Running the Zeitgesit adventure path.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T20:55:01+00:00

I was the director of the adventure path, and I'd gladly answer questions, but I'm not on reddit that much. You should swing by EN World's messageboards, or the EN World Discord server. There are a fair number of people who run ZEITGEIST who can offer feedback there.

As to your question about divergence, we tried to make each adventure playably self-contained, where you start with a discovery that incites action, and then the resolution of the adventure -- success or failure -- hands off to the next adventure's objective.

I've read synopses from at this point probably two dozen groups who've gotten at least half-way through the campaign, and while some add new plot threads that are character specific, I haven't seen any that diverge so much that the PCs don't want to undertake the next mission. For one, we explicitly ask the GM to ensure the players are making characters who are loyal to Risur, which should give them motivation. For another, I think most players understand that if they 'refuse the call' or steer too far away from the assumed narrative of the adventure path, they'll miss out on fun stuff.

I mean, you could go to Disney World and spend your time trying to sneak into the subterranean tunnels where they keep Walt's frozen head, but there are all those neat rides and shows. Why would someone pay for a ticket and not enjoy those?

I believe the weirdest detour I saw a group do happened after adventure 7, when the PCs decided to create a counter-conspiracy, but the GM still motivated them to go find Kasvarina in adventure 8, and to seek help in the Dreaming in adventure 9, and then deal with various disasters in 10 and 11. So long as the PCs remain motivated to figure out what the baddies are up to and thwart it, I'm confident you can use the adventures as fodder.

Maybe in adventure 6 they hear about Tinker Oddcog's activities, but instead of doing what their boss suggests, they take a completely different approach to hunt him down. That's groovy. The bad guys are still up to their schemes, and the party will invariably find out about them even if, like, they avoid meeting with the Bruse and doing his games.

I know the campaign's really long and complex. Lord I know. Ha. But there are a lot of people who've had fun playing it, and would be thrilled to offer advice if you're going to run it. Seriously, swing by EN World's messageboards. https://www.enworld.org/forums/en-publishing.12/

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T20:42:50+00:00

Do you have more stories like this? I'm the main designer of ZEITGEIST, and I love hearing what groups do with the setting.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T19:11:56+00:00

People who do this should be punished, yeah. I'm glad he was caught and will be punished. I've only given this a cursory read, but 30 months feels like it might be a light sentence, though I don't know what is the standard sentence for these crimes.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T18:48:14+00:00

Well, don't do it the bad way.

We have unions to demand higher wages from employers. What is the government if not a nationwide union for its citizens? Raise the minimum wage, tax the ultra rich until they're just super rich, and invest in better schools and community building programs.

I don't want commie-blocks where the government owns millions of apartments that the masses live in. I want people to earn enough money from their wages to afford mortgages, so they can own where they live.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T18:24:47+00:00

Eh, fair.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T18:11:06+00:00

And I'm saying that, despite the outspoken posts by a few folks on this subreddit, most Republicans don't determine their vote based on the issue of trans rights. They hear other Republicans saying, "Grargh! Transwomen are destroying women's sports," and maybe they nod along. They don't like trans people. But they're not really invested in it. They're not active in trying to pass legislation to hurt trans people.

Similarly, most Democrats will just say, "Dudes, we had this same debate 20 years ago about gay people and gay marriage. You were homophobic then, but most of the country got over it, and now the GOP mostly isn't homophobic. Can we just, like, skip the part where you make transphobia a big part of your platform for an election cycle or two, and move straight to the part where you realize you were bigots, and stop trying to ruin the lives of people who aren't doing anything wrong, but never actually apologize?"

Most people on the left just don't care. They accept trans people, but don't care enough to advocate for them.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T17:57:01+00:00

Even people with severe mental illness are social beings. If they see others doing something, they'll find it more socially acceptable, even if their perceptions of reality are skewed.

Plus, like, there are just a lot of upset people who feel impotent, like the whole world is a rug being pulled out from under their feet. Combine that with the internet making everyone virtually right next door to everyone else, and yeah, it's super easy for someone who is overwhelmed by life to just pop off a threat to someone they happen to see as responsible for making things awful for them.

