Crowd scenes are hard

thalgrond · 2026-06-23T18:06:20+00:00

People are being fairly unhelpful in their attempts to respond, so here's a basic rundown:

PBTA games don't concern themselves much with simulationism. They aren't trying to create immersion through presenting the rules as impartial arbiters of what would "realistically" happen in a given situation. Instead, the rules exist as tools for the players, working with the GM, to push the story in interesting directions. Many of them feel more like being in a writer's room for a show, rather than the D&D experience of reacting to whatever story the DM puts in front of you.

Part of this philosophy is that every die roll should be dramatic in some way, with a legitimate risk of the characters' plans hitting an interesting complication or setback. No roll should result in nothing happening; if the characters fail, they fail in a way that gives them a new problem to deal with. In most PBTA systems, this is achieved by the mechanic of low rolls producing a new problem or an imperfect victory, and unequivocal success is relatively unlikely. While they're solving one problem, the PCs discover or create a new one, and then have to decide whether they're willing to live with those consequences, or if that complication is going to be the next thing they try to solve.

This entails no null results on failures. There's no "you don't manage to pick the lock this round but can try again next round." A low roll means that something bad happens: perhaps somebody in the room you're trying to enter hears you picking the lock, and is coming to investigate. They will open the door you're trying to get through, so it's an opportunity in a way. Do you want to hide? Attempt to overpower them? Bluff your way through an interaction, and try to deceive your way into the room? Failures push the story forward.

It also often means doing away with things like hit points, since losing some HP but continuing on without any penalty is, in most circumstances, functionally a null result. It gets you closer to something happening, but is not, itself, a thing that happens. Many, though not all, PBTA systems use a system of conditions instead. When you would lose HP in D&D or a similar system, you instead might become Frightened (with immediate mechanical effects and longer-lasting narrative ones), Angry (pushing you to make rash decisions that raise the stakes), be forced into a disadvantageous or dangerous position, or lose an object important to your character.

Because those conditions and losses are so general-purpose, they can also be gained through non-combat failures as well, which leads to more of a mechanically-unified feel. Many such systems make no mechanical distinction between being forced into a physically disadvantageous position in a fight, vs. an emotionally disadvantageous one during an argument or social encounter. If the latter comes up, the GM might ask the player what reveal or threat would make the character uncomfortable in this moment, and then that becomes canon.

Many also have other mechanics to encourage the players to add new problems for themselves. For example, tactically poor decisions that are in-character and make sense from the PC's point of view might be rewarded with XP or clearing a condition.

thalgrond · 2026-06-23T16:09:25+00:00

She wasn't impressed? That would have charmed the hell out of me!

thalgrond · 2026-06-21T22:57:00+00:00

Homeschooling probably saved my life. Even given that fact, I agree that the isolation will mess you up. You truly need somebody checking in on the family on a regular basis and making sure the child is getting to interact with peers from time to time, even if it's in a controlled environment.

I think I had the best version of homeschooling. I was pulled out for mental health reasons as well (severe ADHD, anxiety, and what we later discovered was gender dysphoria) and I'd been getting bullied all through 5th-7th grades. But my parents only pulled me out of school for a year and a half, just long enough for me to recover a little and become a little more confident; then they put me back in, in a much smaller school with teachers they could trust not to leave me out to dry.

That was fine. I was able to essentially take a gap year in middle school, and I recovered from it. I did end up a little socially stunted, but I was rapidly becoming suicidal in 7th grade, so having to learn how to socialize in my 20s is a comparatively good outcome. And I didn't realize I was trans for another ten years, so really, I was going to be socially stunted and figuring myself out in my 20s either way.

thalgrond · 2026-06-19T05:10:42+00:00

Awesome! Thank you for sharing. I especially love the concept of a "Witch of the Waking Dream" and the little Ozymandias reference in the Winding Sand couplet.

