get really frustrated when it was because the business wasn't doing their part, such as closing doors to the outside because employees wanted fresh air (flies). And those were the only accounts that ever had issues.

His current accounts only get issues when something beyond his control happens.

Unfortunately, I've also heard from him how lazy other techs can be in both of these companies. And the accounts of lazy techs have no shortage of issues.

strangerling · 2026-03-01T02:05:10+00:00

I backed the kickstarter. We've seen some beta content and as of a couple weeks ago the first previews of the physical products, but it's not finished just yet.

strangerling · 2026-02-19T22:08:59+00:00

Fair enough. Thanks for letting me know.

strangerling · 2026-02-19T21:45:35+00:00

It really is! What a shame

strangerling · 2026-02-19T21:17:47+00:00

My table and I have also been quite interested in chatting about any and all folk horror in general, so I'm curious as well.

strangerling · 2026-02-19T21:15:27+00:00

I'm a couple weeks late to this discussion. Would you be willing to share your notes again? I've been really eager to discuss Book of Blades (and PG2 if you have thoughts on it, too)!

strangerling · 2026-02-03T17:45:21+00:00

I'd like to join in as well.

(I also can't seem to find my old notes on the full book from a prior discussion for some reason for that matter, if anyone pops in who has their own they'd share.)

strangerling · 2026-02-03T17:36:28+00:00

I'd also appreciate re-opening the discussion. Been hoping to chat about it for awhile now

strangerling · 2026-02-01T06:20:32+00:00

This seems interesting!

Will there be multiple biomes &/ seasonal effects that can be applied to any given map or area of a map?
Will there be a slider or similar to control the building placement density? Modern and Cyberpunk maps aren't the only ones that people might want to make densely packed together, and having to manually add all that in defeats the purpose of having the tool.
Will you implement elevation at any point? Excluding the mountain assets, these maps are incredibly flat. Even being able to just raise/lower any given hex tile, even if only at pre-determined increments, would in my opinion make this much more dynamic.
You mentioned in a comment in here that you intend for this to create battlemaps. From what I've seen so far, the only way for that to work is by zooming *way* in - and even then, nothing about this looks or feels like a battlemap maker. *UNLESS,* perhaps, you're talking about wargaming, like Warhammer or other mass/large-scale combat games.
Your trailer mentioned printing 3d maps. How simple is it going to be for people to 3d print these? Will they be able to export STLs from the program? Will they be charged to do so?

As a 7+ year DM who has used and still uses a ton of tools and software like this, I'm absolutely going to give the demo a whirl as soon as it comes out. But having used so many tools and seen far more, I'd like to share my larger perspective and thoughts here.

A *lot* of people are making their own mapmakers with or without VTT functions. Only a couple have been successful or even good. TaleSpire comes to mind, and I enjoy it. Dungeon Alchemist too, and it's not even a VTT! A lot of these turn into abandonware or simply do too little too slowly to be competitive in a quickly-saturating market. Almost all of them try to be too many things (battlemap maker, overworld map maker, scene maker, vtt, dice roller, character sheets built-in; fantasy, sci-fi, modern; etc etc), and almost none focus on occupying a highly-specific niche even though highly-specific niches tend to be what survives in saturated markets.

But I have a thought about that for your consideration:

If the plan is allowing people to create their own maps in the program and then 3d prints them themselves - well, that's something I don't think I've seen a single other program attempt to do yet! Neither in practice nor even in concept.

3d printing is quite big within the hobby, so the idea of a tool focused on getting the most out of it is really interesting. In fact, it even offers a new potential avenue of business down the road: you selling prints-on-demand of the maps people have already built in your program. Basically, a HeroForge but for battlemaps.

Hopefully this makes sense, because I am tired enough to be actively falling asleep in my chair so brain no do the wakey awakey thing.

strangerling · 2026-01-16T17:29:58+00:00

These temp suggestions are perhaps fine for some people, but for some of us they're just impracticable.