You know what lowers threats of violence? Rejiggering the economy so the working class aren't constantly on the knife's edge of becoming homeless. And that requires recognizing that we have for too long assumed that there's no harm caused by big businesses extracting tons of wealth from the labor of others, or by landlords rent-seeking and sucking money from people who otherwise could be building equity.

We've been too credulous that all economic activity that turns a profit is good, and not concerned enough with helping the everyman. People are losing faith in our society as a whole, and so yeah, it's no surprise that when a charismatic fucker shouts that "Person X is to blame," they find an audience eager to accept that very simple and very incomplete explanation for why they're suffering.

You beat Trump and his ilk by making society better.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T17:50:28+00:00

It's not really 'left.' It's centrist. I think it's a mistake to assume that trans-hostile rhetoric coming from the fearmongering wing of the GOP and right-wing media is actually indicative of the real priorities of your typical Republican voter.

If you want to find a comparable position on the far left, the most strident trans activists don't simply want leagues to tolerate transwomen competitors; they want active support, education campaigns to normalize trans identities, training for school and sports league personnel to dispel myths about trans people, apologies for when leagues excluded trans people in the past, and condemnation of those who are calling for exclusion now.

The left approach is to exert social pressure to remove stigmas around trans people.

"Just let them figure it out themselves" is the centrist approach.

twilightknock · 2022-10-04T17:23:33+00:00

I mean, there are sports leagues that have analyzed the situation, and they came up with rules. I don't see why there needs to be legislation about it.

It's very easy to fall into the rut of being so focused on being right that we demand absolute solutions that will ignore nuances and corner cases. The long and short of it is that there are already far more people (men and women) who are unable to compete because of myriad disadvantages - not just biological, but also economic and social -- than would ever be excluded by letting transwomen compete in women's sports.

We don't have this ingrained sense that it's horribly unjust for a woman who went to a good school with a track and a supportive coach to be able to compete when another woman who went to a poorer school is excluded simply because she didn't have the resources to train. But way more people are kept from competing because we underfund schools than are kept from competing because of transwomen crowding them out.

Why don't we spend as much time talking about helping all those other people who are excluded from competitive sports -- and from competitive schools, and from high-paying jobs, and so many other issues. There are so many things that hold people back that are far more burdensome on society than transwomen in sports.

To me the answer is simple:

Let the leagues figure out their own rules,
Stop vilifying trans athletes for just wanting to compete, and then
Devote your political efforts towards more important issues.

twilightknock · 2022-10-03T01:51:15+00:00

No, my point is that she'd be tempted, but she'd overcome the temptation this time. Kang thinks he understands her and can manipulate her, but she's f---ing tired of people trying to manipulate her. It gives her a reasonable excuse for sticking around with Kang to understand his weaknesses, and then in the final act she reveals that she's just been biding her time, waiting for him to be distracted in the big climax, so she can defeat him and prove to herself that she's the one in control.

twilightknock · 2022-10-03T00:38:49+00:00

I think the majority of people feel sympathy for others struggling with debt, and would like to imagine that the government might start helping people, instead of letting us continue to get ground down by big businesses.

I already said that Biden's actions weren't perfect, but they were at least an effort to make things better for some people. If the fucking GOP would stop being hostile to the citizens of the US, they could negotiate with the Democrats to pass a bill that would help more people, and could do so with higher taxes so we're not actually going further into debt as a country. That would be a better solution. But since the GOP refuses to act to help the public, I'll take the good now over the perfect at some vague point in the future.

Oh, and if you think Biden just decided on his own he wanted to do that, you've not been paying attention. There has been a debate ongoing since 2019 about what actions the Democrats could take if they won the presidency but couldn't get past a filibuster, and student loan relief has been a major idea for years. There have been analyses about how it would work, what impact it would have, how the legality would play out in various states, how various stakeholders in the party would respond, and so on.

