Are Either Of These Stories Good? Cause They Sound Really Interesting

that’s not ominous at all

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with Tiny Frog Wizards is that I just couldn't get Paths of Power and Power Dice to pull their weight. They represented a soft violation of the game's basic mechanical conceit that casting spells and only casting spells has dice-rolling attached to it, and in playtesting they didn't prove to be terribly effective at encouraging specific flavours of foolishness – they were just a lot of mental overhead for not a lot of benefit.

The pages previewed above represent a first pass at reworking them into something a little more on point. Instead of big goofy statements about your tiny frog wizard's ethos of magic that hook into a metagame resource economy, you get a generic pool of material components, optionally supplemented with magic items that mess with the dice economy at the time of casting, and you don't need to do anything special if you decide you don't want to use them at all.

As always, comments, criticisms, and/or bizarre rants are welcome!

(Please disregard the fact the page numbering skips from 11 to 13 – page 12 is reserved for the other twelve example Functions I haven't come up with yet. In the meantime, if you want to give it a spin, just use a d4 rather than a d6 for the first digit of the Function roll.)

What does the arab in your carrd mean? Is it like afab and amab?

.. i’m palestinian

why does this exist

what the fuck

i never talk about these things but i can’t remain silent.

i know tumblr doesn’t give a SHIT when things happen in countries outside the “most popular ones” (such as the usa & england). it’s true, don’t lie to me. y’all don’t give A FUCK. not every issue and problem in said countries gets the appropriate exposure but in general shit shows up on the news WORLD FREAKING  WIDE. you set up donations, you help out, your spread the word, you say “pray for x”……

southern europe is burning. 

my country is burning.

people are dying - at home, on the road, trying to run away, in their cars.

yesterday my country had 300 active fires.

people are losing EVERYTHING they own.

i have a friend that is on a train right now passing through places that have been burnt to the ground and she says the smoke is so intense it’s getting inside the train and she can barely breathe.

and yet, even though several people (myself included) have been trying to bring awareness to what has been happening in southern europe… what we get from most of you, those not part of the countries suffering, is silence. we don’t ask for money, we don’t ask for shit other than a reblog to spread awareness… something you can delete in 24/48hrs if you wish. 

i don’t know what to tell you. i’m angry. i’m frustrated. i’m disappointed. i feel like i’m screaming into the void. “a reblog does nothing” - you know that’s a damn lie, you know exposure always helps, you know people start paying attention when posts on social media become popular. my country in particular is a small one, we get ZERO exposure. y’all are only starting to figure out we even fucking exist bc of the shit we’ve been winning lately. 

but hell, if the EU doesn’t give a shit, why should some user on tumblr dot com?

again, i don’t know what to tell you so i’ll let the images speak for themselves: 

An image captured by a Nasa satellite shows a thick plume of smoke blowing southward from the Greek island of Chios over the island of Crete

Torneros de Jamuz, Spain

Duca, Croatia

A helicopter from Italy’s civil protection service drops water on a fire near the railway between Venice and Trieste

Residents take refuge on the beach as a wildfire burns on the mountain next to the village of Lithi, on the Greek island of Chios

Men gather cattle during a forest fire in Vieira de Leiria, Marinha Grande, Portugal.

Charred trees are seen on the hills above the Cloister of Thivaidas on Mount Athos, a World Heritage Site in Greece

Portugal

“Can One Punch Man beat-”

Yes. Always. Good lord. I never understand why people can turn this into a big serious discussion. Yes, One Punch Man would beat Thanos. He would beat Luke Skywalker, Superman, every single character from Dragon Ball Z, and every ninja from Naruto. He would beat Thor and Wolverine and the Hulk in a tag team match. 

Because he plays by different rules. One Punch Man is a PARODY character. His skill set is defined by comedy, not power levels or physical strength. One Punch Man not Superman facing off against an ever-more powerful lineup of villains. He’s the Roadrunner against Wil E. Coyote’s ever more convoluted plans. Deadpool is the only other super hero type character who comes close to living in the same realm of parody, but frankly, Deadpool repeatedly getting the crap beat out of him would be funnier than Deadpool winning, so One Punch Man would win that fight too, even if he can’t actually kill Deadpool in one punch. Because parody.

