Originally shared by Jacob Hurst

Finally had a chance to read Zak’s recent “Investigation as Dungeon” post. It is excellent.

As I was reading it I made an initial mistake and interpreted “Scene?” as a “scene of people” not as the “scene of a crime”, which may have been a happy mistake because I immediately started thinking about how you could have multiple of these pyramids going on in any given populated area.

A “scene of people” is effectively a faction, so if you make your big map, and include faction specific locations, you’ve basically plotted out a whole bunch of dungeon entrances for that faction’s dungeon. The crime then is the key that triggers the dungeon entrance opening, and depending on where the PCs are in “meat space” may dictate where they start climbing (or at least say, hey you already know where their normal coffee shop is).

Then of course you can also do “neutral” spots or spots that are overlapping dungeon entrances. Like that pizza parlor can serve as an entrance to the “Pedo Elite” faction’s dungeon, AND the “Lizard People” faction dungeon, AND “Minerva’s Elite Cabal”. And these factions can have tight links and connections between each other, while still maintaining separate structures.

And of course it works just as well for high fantasy settings as well if you sub in guilds and cults and religions and nobility and whatnot. And the whole thing seems infinitely scaleable because faction outposts are now all “dungeon entrances” no matter where they are located or how small they are, and investigating the dungeon now gets players moving around the overland map with self directed purpose (we know this shipment came from this city over here so let’s check it out….).

So you can quickly end up with a super dense “web” that’s built from very simple, well defined and easy to reference building blocks.

Maybe I’m off, but this seems like a very important piece that (my) sandboxes have been missing.

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2017/06/investigation-as-dungeon.html

Moomintroll is wearing the Hobgoblin’s hat in a Moomin-themed restaurant in Japan.

Just to recap, that’s a set of idiosyncratic stories by writer/artist Tove Janssen, based loosely on Swedish and Finnish folk tales, being celebrated in mural reproductions of her drawings and a stuffed animal based on the same in a restaurant in Japan and in particular showing the most Old School artifact in the whole series (the hat is basically a Wand of Wonder because nobody local understands the rules that govern it so it’s really like a Roadside Picnic object) and by the way the Hobgoblin hangs out on the moon so there’s that X-filesiness too.

…and the story here is that those crazy Japanese are seating lone diners with effigy guests.

Naw man, Moomin restaurant with devil-may-care Hobgoblin references. That’s the story.

Just don’t put a barometer at my table. That’s all I ask.

Originally shared by Polynomial -C

“less awkward”

Gates don’t weigh anything but what’s on the other side most definitely does.

The hardest thing about getting demons to flatten an enemy’s house is persuading them to keep the gate tilted the right way until they’re above the target. Especially if they have to fly over a church.

Originally shared by Mark Krawec

Frustrated by their inability to breathe fire on their own, the chimney imps decided to pool their money, buy the biggest lens they could & go all magnifying glass on the village houses.

Illo by Boris Diodorov

S. John Ross put up a poll about whether you just want to play your character without needing to learn the rules.

So usually I like this to be the case – in fact I Iearn the basics of the system just so I don’t drag, but it’s the main reason I play more fighters than MUs – I want to get to the adventure.

But as a DM – sometimes I want my players to make tactical decisions that depend on knowing the system. CCH is like that – wargamey enough that I’d like the players to get a sense of what they can and can’t get away with.

GLOB! This is good.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v3NYx//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I’m sorry for pouring oil on that fire so gratuitously – I regret my comment regarding Greg and any part I played in derailing your thread. FWIW I’m not here to police anyone else’s experience or to present a united front or anything unless explicitly asked by the person whose thread it is. I’ll tone it down in future.

Assassin’s Drone

whoever did the soundtrack for the Assassin’s Creed movie

(a) listened hard to the Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack

(b) is really, really into long bass chords on strings. Like, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with the TV or someone had left a lawnmower running outside. Chords long enough that the viewers forget they’re there until they stop.

Incredible Hulk reboot: Banner is actually a Wendigo.

Boardgame designed by my daughter. James Raggi I think she might be ready for LotFP!