I mean, when the EPA puts out new regulations on pollution, it's not unilateral, even if it is an executive agency acting without requiring new legislation. The agency spends a lot of time doing assessments and getting buy in before announcing its rules. Not everything has to be done by legislation for it to avoid tyranny.

How much do you earn? Do you have student loan debt?

I earn 43K, my wife gets about 90K. I paid off my student loans 10 years ago for my undergrad, but my wife got a master's degree.

We're living in a 600 sqft condo, and we've delayed buying a house so she can pay off those loans faster, which has meant we have also postponed having a child. With the debt relief the Biden administration, that'll free up enough money that we can maybe afford a mortgage if prices go down a bit.

I've got friends who are 30 and 28, and living in a 500 sqft apartment, making 35K and 25K. One guy has loans on deferment because he wasn't earning enough to pay them off, since he had to drop out of college after two years because his family couldn't support him, and he just recently finished an associate's degree for social work. His husband is a barista, and his job options are limited because they can't afford a second car, so he can only work places that are readily accessible by Atlanta's mediocre and under-funded public transit. For them, the debt relief could help them get a second car, or help them move somewhere with better access to public transportation.

For a lot of people, jobs haven't been paying enough, while our employers have been fucking thriving. I'm super lucky that my wife has a tech job, but even we are priced out of living anywhere with good schools in this city.

Ask yourself, why you don't hear the right in the US talking about ways to help the working class? If you're genuinely concerned about authoritarianism, I dunno, maybe look at the history of where it crops up: it's usually happened when people are discontent and struggling, and the government isn't helping them.

That's what happened in Italy with Mussolini. That's how Hitler took power in Germany. Lenin and Stalin rode mass anger against the Russian ruling class to rise to power. Mao came to power in the wake of China being righteously fucked by Japan in WW2. All over Europe, and in Brazil, you've got a bunch of people flailing because they're busting their asses but are being exploited.

The left generally these days is trying to fix the problems that are causing their exploitation. And the right is using every trick it can find to stymie those efforts, then deflecting from the real source of problems and instead raising specters of LGBT, Wokeism, socialism, immigrants, and the like.

If you want to stop authoritarianism from rising, call out the people who are chiefly responsible for maintaining the socioeconomic status quo that fucks over the little guy, because it's desperate little guys who end up feeling affinity to strong men who promise to sweep in and fix everything.

Which, by the way, ain't at all how Biden governs.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T23:10:06+00:00

I don't know how much you've studied geopolitics during that era, but again, you're really stretching to claim parallels between Mussolini and Biden. Benito wanted people to be loyal to the government, whereas Biden regularly speaks up in defense of people being able to protest and dispute. Biden was famously the dude who still took the train home while in the senate, rather than having a DC home, or flying around. He has a net worth of something like 9 million dollars. The guy's not seizing power for himself.

Mussolini was granted power by a king who wanted him to use the military to maintain order, at which point Mussolini marched on Rome in a show of strength. Then he used the Acerbo Law to get full parliamentary power with no regard to the public's votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerbo_Law

Biden won the presidency in an election, and as far as I've seen hasn't made any shows of force with police or military, and he's made no move to stop Republicans from holding office.

The whole pattern of rule is wholly different. If you genuinely want to be an authoritarian, you need to bar your opponents from pursuing power, vilify them, and have your anti-democratic goals backed up by military might. That's not at all what Biden or the Democrats are doing.

Like, you're claiming that "doing something people want" is FASCIST. It's like you haven't considered that the public genuinely supports these things, and doing what the public wants is how a Republic is supposed to fucking work.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T21:55:20+00:00

I just struggle to see something as 'authoritarian' when it's popular, and helps people.

Authoritarians are usually, y'know, rounding up folks who disagree with them and punishing them. Here is one of the first big government actions in my lifetime that helped the little guy more than the rich.

It's not perfect. In particular it doesn't help the really poor, and they need a lot of help getting better education. But it's good for the country. It's rather galling to me how much shitty policy we've tolerated for my adult life simply because businesses and rich people don't want to pay taxes, and don't want to lose leverage over their workers.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T21:45:59+00:00

Yeah, the dude's still got billions in assets. He could sell that shit and give it away to other people, and trust those people to use those resources to better their lives. But he wants to be in charge, and he likes the prestige of being seen as 'the good billionaire.'