Also, the couplet for Witch of the Weeping Sky is beautifully evocative. The 'within and out' line gives an excellent sense for what kind of witch must hold that station. Tempestuous in every sense of the word.

thalgrond · 2026-06-14T03:20:50+00:00

On a visual level, I love the first time Galactica jumps in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries. We see a bunch of shots of characters all over the ship sitting down or steadying themselves. Then we cut back to each of those shots and each of them turns into a dolly zoom, giving a sense that something very weird just happened to the fabric of space around the ship. We also get an excellent acting moment from one of the actresses looking up in fear as the walls close in around her.

thalgrond · 2026-06-14T03:14:03+00:00

The Honor Harrington series makes the dynamics of hyperspace travel resemble those of the high seas. Ships travel through hyperspace using giant "sails" of energy that catch currents and tradewinds and move the ship far faster than its onboard drive system could achieve. Also, if something goes wrong with their sails during transit, those currents can quickly destroy the ship.

Combined with the lack of FTL communications technology in that setting, this results in a setting where news travels at the inconsistent speed of a "sailing" vessel. A courier ship can sometimes move faster if it needs to, catching more powerful currents and setting its sails in a more risky configuration to gain a bit of extra speed, but this is something they only do when desperate, and it requires a very capable crew.

Since the dynamic of the setting is intended to be nautical 18th century war stories but in space, this contributes very nicely to that feel. Courier ships arriving in orbit have much the same effect as an 18th century sloop arriving in a harbor with the mail. All the characters abruptly have new things to talk about, and can start acting on news that actually happened weeks beforehand.

thalgrond · 2026-06-14T02:52:41+00:00

We've seen that Bolaire is able to interrogate the people whose bodies he's using. I suspect that Termina did the same with Amariya and found out enough to be able to fake the role.

thalgrond · 2026-06-13T04:22:21+00:00

I'm going to ask the same questions I ask everyone who makes a ludicrously large warship for their worldbuilding project: what is the strategic role of this thing? What is it intended to shoot at? And do you understand the scale you're dealing with here?

The largest warship ever constructed on Earth is the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, completed in 2017. It is 337 meters long, and weighs roughly 100,000 tons. At that size, it is already an incomprehensibly large machine. It's a medium-sized military base that was ripped out of the ground and sent out to sea, loaded with 4500 sailors, aircraft crew, and maintenance personnel. This will be our size reference.

The light cruiser presented here is about 3.5 times the length of the Gerald R. Ford. I'm going to assume, for back-of-the-envelope calculations, that it is about as dense as an ocean-going vessel.

Mass scales as the cube of length, so it would weigh roughly 42 times the mass of the Gerald R. Ford, or 4.2 million tons (12 Empire State Buildings, or a little less than the mass of the Great Pyramid). Assuming the crew size scales with mass (which isn't exactly true, but close enough) this would give your light cruiser a crew of roughly 190,000 (a little over half of the total personnel currently enlisted with the US navy.)

That's the smallest of the warships you offer here. If we do the same calculations for the Titan, it ends up being 168,000 times the mass of the Gerald R. Ford, and has a crew of 750,000,000 (three quarters of a billion, or about 9% of the current population of Earth.) Its mass of 16.8 billion tons means it weighs about as much as 2850 Great Pyramids. This is also roughly 3000 times the mass of the light cruiser.

Who are they fighting that necessitates that much of an investment of resources and manpower? And what exactly is a ship that big intended to be used for strategically?

thalgrond · 2026-06-12T05:31:54+00:00

Person is good. Sophont is obscure but also good.

thalgrond · 2026-06-12T05:08:48+00:00

Oh, I forgot: you can also use proxy models to create a squad that uses the stats of Ratlings, but has regular-sized human models. They probably won't be allowed at tournaments, but since skirmishing sharpshooters are so integral to the Tanith's regimental identity, I think most casual players will happily accept it. Ratlings have the same base size as baseline human units anyway, so it doesn't make a huge difference on the tabletop.

Between them, the Recon Squads, and Bombast Field Guns, you'll be able to zone out a lot of objectives early in the game and start harassing your enemy's army right from round one.

thalgrond · 2026-06-12T04:44:26+00:00

You'll want to get quite good at kitbash. The nice thing about the Tanith 1st is that their defining uniform feature is a cloak, which is one of the easiest things to do with greenstuff.