Players spin in place – the number of spins before they fall over is the number of spaces they advance.

…the game is based on the novel Bloody Mary about the life of Mary Tudor who, now I think about it, is a pretty good Flame Princess.

Game name: The Spiral of Death. Note especially the very first step after “start.”

complaining that Philip Glass is boring is like complaining that soto zen is boring.

Twee, maybe.

Cotton Mather thought he’d heard everything.

A short rumination on the “pirate republic” of Nassau and why PCs shouldn’t emulate it. Cross-posting with Counter-colonial Heistcrawl, of course.

…the main reason I’m not blogging is I’m too busy writing…

https://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/counter-colonial-heistcrawl-previous-high-scores///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

this is superb, of course

Any madman who enters the castle becomes sane, but only so long as they stay there. They also live forever. [the dragon is] Advised by beautiful trauma victims and exiled monarchs from long-forgotten kingdoms. Deliberately drives people mad so they have to stay with her and be her friend.

Originally shared by Dunkey Halton

Metal Dragons

Inspired by a Scrap Princess post about how forgettable the metallic dragons are.

There’s now one dragon for each of the alchemical metals, with a personality based on the associated planet.

I may be 15 minutes late, need to get the kids to bed!

events/c5bf7mf9ain3vfnvorto0c6ppss?authkey=CIuWv6zymrWo9gE//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

here’s the community!

I have never storygamed.

Am I right in thinking it’s a sort of… collaborative improv for budding novelists? Like, everyone’s self-consciously into the fiction and the goal is to present your fiction that you’ve prepared and baked into your character and then have interesting interpersonal drama/collision of all the players’ fictions? And so all the plot tokens and McGuffins and opening situation and so on are just dressing to enable that action – is that right? Kind of like scriptwriter school in a group?

I think if that’s what it is, I could be into it if it had as little as possible to do with the usual genre tropes. Like I could enjoy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as this sort of exercise, but not at all The Walking Dead or Vampires and Frankensteins or whatever.

I like familiar genre trappings in games where the point is to succeed in the world because they help you get quickly to the plot, which is where the action is. Then it’s great to be Robin Hood because that helps you fit the objectives. But I have no desire to play Robin Hood as an emotional entity/landscape.

OTOH as a DM I love playing the Sheriff of Nottingham because it’s got the potential for broad comedy and gives the players a well-established target to bounce their schemes off.

Weird? Fair? Misguided? Please tell me how I’m wrong.

here’s the community!

We will be playing Counter-colonial Heistcrawl tomorrow 9:30pm EDT!!! I will try to make an Event but don’t hold your breath. If you want in, let me know and I’ll add you to the community. If you’re already in the community, please reply to that post there. If you already said you want to play on the previous post(s)… well it can’t hurt to say again here but I probably have you covered. Tell me twice and I definitely won’t forget (hopefully).

FINALLY THE CHARGEN

If you already made up a character using the linked post, you can play them if you want. The system has changed a bit to more-or-less LotFP (or more-or-less Mageblade!) (emphasis on less – rules lite is my thing) but the chargen doesn’t care much.

I recommend rolling up 2 characters right now. They know each other.

Here is chargen in its entirety (mostly pasted from the post):

ATTRIBUTES: Str, Dex, Int, Wis, Con, Cha. 3D6 in order, punk.

Wisdom is common sense and perception but also ability to notice spirits. Charisma doubles as magic power & luck.

CLASS: choose from fighter, specialist (ie skills-person), or spirit-wrangler. Fighters can possibly learn skillimagical effects during the game a little bit like Mageblades, if anyone knows what that is.

Specialists get 2 skills/tropes – one at 4, one at 2 (roll under on a D6 with mods to perform skill under duress). They should be of the breadth of sailing, gunnery, animal handling, trading, persuasion, herbalism, navigation, smugglers’ tricks, spirit talk – not as narrow as “lockpick” nor as broad as “thief.”