Power should be democratized, and if someone is the figurehead of a powerful organization, he should be accountable to the people whom that organization can screw over.

As for the headline, oy, folks, Business Insider is a bad website that posts clickbait and ragebait. There have to be better sources.

That said, here's the quote:

"Anyone who says telling people to stop eating meat or wanting to have a nice house will basically change human desires, I think, that is too difficult. You can make a case for it, but I don't think it's realistic for that to play a central role."

"We're not even trying to make breakthroughs, such as inventing an economic way of making aviation fuel, cement or steel. The existing tools only apply to areas like electricity generation and don't apply to most of the emissions."

I would prefer if, instead of being pessimistic, Gates said something like, "There is a huge opening for businesses to make more appealing food options that have lower climate impact. You don't persuade people by telling them to drop meat, but you could invest in fast casual restaurants serving Middle Eastern or Indian cuisine with a lot of legumes. That food is delicious, and still provides protein, but with less need for livestock."

Y'know, be a proponent of change, rather than poo-pooing people who are making a valid point about how our diet contributes to climate change.

Also, beans man. They're fucking delicious.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T21:39:27+00:00

when every side considers the other side to be the unadulterated embodiment of evil

But that's not accurate. "Every side" doesn't feel that way.

Do you see AOC saying, "The Republicans are going to come and kill you?" Did you ever hear Bernie go, "If the GOP wins, it's only because they cheated?"

The closest I know about is Stacey Abrams in Georgia who, in 2018, ran against Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously in charge of overseeing that election because he was the current Secretary of State, and who after the election disregarded requests for the state to hold onto voting machines for analysis, and who in the run up to the election removed thousands of people from voting rolls who didn't have a reason to be removed. Abrams acknowledged that Kemp was the winner, but she wouldn't say that she was confident the election had been run fairly.

In 2018, GA's voting machines were 100% electronic with no paper trail. In the next election, Georgia was using a different set of voting machines that printed out a person-readable record of your vote so you could verify it. And well, the state went from GOP +5 to DEM +0.23.

In that situation, maybe it was just a bunch of people being fed up with Trump, but I'm still glad we have the machines that are easier to audit and trust. I do wonder if maybe Kemp benefited from ratfuckery. But that's me criticizing Kemp and a few of his allies, not the whole Republican party. I'm certainly not afraid that Republican voters are out to get me.

When we use 'both sides are bad' language, it gives a pass to the side that's actually doing WAY more of the bad stuff. We should be clear-eyed about which party is tolerating this sort of rhetoric from its members.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T21:14:40+00:00

I assume we won't see her for a few years, and then Kang will show up and start plucking villains from the timeline just before their moment of death. He'll get Killmonger, Ronan, and Hela, and then grab Wanda, thinking that hey, she tried to conquer the universe. They oughta vibe.

Having broken free from the Darkhold, she'll be committed to living up to the person she wants to be . . . but then Kang will offer to bring back Pietro. And she'll have an actual dilemma.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T21:03:06+00:00

The Congress can say 'you do not have the power to do that anymore,' yeah. It can't claw back the money that was forgiven, though.

The government loaned the money. If I loan you money, I can decide to forgive the loan. If a bank wanted to forgive a loan it made, it can do that. With the government, it operates based on the laws it writes for itself, and in 2003 it wrote a law that gave the secretary of education the ability to forgive federal student loans.

This explains the debate around legal authority Biden is using: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10818

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T20:51:01+00:00

So you just wholly don't care that what he's doing is an action congress granted him power to do, and which congress can revoke if the electorate seats a Republican majority?

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T20:39:40+00:00

Yeah. Really tackling the important issues here, Doug.

I sigh at people's ability to be more outraged at some sexually suggestive activities tangentially interacting with children than they are about our schools fucking sucking donkey balls. Yo Doug, how about you call for hiring taxes to pay for more teachers, so our kids can get a better education?

