This book sounds absolutely fascinating. I love weird obscure, hobby history. It’s why I really miss the history segments of The Great British Bake Off (even though some people apparently found them boring?). I’ll definitely have to add it to my list of books to get.

I was going to guess Rifts because I’ve heard crazy things about their setting, too.

There’s a YouTube channel that focuses on how to make cool atmospheric D&D environments like this. I think it’s called AtmosSeeker? They’re smaller than I think they should be.

Thanks for that suggestion! I’ll try to find it, too. Maybe that will help it click for me, too.

Surprisingly perhaps, I’ve never heard anything but good things about him. But then I’ve never actually looked into his personality or life, just his contributions to D&D.

I don’t think it sounds stupid at all. PBTA requires a shift in how you think of rpg’s unless you started with that system. I’ve always been told that, and it seems to be true. I’m still kind of wrapping my head around it, myself. I’ve always loved the idea of it, even if I haven’t gotten it down yet, though. I bought Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, Monster Hearts, and the Avatar rpg Kickstarter with all the extras. I wonder if I need someone else to DM me with other players around who can play it right before I can DM others, because I don’t feel like I’ve quite gotten it down despite all that lol.

Really? That second teleport ability sounds super fun. It means the players have to run around the battlefield fighting the monster, and interacting with the terrain, not just standing in front of each other trading blows. Plus it only happens once a round anyway so you can strategize around it.

The first ability also sounds super cool. At that level there are ways around these things anyway. The friendly casters may have teleports of fly spells, players have dimension door and other crazy abilities from their various magic items they’ve collected for 20 levels, and a DC 27 save at that level probably isn’t that hard to hit anyway.

Just goes to show how subjective fun is I suppose because that description makes me more excited to fight that then the standard bag of hit points 5e tarrasque.

Oh ya, makes sense actually. Must be the other one.

I think MCDM had cool ideas about this in one of their books, including some sample ready made parties. Of course you’d have to convert them from 5e to PF2, but still it might not be a bad source of inspiration. It must have been either Flee, Mortals or Where Evil Lives.

It sounds interesting although unfortunately I’ve only read the first Brandon Sanderson Mistborn book. Maybe getting the rpg would encourage me to finish the rest of them lol.

Same. The monsters are amazing, and would be a big boost to 5e, but I haven’t been playing it as much lately.

Yet apparently a bunch of people need to learn that, because according to the author when they brought up his flaws in a book, people were falling over themselves to say he was besmirching his good name or slandering Gygax and stuff like that. People need to learn their heroes aren’t perfect, even now, and that’s why I think it’s good this article is spread and read. Not everyone knows to separate the author and their work.

I would blame social media for encouraging parasocial relations, but this is the kind of stuff that existed before the internet, with other musicians and artists and authors, and it’s brought up in academic courses on similar work, so I guess it’s just a human thing that people need to be aware of.

I mean there’s a pretty blatant quote in there, too.

Eh, that’s like every super hero story, too. Like The Incredibles, and I still enjoy that movie.

As do fans of the Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow series.

Well, there’s a difference between settler colonialism (which replaces the indigenous population) and the sort of imperialist and classic colonialism in a lot of parts of this map, where people move in and resources are extracted, but you’re left with a traumatized population instead of a genocided one, like in North and South America as well as Australia, so we’d expect the results to probably be different.

Not that I think religion helps these matters, as the US which is slowly turning Christo-fascist and reversing LGBTQ rights, probably not coincidentally, shows. I just don’t agree with the Islamophobia part. Christianity looks pretty draconian on these issues too in some parts of Africa.

Idk about the others, but for Afghanistan, it’s probably because it was taken over by religious fundamentalists trained, supported, and armed by Pakistan, Iran, and the US in order to fight off Soviet Union influence, along with some other countries (China, UK, probably some others). They basically invaded because they were called in by the local government afraid of these terrorist groups, who also called problems in the Soviet Union (similar to the US invading after 9/11). (Interestingly enough, the Pakistan influence can also be said to be a result of colonialism since it’s existence is basically a result of English colonialism in India and the Middle-East.) After this, Afghanistan was basically a civil war zone between religious fundamentalist warlords fighting each other, the most extreme being the Taliban, but the other US allied ones weren’t great, either, and were all still fundamentalist Muslim.

The official anti-LGBT laws were vague when the Republic (the Soviet friendly government) was in charge, all of the terrible attitudes were probably still there but under religious rules and unofficial, and being invaded by the USSR for years never helps those kinds of things, either. It was more intense when the US friendly war lords were in charge and made Sharia more official, making LGBTQ laws worse as a sort of collateral. It then got even worse when the Taliban officially took over, now it’s even more explicit and the punishment even worse (death). I haven’t read the article yet so not sure if it talks about any of these things, or if I got anything super off, but I’ve just been listening and reading stuff about this lately and felt I could contribute lol.

Oh that’s cool. I’m happy that it exists and now kinda sad it’s only owned by one VTT. That would’ve been a good resource for other VTT’s out there.

I have no idea what Demiplane is but I do hate to see companies buy other companies.

I’ve been trying it out because I kind of skipped that edition, and tbh combat has been pretty amazing. Every battle is fun and tactically interesting. It’s really been scratching that itch I had for dynamic, teamwork set piece combat that I was afraid I was going to lose when some people wanted to play “DnD” and I really didn’t want to play 5e lol. It can take awhile because health is too big but once we instituted a common house rule and reduced enemy HP by 25-30%, it’s been perfect. We’ve just been doing a one-shots and tiny modules while the players humor me trying out this edition, though, so no idea how it will scale.

But now I do wish I had given it more of a chance before. Admittedly, now we have the benefit of hindsight, and some 10 years of common house rules recommended by the internet that didn’t exist when it first came out. I might even switch between it and PF2E from now on depending on how much I miss the cool critical rules and 3 action economy of PF2E vs dynamic forced movement rules and simple but abstract AEDU actions of D&D 4e. Although we’ll see if the sheen of newness fades at some point.