Spirit Wranglers are a bit like spirit mediums, a bit like pokemon-trainers. All magic happens because of spirits. Spirits can sometimes be forced, more often must be negotiated with. I warn you now this part of the game is totally untested you will be helping to define the rules as we go. Like a true sorcerer.

Also choose a background. This is what people know you as and you can plead based on it saying “but I should be able to do this because I’m a…” and it gives you 1 skill or a default roll off your attributes when successfully invoked. Example professions include: pirate, smuggler, concubine, procurer, medium, monk, bodyguard/mafia hood, magistrate, spirit medium, cunning man, builder, fisherman, whaler, scout, merchant, legal opiner, scholar, “viking” slaver, diver, navigator.

Note: we will not be using DnD type levels. Advancement is by increasing skills, crew and most of all, loot. This is a domain game from turn 1 – your group holds and uses property in common. If you conquer a kingdom, you’re kings.

Default status

You can have a secret, long-lost background as a ship captain/priest/village judge/longhouse master/princess that’s fine, write your story. But (spoilers) you start in chains, with none of your stuff on you – Equipment (below) is somewhere on the island, your Special Possession is somewhere out there.

Equipment – roll once on Table A, once on Table B. You had these only yesterday and you know they’re nearby…

Table A

1. crowbar

2. dagger

3. shield

4. food, drink and backpack

5. lamp and flasks of oil (3)

6. melee weapon

7. armour: leather or improvised equivalent

8. bow or crossbow with 10 arrows/bolts

9. small raft (size 1)

10. mirror

11. rope (50′)

12. grappling hook/anchor

13. pouch with 20 silver dirhams

14. musical instrument

15. hammer, chisel, pick + 8 iron spikes

16. writing box and seal

17. arquebus + 10 shots

18. small barrel of gunpowder.

19. Barrel of arrack

20. 3 caskets grapeshot, with powder

Table B

1. lucky medallion (re-roll 1 failed saving throw)

2. potion of healing

3. lockable iron-bound chest

4. guard animal (dog, lynx, monkey or similar)

5. riding or pack animal (camel, pony, goat)

6. size 2 boat

7. armor: scale or exotic

8. loyal family retainer ( a standard grog with a couple of charming quirks).

9. map

10. book – holy text or instruction manual

11. holy symbol or badge of office

12. spirit in a jar

13. slip of paper with a spirit contract – eat and then specify what you need

14. bird in a cage that repeats spirit chatter

Special Thing – roll once on each table – this is somewhere out in the world, a hook to be retrieved, rather than something you had only yesterday:

1 a ship

2 a fort, bay or haven

3 a contact – smuggler, informant, fence, carpenter, smith, spirit go-between

4 a weapon – cannon, bomb, spirit, blackmail, poison, disease

5 a debt – blood, goods, mafia, spirit

6 a diminished god from a foreign land

7 a massive cache of gunpowder

8 several gallons of the interloper’s “holy water”

9 a sibling rival – kite pilot, long-distance swimmer, pirate, magistrate/king/official

10 the washed-up corpse of something massive

11 a spring that bubbles with blood or a cistern filled with teeth

12 Hungry Grandmother’s bottle of secrets

13 a funeral barge, surrounded by silence

14 a Dark Child

15 a commander of the invaders, disgustingly ill, on a mission

16 one of the enemy’s ships, on the edge of mutiny

17 one of the enemy’s Holy Books, foolishly translated into a tongue we understand

18 the ashen remains of an ancient Obsidian Queen’s funeral pyre

19 a relic of a foreign saint

20 one of the teeth of Brother Shark

Your relation to it:

1 It’s rightfully yours but currently captive

2 It’s marked on this map

3 It’s known to be abandoned, there for taking,

4 It’s lost in a useful way

5 It’s in danger from something esoteric

6 It’s been swiped by an enemy

And/or:

1 you are blessed/cursed in some way

2 you are bonded/owed in some way

3 you have a mysterious ally/enemy

4 your memories/skills/loyalties/reputation/status/soul have been stolen/augmented/crippled/replaced

5 your tribe’s priest/captive spirits need you and only you

6 you are an exiled spirit with temporary control of a body

https://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/counter-colonial-heistcrawl-rules-v-0-1///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I don’t have time to process this today either. This being busy thing: I’ve tried it, I don’t love it.