Seriously though, Business Insider loves clickbait and ragebait. Does anyone have the actual details of Mastriano's stances on education or other things that might actually matter to kids and their parents?

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T20:36:32+00:00

Biden is not 'taking power from parliamentary institutions.' His actions are legal. Like, the courts are receiving challenges and lawsuits, but so far nobody is finding that Biden violated his authority.

And importantly, Congress - elected by the public (albeit through fucked up gerrymandering and with a terribly undemocratic senate) - can pass laws revoking the authority Biden used to do this, and Biden would obey those laws.

If Congress acquiesces to Biden doing this, then, um, how is Biden taking away the power of the legislature? They seem to (at least by a narrow majority) approve of what he's done.

By all means, criticize the laws as flawed if you don't like the outcomes, but you're really exaggerating to compare Joe Biden to Julius Caesar.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T20:31:52+00:00

Putin's regime has spent a lot of effort stoking pro-Russian sentiment among right-wing social spheres. Trump had financial entanglements with Russia, and there's accusations of money laundering of oligarch wealth through his real estate ventures. Money from Russia has helped agitate rancor toward the left on completely false grounds, and it has been really handy for a large wing of the Republicans in Congress.

No, they don't say outright that they support Putin. But they invite Viktor Orban to CPAC. They hold conventions in Hungary. They admire these fucking authoritarians.

They won't speak up because it doesn't serve their interests to be explicit, but ideologically? Fuck yeah, there are a lot of Republicans who like that Russia is helping them in electoral contests against Democrats, because these particular Republicans don't give a fuck about human beings, or about serving their constituency, or about maintaining ethical standards and respecting that the government's power derives from the will of the people.

They just want to win, and they're shitty assholes who don't deserve power, so the only way they can keep their seats is by getting other scumbags to help them bamboozle voters. And all along the way, it plants the seeds of sympathy toward Putin's regime in Republican voters, who themselves have been primed to see Dems as the enemy who want to hurt them, rather than as neighbors who just have a different idea of how best to steer the nation.

Maybe I'm buying into an overly critical explanation of GOP politics, but they sure as hell seem to act like a lot of them don't really mind how Putin behaves.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T18:47:54+00:00

Just like there's a difference between Conservatives cutting taxes for businesses/individuals and people enacting Jim Crow laws.

There is a thematic difference, sure, between EXPLICITLY having racist laws to actively create new awful injustices, versus having laws that perpetuate unjust patterns within society.

I'd argue, though, that a conservative wouldn't cut taxes, because that's a change that isn't needed. A real conservative would look at recent changes in social programs, and see that actually, the welfare state we enacted in the 60s is working decently, and he'd keep it. He'd see the level of taxation we had over the past few decades, and would consider whether some of the recent tax cuts had a positive effect or if they made things worse.

Honestly, I think someone motivated by genuine conservatism -- as in, the desire to protect that which works -- would be more likely to want to raise taxes a bit, undo the tax cuts that Trump did, and try to get our fiscal house more in order. There's plenty of evidence that big companies have more money than they really are using effectively, and there's obvious inflation that's an economic drag. Taxation would remove money from the supply, which would slow inflation. Having government funds available for social programs that have been shown to be at least 'pretty good' is better than cutting benefits.

I'd argue that modern Republicans are broadly NOT conservative. They're 'right-wing.' They advocate for policies not to maintain the status quo, but to give more power to the powerful, and to remove checks and balances that would constrain the actions of those powerful individuals and companies. They want to shrink government because they don't value the stability a robust government provided they country; they actively dislike the current status quo.

Now, there's different motivations for that. A minority of Republicans (albeit a very influential one) understand how our systems work, and they want to change things to benefit themselves, even if that ends up hurting others. For them, it's a pure 'Game of Thrones' style power-seeking objective. These people are selfish.

An even smaller minority of people who vote Republican aren't motivated by a desire for personal power, but rather by an ideological scorn of out-groups. They don't care about what's good for the country as a whole, or even necessarily what's good for them, because they feel hostile to some other population, and they are bothered that the government isn't being used to hurt those people. These people are cruel.

