Or, hear me out, you could just not bother at all. It works for (most) men after all ;)
Tangent: where do you folks buy cat grass seed? We've always got these stupid little kits where a package of 100 seeds is like $10 with the kit. But it seems silly to pay that much and the pet stores seem to be a racket.
Yes, well, timeline shenanigans. ;)
Meet one of my former D&D characters: Kronos, master of space and time (chronurgy wizard), accidentally turned himself into a grung while experimenting on frog familiars. Jokes that he is his own familiar now. Also has a frog familiar. Claims it is himself from another timeline. Campaign goal: to recover his lost powers. Secret: is delusional, or is he?
Someone at Goodwill hates you right now :)
Look at those smiling eyes!
The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life -- most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don't get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it's no nuke.
So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they're probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn't.
Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.
Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!
On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.
That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.
Probably the money paid for whomever Alex Jones lost lawsuits against -- so like Sandy Hook victims.
I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding
while (0){};
Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.
Usually it's a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.
The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there...
Higher res version available at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch
I fell in love with this painting due to the Ayreon Song: https://ayreon.bandcamp.com/track/the-shooting-company-of-captain-frans-b-cocq
Hi folks, just acquired this module and had a flip through, reading the intros and some parts of the first two levels. Here's a quick overview in case you're interested. This is a Paizo-official 5E conversion of a Pathfinder 2E module -- I haven't played the Pathfinder version so cannot offer any comparisons.
TOC page:
The module goes from L1-L11. There's nice little starting town 20 minutes away from a megadungeon. The dungeon has 10 levels and you should level up after completing each level. The town exists as a home base you can return to as needed, and also to provide support NPCs and plot motivation. At first glance, it appears that there is at least one event triggering in town each time you complete the level, approximately.
BBEG is an undead sorcerer who was defeated 500 years ago and is slowly rebuilding their power. Very necromancer themed, but not a Lich per se.
I like the layout of the module. Each level spells out the expected loot on page one, gives you a decent synopsis, and gets underway with minimal hassle. I haven't read everything yet, but of the description blocks and such that I read, it is thoughtfully crafted but also leaves options for the DM. A good example is the "floor boss" on level 1 who you can convert into a useful NPC if you diplomacy them or let them live. Downside: it might lead to FOMO for the players as they provide a lot of written branches and consequences.
The Monsters are well constructed and have unique enough feel. What's interesting is that they borrowed a few monsters from other publications and copied them in whole-cloth (with credit given on the credit page). For example, the Froghemeth comes from Necromancer Games (via Frog God Games), so it seems like they're really leaning into reinforcing each other as publishers.
If you've run megadungeons before, this is probably nothing partcularly groundbreaking. But if you're looking for a well crafted 5E megadungeon, this looks like it has a lot of potential. My guess is you could easily spend a year on the module if you're meeting weekly :)
🙀