That said CCH TOMORROW NIIIIIGHT simple chargen coming this afternoon.

Originally shared by Scott Martin

THAT MOOD INDIGO

Somewhere on doomed Jrustela my double — call him Robert Starling — spends too much time reverse-engineering popular slow dances and torch songs, scooping back the narcotic syrup he calls “the Great American Spellbook” to demonstrate the engines of frustration and disappointment that drove the magic of our mid-century civilization. None of his contemporaries take him seriously, but he’s apparently “journeyed” to something like Tin Pan Alley and other key otherworld sites so I jumped at the chance to consult him on the workings of Grindhawk’s scroll & treasure map industry — on the chance that these are probabilistic masks of the same sad engine.

Today’s expedition starts with David Lynch and Patti Smith commiserating over how they recoiled immediately from “Blue Velvet” when it hit them at the vulnerable age of 16 going on 17. (Technically he was 17 going on 18, older and wiser, but you know boys can be a little slow.) There was something poisonous in it, mommy or daddy’s forbidden “medicine” doctored up with 1000 strings in order to keep the patient alive long enough to do its work. Something secret, kept from the children behind a semi-transparent veil like a world of white cotton wool melting in the dark.

For my friend from Jrustela, the pop charts had might as well be the endless spell lists found in a mature game manual: artifacts of a kind of “fantasy” abstracted from every aspect of his day-to-day experience. It’s what he calls “hobby music,” a kind of cargo cult attraction to the absolute exotic, I guess. Like the grunge bands that came straight down to Lima from the upper reaches of Yma Sumac country back in the day looking for a place to plug in a guitar. Anyhow, I should be grateful for his quixotic interest in our songs. I am.

He considers them in terms of transmission and a kind of cultural physics that might be “mythology” for all I know. Who are the incremental innovators behind each cut on each album, quietly refining the raw material, pushing the envelope a fraction in one direction and then the next? Where do the breaks come, and are they accidental or by design? Taking the long view, how do you get from Cole Porter to Jimmy Webb and how do the Pet Shop Boys pick up the pieces? Do Dory Previn and Lana Del Rey sacrifice to the same powers or have those powers changed over time, taking market forces with them on the ride? Who is Neil Diamond really?

Sometimes he talks too fast and it’s humbling. I hear these songs and the associations are from childhood, maybe a decade earlier if you do all the math: overcast New York afternoons, the view from a taxi window — no wait, that’s the That Girl opening credits — the strange recurrence of harpsichord timbres, the summer wind comes blowin’ in. Green grass and presidential hearings on a gigantic cabinet TV. Charlie Brown losing the spelling bee. Plastic trash left over from the space age. To me these songs are really just the mirror language of trying to build a map of adulthood too soon out of whatever I could filch. I’d say that precocity is where the abject quality of this music seeps in — “swallowed his parents too soon,” Kristeva would shrug — but my friend from Jrustela is on the side of Lynch & Smith here.

There’s something going on inside our pop music, he says, like a black ribbon wound around a dead sweetheart’s neck. By definition a harpsichord shouldn’t reverberate this long on its own. It defies our observable cultural physics. It’s something else.

Come Saturday Morning. A Very Good Year. Mood Indigo, with its phantom fourth instrument, a trick of early electronics. Tell Laura I Love Her. MacArthur Park. Town Without Pity. Telstar. Girlfriend in a Coma, I know.

Blue Velvet. Ridgely gets nervous midway through Bobby Vinton’s greatest hits, draws the straight line back to the works of Mrs W.K. “Lucy” Clifford we both love the way other people love a horror movie: the sugar-sweet poison of oxytocin paranoia, the overwhelming suspicion that somebody is trying to eat your baby and maybe it’s you.