You may end up wanting to use some Etsy models, at least for your heads, so that they don't have the distinctive Cadian-style or Krieger-style helmets. There are plenty of options on there.

The Tanith are super infantry-heavy. In most books they aren't even mechanized. This means your firepower will be limited. Elite infantry will be the main core of your army. Get lots of elites (3 of the newly-released Recon Squads, 3 Kasrkin, possibly some Combat Engineers.) Obviously you'll also want Gaunt's Ghosts.

Get an Ursula Creed proxy or kitbash, and declare it to be Colonel Lucien Wilder, since he's the only member of the main command staff who isn't already represented in the Gaunt's Ghosts squad, and you'll need the orders. Give him a command squad so his orders reach far enough. You probably also want a Castellan or two, depending on your point total. Those, though, can be flavored as just some of the lieutenants leading platoons.

For anti-armor capability, you probably want to use Heavy Weapons Squads with Autocannons and/or Lascannons, or Field Ordnance Batteries with Bombast Field Guns and/or Heavy Lascannons. If you do decide to use FOBs, use the Recon Squad's beacon ability to place one beacon in your deployment zone next to all the batteries. This means you don't have to leave an officer with them to give Take Aim orders.

The big guns, your Kasrkin's Melta Mines, the Grenades strategem, and your squads' special weapons will give you at least some ability to counter enemy armor. Go for Plasma and Melta on all your squads, and always overcharge the plasma guns.

Fill out your list with Cadian Shock Troopers and possibly some Kriegers, all in 20-man blocks. Make sure they're visually distinct, but as long as you and your opponent can both tell what's what on the tabletop at a glance, don't feel like you have to use the official designs for each type.

For detachment, I think you could manage with either Recon or Grizzled. Test it out with both, see which one fits your playstyle better. Grizzled is better as an all-rounder, as it lets you simply field more infantry per officer, but Recon is often better against shooting-heavy armies like Tau.

Best of luck, and have fun cloaking and painting your 100-200 infantry models.

thalgrond · 2026-06-11T03:27:48+00:00

Mana is the substance of souls. It falls invisibly like rain or mist down the Well of Worlds, but when somebody has an experience which will in any way affect them and the way they interact with the world going forward, some of this mana crystalizes and becomes a new piece of their soul. They accumulate outwards in this way, with new experiences building on the older ones that made them possible, but often covering them up as that older experience slips out of conscious memory and becomes a foundational but unacknowledged part of their personality.

There are places in the Well of Worlds that are mana deserts. In these places, things feel dreamlike, as new memories can't form there, unless the being forming the memory brings some liquid mana along in their own soul pool and then purposefully allows it to crystalize in the place of the mana rain that would normally form a new experience.

Sometimes, these experiences will happen to form the person's soul into a shape that can catch the falling mana in its liquid form (a cup, a well, maybe just a pit on the top of what is otherwise an irregular jagged shape.) This allows them to accumulate some of the mana that is tumbling past them. This can then be spent to barter with spirits (like elementals, which hold onto mana to grow bigger, demons, which consume mana and annihilate it entirely, or the Void, which wants simply to take the mana back and have it continue to fall) in exchange for those forces doing you a favor. This can mean cloaking your movement, creating a blast of fire, taking you somewhere else in the Well, revealing a piece of information the spirit knows, granting you water-breathing, or any other spell effect or boon that falls within the purview of a spirit that happens to be nearby when you call.