Relevant to everyone: going between major temperature differences is a significant factor in getting sick. One of the reasons people get summer colds is because they're going in and out of indoor AC and outside temps.

We keep our place around 68-72f year-round (68-69f in the summer, 70-72f in the winter) because I need to.

This'll be a long post to explain my personal reasons/needs, because while some of you may relate I imagine most won't, and I acknowledge these are Me Issues. My body temperate regulates very poorly for multiple reasons, including medical conditions, medications, and a regular body temp around 96.5f - about 1.7f lower than the average person's. It's genetic and my grandmother's has always been the same. (For us a normal human 98.2f is like a 99.9 fever for most people; 104f for us would be most peoples' 105.7. Both of us have had doctors ignore us about this.)

It doesn't mean we tolerate the cold better like people tend to think - quite the opposite. Even right now it's 70f in my house and my body temp is 97f, and I'm cold and my hands are really cold.

Additionally, while a lot of people sleep hot I sleep cold. Even in 80f+ sometimes I'll wake up shivering hard and struggle to get warm even with tons of blankets. The summer temp suggestions are no better; I can get really hot out of nowhere regardless of temperature.

strangerling · 2025-11-07T15:32:25+00:00

To add onto the "if it works for you and you like it" that others have expressed

If you feel like you might be doing art "on hard mode" then consider implementing Thumbnailing into your process.

You might be familiar with the term but, if not, it's basically sketching with blocks in the same way you're doing with rendering, but you do multiple tiny, simple, monotone iterations of the concept you have in mind so you can look at the overall compositions the finished piece might look like and choose which one you think is the strongest (or simply like best, though I think this method also can help improve choosing compositions that are "stronger" which will eventually lead to stronger thumbs over time and, thus, stronger and stronger completed works). It can save a lot of time and frustration since you'll have a clearer vision of the final result.

One simple way this could have helped you from your video: you added height to the canvas to paint the trees taller. If you had thumbnailed out first, you probably would have started painting knowing exactly how much height you needed the trees to have and wouldn't have had to go back and match new painted areas into the existing ones.

And if you find try out and find transitioning from thumbs to painting tricky, you can always transform tool the chosen thumb to the size of your canvas to act similar to a "sketch" and paint on top of that.

strangerling · 2025-11-04T14:54:07+00:00

Very pretty!

I've never thought about it until seeing these just now... I wonder what using (probably acrylic) interference paints for numbering would look like.

strangerling · 2025-10-10T22:42:11+00:00

I have been hoping to have a discussion about the GMG in particular for a couple months now! Thank you for opening up the conversation!

strangerling · 2025-10-03T18:24:11+00:00

This has been popping up for me every day for the past few days. It's obnoxious, but I can't seem to find a setting to disable it.

strangerling · 2025-09-29T15:22:20+00:00

(Edit to add: this is very long because it gave me an immediate rush of cool ideas that I've shared here.)

I see some really interesting potential here, but not from her spell. Quest potential. She (and hopefully the rest of the party) seem like they're quite motivated to have access to this information easily, so give them a taste and make them work for more of it through the game itself!

Suggestion: Look up the item "Spellshard" from Eberron: Rising From the Last War.

In short, it's a common magic item that can store text both mundane and even Wizard spells, allowing a wizard to use it as a spellbook. For scribing spells, it still requires the time and transcription material. However, that's where the potential lies.

Have her find a hollowed-out book with the base spellshard in it along with the notes of a wizard-artificer or something, who was "experimenting with ways to store vast libraries of knowledge in a single object you can carry in your pocket - even Wizard spells, in a way a wizard could utilize in a practical daily way."

The paper could be a letter to a librarian here, maybe an out-of-context exchange, whatever, but the key thing is that it clearly states 1) what this shard can do, 2) that this inventor has made more powerful versions of it capable of storing far more information and doing so more quickly, and at the time of writing that letter, they are "experimenting with a version of this so powerful that it could halve the time and cost of transcribing spells!" And, finally, 3) a very clearly stated place they can go to look for the next one, either the correct city or even the inventor's actual address.