But my friend from Jrustela, it’s funny how his deep breaks wrench him out of the imperial bronze age into midtown in the rain. It’s like one of those set pieces in a mid-period Zelazny or early Jonathan Carroll when a chase scene veers back to our home shadow and you have SWAT teams taking on iron stallions and demon dogs, only he’s the dog in this scenario. Narnians gone the wrong way through the wardrobe, blinking in the traffic.

All they can do for him back home is prescribe better psychic wards to keep the dream parasites at bay. To them his trip to Coney Island was somewhere between heavy outer “atomic” [untranslatable] exploration and another progressive schizophrenic episode. I sometimes think I’m watching the struggle of a saint, but who knows.

via Winchell Chung. I feel like I’ve been working toward something like this for a while. The next trick is, how to make an actual game system out of it.

http://www.projectrho.com/nomogram/index.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

saving for later…

Originally shared by Christopher Weeks

This is the most important cocktail article I’ve seen in a year.

http://punchdrink.com/articles/mastering-daiquiri-cocktail-recipe-jeff-beachbum-berry-latitude-29-new-orleans///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Writing is easier and more fun than editing.

Does this make any sense as an introduction?

Is it better not to talk about how the sausage is made?

I’ve a feeling James will want something more classically sales-y.

What is this even supposed to be?

This book is doomed to failure. Its very concept is a mockery of science and it takes a special kind of idiot to attempt it.

That idiot would be me.

James Raggi called me up and said “I’d like you to write a historically accurate set of ship rules for LotFP.” And I did not immediately say “you realize the demands of making a playable game are basically at odds with those of a historian’s research, right?” Instead I said “sure,” thereby putting my reputation both as a historian and as a game designer in jeopardy. James further said “can you cover 17th century European and Ottoman shipping?” and I said “I’ll cover all the kinds of 17th century shipping I can.” …which obviously meant I’d cover them with varying degrees of confidence, but it so happened I’d done some reading on Southeast Asian and Arabian shipping on my way to Dutch East India Company ships, so I figured “well, who else is going to attempt even a slightly non-Eurocentric book on this topic?”

Idiot.

So to be clear: what this here is, is a set of rules for designing, building and fighting ships – of all sizes and all periods before the steam age. And the rules are written to try to yield more-or-less historically plausible results – so if you put in the data for a Venetian galley or an East Indiaman or an ocean-going junk you should get fairly accurate results for crew requirements, sailing performance, armament etc – at least as far as we actually know those things.

Obviously, there are compromises – the demands of coherent, usable game rules don’t match well with modeling the differences in handling between a bark and a full-rigged ship, or the effectiveness of French vs. Siamese oars. Perhaps less obviously, there are massive gaps in our knowledge even of basic questions like ship speed and resilience. In particular, on the question “how much damage does a 9lb, 12lb or 36lb cannon shot do to a merchant ship or warship of the 1630s?” there are simply no reliable sources – written accounts of battle don’t go into that sort of detail. There was no cadre of Kriegspiel experimenters. And even if there were, they would only have been writing for their own navies, they would not have covered anything like the range of shipping that was actually in close contact around the world during the period.

So this book is speculative. I offer that it may be better-informed speculation than any of the other game books I’ve consulted in writing it. It no doubt contains errors – I look forward to reading all about them – and I hope one day it will be superseded, but for now this is the most honestly and thoroughly Quixotic attempt I’ve seen to render the ships of Magellan, de Ruyter, Piri Reis and Zheng He in RPG terms and to enable players to design their own.

What do you mean, “honestly Quixotic?”

I should first honestly state my qualifications, such as they are: I’m a PhD architectural historian who studies shipboard spatial organization – as far as I know, I’m the only one principally concerned with ships. My doctoral work includes the study of Dutch East Indiamen and their crews, and especially how they fared during mutinies and shipwrecks. So I’ve learned a few things and read widely around the topic (that’s something you have to do when nobody else really studies your subject to prepare the ground for you). But there’s a lot I don’t know – a gamer will inevitably ask questions that a hundred historians cannot answer. And if I don’t know, instead of answering with false confidence or repeating the answers given by other game designers (which are as likely as not based on literary precedents or other kinds of unreliable knowledge), I try to do the responsible historian thing and say I don’t know. Except when I have to make it up out of whole cloth because, if I didn’t, there wouldn’t be any rules at all. Which, you know, does happen here and there…

Maybe that’s the wrong approach. Maybe it’s more practical and appealing to write another Sinbad or Pirates Ho! book – that’s an honorable endeavour, too, to write a good piece of literary fiction and offer really appealing stereotypes… but I rather think that tack’s been covered by other authors. So “honestly Quixotic” is what I can give you.