If I see another Youtube video recommended to me like “Could One Punch Man beat-” really, truly, I do not care. 

The voice was so spot on it took me seconds to realize what he said.

Also it sounds like sci-fi but one day (possibly very long one day) with genetic technology even extinct creatures may eventually be brought back.

Accidental Old Gods of Appalachia appreciation post.

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

Huh cool to know

Thinking about Purity

I have two thoughts on Purity. Here they are:

One. Her trigger event consisted of her being trapped in a lethal environment with no resources, gradually going insane, and developing overwhelming firepower in order to fight off a horde of assailants who didn’t actually exist. I can’t imagine what that’s a metaphor for. Haven’t the foggiest.

Two.  Purity is interesting, from a worldbuilding perspective, because at the start of the story there’s an actual niche archetype from the comics that she’s fulfilling.

 “Hardcore street-level hero who actually turns out to be a racist lunatic that the actual heroes need to take down” isn’t quite a chestnut at the big two but it’s a story beat I’ve seen multiple times; Nightwing vs his building’s insane janitor in Dixon’s run, Captain America vs Jack Monroe and to a lesser extent USAgent, I feel like Batman’s deal with Lock-up from the animated series inches towards this, although that one wasn’t explicitly racialized. Punisher’s done this a couple times, It’s Peacemaker’s whole bit, there’s definitely a few more I’m forgetting.

So the subversive element here isn’t that she’s an openly racist superhero; it’d that she’s still allowed to be a racist superhero. It’s that a thematically appropriate hero like Legend hasn’t come to town specifically to drop the hammer on her for daring to be an openly racist superhero. 

 And to be charitable, what’s usually going on in those other stories is that the racist heroes are almost always explicitly bad knockoffs of the protagonist. They’re intended as a dark mirror, because the obvious failure mode of heroic vigilantism is that it’s extremely appealing to racists, glory hounds, egomaniacs and egomaniacal racist glory hounds, but the flip side of that is that people with those characteristics go down like chumps in a fight with a true-blue hero. They exist in the story as a one-off warning for the real heroes, who give them a chance and then chuck them in the bin when they show their true colors.

Worm, though, doesn’t have a just-so structure. The racist idiots who get superpowers and develop delusions of heroism don’t provide the courtesy of also being weak and incompetent enough that the “real” heroes can root them out with minimal fuss. Purity won the goddamn power lottery; she’s one of the most powerful capes in the Bay, with hit-and-run capabilities that all of the heroes working together are textually incapable of countering. (And this isn’t like The Boys where they’re all secretly in bed with each other- New Wave has serious beef with the Empire! They would absolutely pin her ass to the wall if the opportunity arose, but they can’t!)

So in a very real sense, The Protectorate is pussyfooting around her, letting her exist in the gray zone of self-deluded vigilantism, because…. well, the second she can’t sustain her self-deception anymore, the second someone really pushes, her go-to reaction is to commit a mass casualty event. She was always a time bomb, and so the strategy of just continuing to label her as a villain, while she continuously hopefully refreshes PHO to see if any helpful fans have updated her wiki page yet, is, you know, I get it. It’s not great but I get it. A hands on approach only works if you can actually lay hands on them.

But! As far as I can remember, she was functionally operating as an Independent Hero as the setting defines it! Everyone in power pretends she isn’t but she was still in that ballpark, hand in hand with how selectively racist she was being about it! She was a vigilante, she was out to target “criminals” and clean up the streets using her powers, she had a costume and a secret identity- actually one of the few capes we see in Brockton Bay with a full-time day job- and she was really really really racist.

So with Purity, Worm is being honest about the inability of a superhero community to clean house, to effectively police who gets to be a part of it, who gets to actively consider themselves a part of it. There was never going to be a righteous beat-down where she gets “kicked out” of the fraternity, no “you are not affiliated with me” moment that finally gets through, even though many heroes in the setting would dearly love to deliver such a thing. A certain level of power purchases the right to think of yourself in whatever terms you want, and the heroes just have to stand around looking uncomfortable and swearing up and down that, no, her vigilantism is different from good vigilantism, honest, completely different underlying models.