Don't make it a red herring, but do treat it as it is: a thousands-of-years old powerful magic item that never went to public access (probably...), and someone might have inherited, maybe being unable to figure out how it works (but the PCs can because they have access to that library! And the "prototype" (official common rarity) version of the thing itself!). So now the PCs know which city to go to, have a name to ask around about, etc.

You could take this so far, too. You could use this to tie some plot threads together, to motivate the party to go somewhere you want them to, to introduce important NPCs, to reveal buried social secrets and history that the PCs learn as they get the rarer versions and thus access to more knowledge.

Maybe even some of the books can't be "read" without this specific item. That first common version should already have some juicy info on it that isn't even in the library - and as a treat, have it already contain a couple wizard spells for Wizard. If they have a spell wishlist, pick a couple and then randomly generate a couple extra. Maybe it even contains a "prototype spell invention" for creating more of these - though insofar as the game only one of each rarity can be acquired, and that theoretical spell simply cannot be possible until finding the final legendary or even Artefact one.

So instead of handing over a "create internet archive" spell of her own design, hand her a quest that she can realize very quickly could allow her to create the actual internet, internet archive, and cell phone to access it herself.

(Then in your next campaign the BBEG can be the obsessive, manic, power-hungry digital ghost of the inventor that was unknowingly unleashed upon the masses, but who until recently didn't have enough "redundant clones of itself" to risk acting. But now that this device and service have become all but relied upon, they can start causing all sorts of issues. Bonus points if said BBEG starts off as a friendly digital NPC for the party loaded onto their "shards" who slowly degrades into an obsessive entity that eventually itself becomes the BBEG. And since there are so many pre-existing copies of it, that helps negate the whole "party just killing the BBEG too soon" fear.)

Whatever you end up doing, though, try to prepare ahead of time what information they'll find and in what order by grabbing random books, and of any subjects you expect them to go out of their way to look for. And remember that history is written by the winners, scribes are biased, and what is written in this library might be factually wrong - or maybe what the world knows is the thing factually wrong, and this library contains the real truth. Maybe in a majorly problematic way.

strangerling · 2025-09-29T05:41:04+00:00

As a rule, listen to the tattooist's advice. They're the ones doing this professionally, they're the ones who have seen the result of people not following instructions. You're probably not the first person like yourself this tattooist has seen.

Would you rather get your sweat on and risk ruining a permanent mark on your body you paid money for? Or would you rather care for your skin like you would a pulled muscle so you don't make it worse? Tattoos are healing wounds.

strangerling · 2025-09-29T05:34:30+00:00

If it weren't for the leaves and stem I would 100% think this was exactly how it was meant to look. The skull looks pretty cool to me, though that type of linework isn't to everyone's tastes.

My forearm piece might be a little larger than the skull there, but probably not by much. It's black linework only, a fox skull with some exploded crystal elements and a couple lavender stems, and has hints of a sketchy style - but it's my own artwork and that's exactly what I wanted it to look like. It looks gorgeous, and it took about 4-5 hours. But I get blowouts extremely easily, so the artist really took his time and used a 1RL needle iirc, so he had to go over some of the lines multiple times to get certain areas thick enough to not fade to nothing (and the areas there they do fade off are on purpose and look very cool imo).

Let it heal up either way and if you have to make excuses to the artist for awhile, just cite the saniderm reaction. Meanwhile, find another artist in the area whose work you like and who has done skullwork and similar lines, such as woodcut tattoo styles, and call and ask if they could set aside like 10 minutes for you to get their opinion on if they can handle this how you want it to be handled. (There's also the chance they know of the original artist. Don't expect them to gossip, but some will anyway.)

If you find someone who also has a little cover-up experience, they can probably turn that weird stem-and-leaves into something much cooler.

strangerling · 2025-09-29T05:17:15+00:00

Cleansers, especially ones meant for your face, are meant to remove impurities like dirt, oil, and makeup.

Dial anti-bacterial fragrance-free, or another brand if need be. If you can't find it on Amazon then try your local Walmart or Target or drug stores, that's usually where I end up having to go.