Coming soon: the second part in which I attempt to deliver a gameable-while-historically-accurate system of pirate economics.

From a book on “the proverbs of India:”

“A modern writer impressed by the selfish and heartless tone of many proverbs desribes them as “the algebra of materialism”…to describe them as the algebra of popular pessimism would be nearer the truth.”

…of the proverbial character of the Indian peasant: “he is credited with practising fraternal polyandry, like the Venetian nobility of the early eighteenth century, as a measure of domestic economy, and a whole family are said to have one wife between them.”

Paolo Greco 216!

I’m sorry about what happened in that thread. I felt like I was being a useless bystander while you got trashed – on the other hand, you seemed OK with it all, and I always have a hard time navigating those places where people tell each other to fuck off “in good humour.”

So. I should’ve checked in to see if you were OK and I didn’t. Sorry.

craft cocktails, Tiki revival…

…what do you think the prospects are for opening a honky tonk and ragtime saloon?

Locally sourced sarsparilla, limited menu of rye whiskies.

to the left to the left to the left to the left

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/italian-fighting-manual-ca-1410///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I haven’t read any of Break!! yet but I keep imagining what it could be.

reading the wikipedia cobalt dragon entry:

Mercury dragons have one breath weapon, a line of superheated yellow light.

it seems so cartoony to me, I want it to be

Mercury dragon breath weapon: a line of yellow light and a wailing guitar chord. Any characters that have transformation sequences must do them now, during which the dragon’s henchmen can steal their vehicles.

Mike Evans asked “what are the pros and cons to a dungeon world?”

I think he means to a system I haven’t read, but I prefer the worldbuilding response.

Pros:

– no safe normal place to retreat to.

– territory has to be a consideration, ie rooms are now treasure.

– trap building/maintenance at least as important as trap defusing

– no endless import economy to the underground. Arrows are a valuable resource (although maybe less valuable given that your biggest spaces are corridors or altar rooms)

– reveals good/evil talk as simple chauvinism, since everyone’s a trog

– have to think through seriously weird ecological questions – where’s the energy input with no sun? Where does food come from? Is there no wood? Is all smelting done geothermally?

Cons:

– possible arguments/aesthetic purism about what the essence of dungeon is. Like if you have an underground lake that’s big enough to support seaborne empires and piracy, are you a dungeon in name only?

– claustrophiliac fetishism: can you not have any gates to Outside (astral plane, heavens, Tekumel demon gardens) because of first con

– definitely no flying islands

The UK has spoken: there is no one to vote for.

I don’t even live there any more so I couldn’t vote, but if I could, I’d support Macron.

You know, if I could.

8:30 Cindern Block asks “can we have some music? Only not the Beatles.”

ahahaha

Lucy and the Sky

A Day In The Life

Starfish & Coffee

Girls and Boys

… and by 9:30;

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yuH1XDtN4rE//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Mini crowdsource question – this could possibly end up in a published thing.

You know those sailing ships that fly – what’s your favourite excuse for that?

What I’ve got so far:

So you want to fly but you don’t just want airplanes – either because they have terrible limitations of size and stall speed or they just don’t tickle your pirate bone. Why not just make ships fly?

What keeps it up?

1. Lifting wood or crystals or a Ninth Ray or spoons of the ancients or something – these are small enough that you can basically build ships exactly like the ones you make for the sea only they fly, and somehow you can also control the height. The Flying Stuff or its receptors must always be exposed to fire from underneath. The good news is that if they fall off, they fall upward, so it takes a lot to rake them off the bottom of the hull.

guys, are you planning to be in the CCH game next week and for weeks following?