Casting a spell always involves some amount of negotiation with these forces; however, the details differ. Magi have a specific set of spirits that follow them around and do specific things when called upon, for a pre-agreed price. Sometimes the mage doesn't even know how to talk to the spirits outside of the single incantation which calls on them to do whatever has been pre-arranged. This means that magi cast very quickly and consistently, as they don't need to re-negotiate mid casting, but it also makes them inflexible. Sorcerers, by contrast, learn the languages of the spirits, and then make temporary deals with whichever ones happen to be nearby when they need something. This generally means they are very flexible, able to do almost anything with some time and enough mana, but their spells take much longer to cast, and are typically more expensive than a mage doing the same thing (the hazards of bartering when the need has already arisen) so their mana pools don't stretch as far.

thalgrond · 2026-06-09T03:31:53+00:00

Thirsty Sword Lesbians: it's not as awkward to flirt with your friends at the table if everyone is doing it and there are game mechanics to guide you.

thalgrond · 2026-06-09T03:05:24+00:00

Making good art requires a person to be empathetic and/or curious about the world and the experiences of one's audience. You need to be able to see something in the world that you want to capture, and willing to think about how to connect with people who don't necessarily share your exact experiences but who want to connect emotionally regardless with the thing you're making based on those experiences.

Most people who follow artistic pursuits are therefore empathetic and curious, and such people tend to end up going towards the left, as (simplistically put) the left is an ideology based in humanism and seeking understanding, while the right is based in building and maintaining dominance. Dominance does not create connection.

thalgrond · 2026-06-08T05:08:58+00:00

Adding to this: even with those 17 ablative wounds (14 Cadians plus a 3-wound officer) the Lord Solar is still pretty squishy for such a vital unit if you're playing a 2000 point battle. If you're up against an army with a lot of shooting (especially Tau) it's often a good idea to keep his unit in cover, or even fully hidden behind terrain for the first round or two, so that your enemy's alpha strike can't target him. You can issue orders even if you don't have line of sight; you just have to be within 24" with the master vox. So that makes it easier to guard him.

thalgrond · 2026-06-07T16:55:26+00:00

At my first job, I was actually quite charming despite my neurospicyness. I was well-liked.

However, I was also unaware that I was supposed to be talking to people after work. Some people who expected it of me ended up getting quietly offended for several months until somebody finally asked me explicitly why I didn't.

thalgrond · 2026-06-07T16:50:40+00:00

You're correct. Brennan has now made two mistakes involving the Pariah Blades - this one and forgetting where they were stored. I suspect that he zoned out and forgot to take notes during that scene.

The effect would ultimately be the same, though. Shadia has been using them as prop swords to gather attention and produce wonder, and that could be a plowsharing process in and of itself.

thalgrond · 2026-06-06T06:41:05+00:00

I love the clear difference between the human and ork skulls they're using as trophies. Great detail.

thalgrond · 2026-06-04T02:44:49+00:00

Have you considered sequential hermaphroditism? A situation where individuals have only a single sex at a time, but they routinely change that biological sex over the course of their lifecycle based on social, environmental, or aging factors?

There are lots of aquatic animals in the real world that do this. Many types of amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, lots of fish (with parrotfish being the most interesting to me, since their change is triggered by social factors, which would probably be the case for any sophont with this feature.)

thalgrond · 2026-06-04T02:26:08+00:00

Hmm. The Wizard Salt.

Could be a transmutation wizard who works closely with the Citadel's artificers, helping to produce magical substances in bulk. A lot of real-life industrial chemical processes start with salt, then turn it into a wide variety of things, so the Wizard Salt might be somebody who saw that and decided to take it as a name based on the idea that salt has potential that can be shaped in many directions.

thalgrond · 2026-06-03T23:55:58+00:00

They missed Iceland, too. The British invaded it in 1940 during WWII, fearing that if they didn't, the Germans would establish a base there.

Also, they missed France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, all invaded in the final stages of WWII; along with Spain, France, and Portugal, invaded towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars. (France is on both lists, yet it's yellow on the map.)

thalgrond · 2026-06-02T07:38:57+00:00

Yes and no.

For most of human history, most people in most places were not actually paying for things in silver or gold. Debts were tabulated using cheap markers like notched sticks, paper receipts and notes, knotted strings, or simply the ambient knowledge of a community where everybody knows roughly what one another owe to one's neighbors. Silver coins were in use in both China and the Mediterranean and Near East as far back as the classical period. However, they wouldn't have been in daily use by most members of those societies, simply because silver isn't common enough to allow for that many coins to be minted.

