TIL!

…i also had no idea aluminised tetrapacks were recyclable; always figured composite materials were dead-end landfill fodder…

(the changeover wasn’t entirely in the sixties, though: as a kid, we used to peel cartons open and scrape off the wax for craft projects clear into the early eighties, never realised the packaging had changed prior to the advent of plastic screw-tops)

…typically they’re coated with food-grade wax…

…advanced marvel superheroes, the full FASERIP system…

…problem is there are enough imperial f*ckheads ready to dogpile on any virtue signal du jour…

…i’ve been disappointed with the print quality of most of their POD books since last year: it’s like someone isn’t monitoring the ink levels and one of the CMYK colors almost always looks washed out…

…1981 moldvay red box was my first product, but the first i played i think was 1977 holmes, although i don’t know for certain because i never saw my cousin’s books; in fact, i’ve been unable to identify which module he ran us through to this day…

…i adore this depiction of moria from the one ring, plan and section both set against surrounding terrain to give a sense of scale…

…isn’t that essentially critical role?..

…there’s a comic i read somewhere illustrating how sombre, dramatic campaign settings ultimately devolve into slapstick hijinks and silly, slapstick campaign settings ultimately evolve into dramatic epics…

…the village building inspector is a recurring NPC in our ongoing campaign of the last four years…

…invisible sun, so i guess sort-of-cypher?..

“It makes me feel GREAT! Smarter. More aggressive.”

https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/rise-of-the-mimic-moon-for-5th-editionpdf/

…i have this loosely-developed idea of replacing the d20 in OGL-derived systems with a 3d chain which scales with tiers of proficiency for a nice bell curve: 3d4 (untrained), 3d6 (proficient), 3d8 (expert), 3d10 (master), 3d12 (legendary), 3d16 (celestial), 3d20 (demigod), 3d24 (god), 3d30 (overgod)…

…in the background are impact!/goodman dice of unusual size; they just wrapped up a crowdfunding campaign to add matching d9, d11, d13, d15, d17, d18, d19, and d22 to the series…

…in the foreground are my chessex 2507 set circa 1992, which i’m sadly unable to match with any of their modern blue/indigo/violet production runs, hence the slightly-mismatched d6 + d20 update to a fifth-edition set of eleven dice…dedicated percentile dice were a new innovation at the time, produced only in white!..

…i hadn’t even considered that compartmentalised dice bags might be thing; that looks pretty handy!..

…i checked out cardking pro’s other offerings, and curiously-enough the old speaker bag i’m using right now is nearly identical to this bag, maybe twice as tall…

…i’m tempted to say physical dice, but in truth i have many sets and switch them out for each campaign, so my most-used accessory is probably my nice padded rolling tray, followed closely by my staedler stick eraser…

…my most-used books, despite my meticulously-curated physical and PDF libraries, have turned out to be the player’s handbook and dungeon master’s guide on DnDbeyond; i always keep them open on an ipad stand during gameplay because it’s really tough to beat indexed hypertext for ready-reference during gameplay…my players use the heck out of my shared campaign subscription, but it’s becoming tougher now that DnDbeyond defaults to 2024 rules, so that use pattern may well change as the platform evolves…

…even as a player, though, i feel like a good DM’s screen might be quicker!..the problem of course is tabletop real estate, but it seems like there’s an untapped market for player’s reference screens during remote sessions, where most folks have more tabletop real estate to play with physical accessories…

…i’m considering crafting a player’s reference screen with panels focused on core rules, house rules, and class rules which can be readily swapped-out…

…marvel super heroes also featured a resources ability score and feats to represent financial maneuvers akin to lines of credit; it felt frustratingly abstracted as a teenager living in a discretionary cash economy, but after several decades as a real-world adult i realise that it’s an elegant abstraction for how people actually live and conduct commerce…

…my wife came home from a chemistry demonstration with a cooler full of dry ice: we thought it would be fun to fill the master bathtub with hot water, dump it all in at once, and watch what happened…

…besides the obvious violent commotion, our entire house filled with a waist-high impetrable fog, enough that we panicked and quickly evacuated the cats lest they be overwhelmed by carbon dioxide…

…that’s exactly where my imagination went first, and then onward to the league of extraordinary gentlemen, and then i started brainstorming elements for my eberron campaign…