…is there another time you could be up for playtesting/feedback on this ship thing I’m writing?

one for kreg Mosier and allegedly better, vanished times

http://www.barchetta.cc/All.Ferraris///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So Trump, the one-man litigation boom, has finally reached the saturation point where lawyers won’t defend him.

In comments on the original post, this quote from the WSJ makes me wonder: “Trump’s continued ineptitude will only scare away intelligent and qualified people from working at the White House – and leave an administration filled with ‘no one but his family and the Breitbart staff.'”

Is this called “swamping the drain”?

Originally shared by Cindy Brown

Oh, my god.

The unwillingness of some of the country’s most prestigious attorneys and their law firms to represent Trump has complicated the administration’s efforts to mount a coherent defense strategy to deal with probes being conducted by four congressional committees as well as Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.

The president’s chief lawyer now in charge of the case is Marc E. Kasowitz, a tough New York civil litigator who for years has aggressively represented Trump in multiple business and public relations disputes — often with threats of countersuits and menacing public statements — but who has little experience dealing with complex congressional and Justice Department investigations that are inevitably influenced by media coverage and public opinion.

The kicker:

“The concerns were, ‘The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen,’” said one lawyer close to the White House who is familiar with some of the discussions between the firms and the administration, as well as deliberations within the firms themselves.

(bolds mine)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/four-top-law-firms-turned-requests-represent-trump-122423972.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

hey, are you OK?

There’s been a load of shit-talking going on today but I think it’s all tongue in cheek. I’m just worried – are you doing all right?

Reading LotR to the youngest. It’s my first read through since the films were made.

I remember the thrill of recognition I felt in the cinema when I saw the black rider stop and sniff on that wooded road in the Shire – I knew I had read this scene and it felt just right. Now reading it, I can’t help seeing the movie and its small additions… and constantly comparing the book and film and agreeing with Jackson that Tolkien’s decade of shuffling about after Gandalf first feels the Ring’s presence is frankly hard to swallow… and then after Frodo’s waited for his birthday to set off, the riders come looking that night.

Fairy tales, I guess.

Title

teeny tiny irritations:

so now the top bar of the G+ interface is grey text on a white field. But the “you’re on this page” icon colour is still red and the “write a post” button is still white icon on a red field.

This is the moment when whatever rando they got to replace their graphic designer also said “I give up.”

started today with amazing g+ posts from Scrap and Arnold, ended it with 3 separate groups of people talking about Tulipmania.

Sadly, my quality bar for engagement in an argument had been raised early in the morning. Rather than responding “woah, Dutch golden age, awesome!” I was more like “look if you’re not going to follow up with the South Sea bubble what are we even doing here?”

The book I’m writing for Raggi is supposed to be rules rules rules. But. I’ve already added a couple of sidebars of non-rule curios.

I feel a temptation to turn these into manic footnotes a la HHGTTG and further to add more of the same, abusing the footnote format.

Should I? Is this stupid self-indulgence?

Raggi doesn’t want me to ask this question (I’m pretty sure) because it’s not a creative decision he wants to make.

possible style for Castoordam map

Originally shared by Jensan Thuresson

Has anyone done a citymap (in a RPG) in the style of Radiohead’s “Hail to the thief” album?

Using a single word on a typical “building block” to label its use. Also I’m thinking about letting the size of the word/block convey its importance (threat? ).

reposting not because you need me to tell you “go read Scrap or Arnold” but to remind me later to use every single entry here.

Go read Scrap’s post (linked in post).

FleshCow: something that could look like a cow if you had never seen a cow and had only had one described to you by people that you hated listening to. It licks you into amorphous plasiticity

Originally shared by Arnold K.

In which I attempt to list the opposites of monster manual entries. From CTHONIC MASTER to COW EGG.

I am presenting these monsters as evidence that my sexual habits are both tasteful and appropriate for my demographic.

Starts writing adventure.

Hm. Need to research Qat.

3 clicks later – slew of pages on viagra substitutes.

OK then I guess I know what that’s doing in my adventure.