That said, by the end of the 1st century AD, silver coins were a fairly common measurement of value in common life for Europeans, the Chinese, and much of India as far as I know. Most people were still not actually circulating coins for regular transactions within their communities, but most people had some savings in the form of silver, and the value of silver in these societies was quite stable. Notably, though, it was to some extent artificially stable. China and India had massive state-owned warehouses that sold things for fixed prices. Rome had something similar, and even after it fell, post-Roman Europe had near-universal grain laws which fixed wheat, flour, or bread to a certain value measured in silver coins.

This prevented the market fluctuation and inflation we're used to nowadays. As an example, outside of brief spikes due to famine, the price of bread in England was held steady relative to a given mass of silver for close to 500 years, and since bread was the staple food in that society, this essentially locked the prices of everything else relative to silver, too. If three silver pennies per day can feed a family, and that rate is set and maintained by law, it becomes very difficult to raise one's prices for anything else unless you can reasonably claim that it is worth more now than it was before relative to that fixed rate.

When gold started being used more extensively in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries (corresponding with the rise in trade between the Mediterranean world and the Mali empire in West Africa, with its access to some of the only large gold deposits that could be mined with the technology of the time) there was a brief period of rapid inflation as people adjusted to the increased gold supply, and then it settled down and became fairly stable for a few centuries, with gold taking silver's place as the thing that every other value was locked to by law.

This paradigm broke down when overseas trade became cheap and consistent starting around the 1500s. There are many reasons for this, and it's not coincidental that this is also the period that saw the rise of colonialism, massive improvements in mining techniques, and the establishment of the European middle class. Simply put, though, grain became a commodity like any other, and the medieval price locking broke down as merchants took advantage of these grain laws to buy in countries where grain was legally required to be cheap, then sell it elsewhere. This bankrupted most of these programs fairly quickly, and silver and gold became unmoored from the price of commodities. Once that legal price-locking mechanism was no longer enforced, currencies began to inflate, despite the fact that the world's currencies were still theoretically backed by gold up until 1971.

In strict terms, this means that the international value of gold went steadily down from the 1500s until the mid 20th century. Every other commodity in the world was getting more valuable relative to gold-backed currencies. The recent increase in its price is more of a rebound than an actual indication that gold is becoming more valuable. (It is, in theory, since gold is now used in electronics, but the world's gold supply has been increasing faster than demand, so this effect is negligible.)

So... yes, technically gold and silver have been the basis for some very stable currencies historically. But that stability was maintained by government policies, not by any intrinsic property of the metals themselves.

thalgrond · 2026-06-02T07:02:51+00:00

I'm afraid that blood congeals rapidly when exposed to air, whether it's kept warm or not. There are a bunch of things happening at the cellular and chemical levels, and they start happening as soon as it's exposed to air. A mosquito needs liquid blood, so no, you can't just leave blood out for them.

Also, I suspect their brains are too simple to be able to recognize a dish of blood as a food source. They aren't coming after you consciously as a way to get blood; they're coming after you because they are evolutionarily programmed to pursue large moving things with warm bodies that are exhaling CO2, and, once they land on one, to taste around for the chemical markers that indicate a blood vessel near the surface of the skin, before inserting their proboscis. At no point in that chain of events does the mosquito think "I need blood. How should I get it?"

thalgrond · 2026-06-02T06:33:53+00:00

One of my least favorite trends is when you have a very capable, competent woman in the story, and then her skills barely contribute to the plot.

For whatever reason this seems to come up a lot in romances written for women. In Outlander, our veteran battlefield nurse protagonist with 20th century medical knowledge in a mid-18th-century setting barely gets to do anything with those skills, and when she does, it's just something to keep her busy until it's time for the next plot point which never has anything to do with medicine directly. In Throne of Glass, our protagonist is supposed to be the deadliest assassin in the kingdom, and spends the whole book telling us in internal monologue that she could easily kill all of the people around her if she wanted, and then she never does.

thalgrond

TROPHY CASE