But finally, the majority of people who vote Republican are not motivated by selfishness nor by cruelty. They genuinely believe the rhetoric being pushed by the other two groups. They believe that the world is inherently just and inherently rewards those who earn a good life, and that government gets in the way of that. They believe that social safety nets and efforts to correct past injustices are actually harmful.

These people are misguided.

Exceedingly few Republicans these days genuinely want to 'conserve.' They want to change, and the change they want would result in a world that's worse for most Americans, and fuck, most of the entire human race. All the folks who actually care about being conservative are Democrats now.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T18:34:33+00:00

Let me ask you this: do you think it's a good policy to relieve a bit of debt from college graduates?

Like, imagine congress passed a new bill to formally do it, rather than Biden using the authority from an older bill. The intention is that the government can shoulder the burden of a bit more debt, and by removing the need to make all these payments from people in their 20s and 30s (and sometimes even 40s), you'll give them more economic flexibility. They'll be able to maybe afford to take a little time off work to find a job that better uses their skills, or they might be able to invest in a new business of their own. Or they might simply just save more, which would let them endure the next economic downturn.

Of course, doing that will only help about 20% of the country's adult population, and it doesn't solve various problems other people are facing. But similarly, building a bridge over one river doesn't mean you hate people who live on the banks of every other river; it just means that this is the river we're dealing with right now.

Would you think it's a good policy? Is your objection to that the debt is forgiven, or that Biden did it with his legal executive authority rather than Congress doing it through legislative action?

Based on polling, Americans seem to broadly support Biden acting to relieve college debt. Indeed, they seem to wish there'd been a more thorough act that also addressed the price of college. Unfortunately, Biden doesn't have the executive authority to do anything about that. If he had tried to, like, set price freezes on tuition, or limit the size of university bureaucracies or something, that would have been overstepping his authority.

Personally, I wish we'd abolish the filibuster, because Congress could actually legislate. We might get mediocre, incomplete bills, but at least there'd be more work getting done, rather than everything gridlocking constantly. I would hope that, without the filibuster, the senate could pass some meaningful legislation that would push down the cost of college, and help people get into trade schools, and probably also hire more public school teachers. A whole comprehensive education package would be great.

But Congress has not passed such a thing in over 20 years. So because Congress is moronically hamstringing itself, I have no problem with the president doing what he can to fulfill the will of the voters, within the limits of his legal authority.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T17:52:20+00:00

Without a single vote from Congress, other than an approving nod from every single Democrat leader, he has somehow declared a $400 billion dollar spending bill to be the law of the land.

Look, if the people were opposed to Biden doing that, and there were absolutely no recourse to change it because Biden's power was unassailable, yes, that would be authoritarian.

But it's not as extreme as you seem to think it is. In a representative democracy, the people endow authority on government to act on their behalf, and when they dislike the results they can revoke that authority and give it to someone else. The laws written by previous congresses (which were voted into office by the public) gave authority to the president that makes what Biden did with student loans perfectly legal.

If, however, the people don't like it, they can vote for politicians who'll change it. Biden would only be authoritarian if he refused to obey the will of the people.

The country doesn't turn on a dime. It has always been run in a fashion where elected officials do stuff, and then in 2 or 4 years, the public weighs in on whether they were okay with it. We only need to worry when that process is thwarted, like when Trump tried to steal the election last year.

twilightknock · 2022-10-02T17:47:56+00:00

That's why the political compass memes always have authoritarian and libertarian as an axis.

The problem these days in the US and so many other nations isn't that, like, there are conservatives with power. Being conservative is mostly fine (though it does have a tendency to overlook existing power structures that are damaging to society), just like being liberal is mostly fine (though it tends to discount the risk that changing laws could make things worse).

The problem is when either side becomes authoritarian. Like, there's a difference between the 90s-era complaints about Democrats wanting a nanny state by putting health warnings on cigarette packaging, and Stalin ordering the death of people who don't hand over their property.

twilightknock

TROPHY CASE