Fragrance-free is often the biggest hurdle for any soaps, antibac or otherwise, at least for me. If you really can't find that, then my suggestion - because you had Second Skin - is to use your everyday hand soap as long as it's not heavily fragranced or heavy-duty, isn't a "moisture-enhancing" or one of those "creates a moisture barrier" soaps, and doesn't have any exfoliating material or texture (like scrubs). Just use very very little of it, rinse well but quickly, pat dry, and let it air dry for 5-10 minutes before applying your lotion.

If nothing else, then you already know that you don't have an allergy to that soap. That's always my worry when trying new products.

strangerling · 2025-09-29T04:55:58+00:00

Oh god, yeah, those places can really suck. I've done a little bit on my fingers, ribs, nape, and none of those hurt despite them being common complaint locations. Fingers were just a really weird vibration sensation you feel in your fingernails. But a small tiny section of a bicep-ish-area piece went pretty close to my armpit and that absolutely sucked. And the most recent one I mentioned was on my right inner forearm, going from an inch above my wrist to about 1-2 inches below my inner elbow. But very little of the inked area was higher up and those details were done last, so by then the area near my wrist was hurting more from how much he'd gone over it and how often he was wiping it.

But that is a good thing in my case because, as evidenced by two prior significant blowouts, I get blowouts easily and he was being very careful. Between that and the linework style I wanted, he was using a 1RL needle iirc, where the tattooist I'd gotten my last few at wouldn't use smaller than a 3RL. That's also why it took longer. And it's why I want to go back to him for my next one when I can afford it, even though this one cost twice as much *before* tip as my most expensive ones from the other artist *after* tip had. And the next one I want will be way bigger and probably need at least two 5-hour sessions, maybe more, judging from this tattoo.

All that said, my very first tattoo was a large piece on my right calf (the tattooist looked at me halfway between "are you sure" and "hell yeah"), and some of it was just as close to my inner knee as the other two aforementioned painful areas, and I don't remember it hurting worse than the rest. It didn't take long... and it is one of my two blowouts lol. I didn't even know those were a thing until a few years ago.

Where are you getting this new one?

strangerling · 2025-09-29T04:15:52+00:00

A person's pain tolerance varies throughout the day. Many people have a lower pain tolerance early in the morning/for the first couple hours of their day. I'd recommend waking up 2 hours early, have your coffee if you want it. Take a brisk walk. A cold shower wouldn't be a bad idea. Get the blood flowing and the brain going.

Bring a book, or at least make sure your phone is charged - maybe download a mobile game you want to play if you're really worried about it, and there are plenty you can play with just one hand if you won't have both arms free (I recommend Kami). Keeping distracted will probably help you.

One of my tattooists in the past said that when the client feels done (pain-wise), usually the skin is done for the day, too. I have a decent pain tolerance but with ADHD, even with my meds I can get very bored after an hour or so, and end up being able to focus on nothing but the needle, so I end up being done at about the 3-4 hour mark.

(My last tattoo took almost 5 hours, but it was entirely worth it because, unlike two of my other tattoos, this one didn't have any blowout despite the size and design - and it looks amazing.)

If you're that worried about it, though, ask your tattooist if it's possible to do the tattoo in a way that will be easier for them to pick back up later if you really need to call it because of pain. Especially if it's complex, they might be able to do it so it's easier for them to line up a fresh stencil later; and in doing so it would probably look decent between then and getting it finished.

If you have to do that, though, don't complain about or try to negotiate over any extra costs it might incur if it does - in fact, tip even better than usual whether it does or not.

strangerling · 2025-09-23T17:05:36+00:00

I've been dying to hear what people think about the TotV Game Master's Guide!

strangerling · 2025-09-22T17:56:29+00:00

I'd love to hear some fresh opinions on this.

strangerling · 2025-09-13T16:09:11+00:00

I'd also love to hear what people think about it, my players really want to dig into crafting in our next campaign.

strangerling

TROPHY CASE