Google+ please remove the prompt at the top of my feed that asks for permission to link to my phone photos.

– on latest iOS.

It’s not going to happen.

At least give me a button to dismiss it.

Reasonable person with normally reasonable comments threads writes reasonable, factual post. Total clusterfuck meltdown in comments.

Oh right. Post included a youtube video.

John Baez you have my sympathy.

I didn’t expect this:

Spanish Inquisition stats (Wikipedia): 19th century estimates stated that only between the years 1484 and 1525, 28,540 were burned in person, 16,520 burned in effigy and 303,847 penanced. However, after extensive examinations of archival records, modern scholars provide lower estimates, indicating that fewer than 10,000 were actually executed during the whole history of the Spanish Inquisition, perhaps around 3,000.

Perhaps! Mmmaybe off by… a factor of 10. And that right there is the joy of early modern archives.

If you’re going to get burned, in effigy is the way to do it.

Holy shit this is amazing. Thank you Skerples – I don’t know why I didn’t read the previous posts but now I will because:

a) using a hexcrawl as a logic table is the kind of genius that’s staring you in the face but it takes someone actually demonstrating it to make me go “ah!”

b) your grasp of both the dynamics of historic warfare and the dramatic possibilities of a corps-a-corps clinch is superb.

your enemies always seem richer, luckier, and stronger than you. It’s a game mechanic thing

Brilliant. Archive dive coming next…

Originally shared by Skerples

Paolo Greco asked me to both cite my sources and explain my crazy moon logic for my Medieval Stalemate Simulator. So I did.

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/06/osr-medieval-stalemate-simulator-part-2.html

(I’m just kidding, he was very nice, and annoyed in the way only someone who loves history can be.) 🙂

Originally shared by Noah Axon

There are obvious places to take this argument and choirs to preach to. Instead, I’d like to talk about this idea of “being radicalized.”

When someone commits an act of terror or random-seeming violence we now look for “Who or what radicalized them?” Which sounds to me like looking for the devil that made them do it, or (in a more recent version) what drug made them do it. Getting Really Angry – not even once. Look what happened to these previously normal white boys…

And if there’s no obvious mentor to finger, we reach for “self-radicalization,” which seems to be short-hand for “radicalized over the internet” or by reading published rhetoric.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecelia-lynch/selfradicalization-and-re_b_8804748.html

But what are the implications of this “process of radicalization” for personal responsibility, mental health or political protest? If you were normal and peaceful but now you’re radicalized, what’s the practical difference? Mostly, it seems, that there might be more evildoers to prosecute than just the trigger-man – radicalization seems to be a way to multiply blame, rather than shift it.

It seems to me that what’s missing in all this is any discussion of:

a) what happens within the killer, that leads to them killing – there’s discussion of inputs (they became obsessed with these sources, they had the book by so and so) but not what leads the killer to concentrate on them or act out, where others don’t;

b) what “radicalization” means and how it’s different from whatever the rest of us are doing. What are the bounds of the “non-radical” viewpoint that is coded as being healthy, vs. the “radicalized” one? Is it important/necessary to recognizing someone’s “radicalization” that they act in violence against targets near them, with only a tenuous connection to the source of any actual injustice or offense? If your health insurance is taken away, placing your family’s life in danger, by a small number of government officials and you get mad about that, are you already guilty of the thought-crime of “radicalization” or does it take more than that? Is that too rational, to understandable? If you then go and shoot all the dogs in the neighbourhood because you’re mad about the AHCA, is that irrational enough that we can tell after the fact that you’re “radicalized?”

Does “self-radicalizing” just mean getting upset enough that you can’t forget about a thing, and then finally working up the rage to do something about it?

Could it be made to mean that? Because that’s what it sounds like to me. When one person takes it on themselves to enact violence because someone else radicalized them by saying stuff, isn’t that a contagion argument – they were infected by “dangerous ideas”? And if there are in fact contagious “dangerous ideas” (I’m just saying “if” to follow the logical chain, don’t worry) then who’s to blame for them? Is there a way in which the society or political rhetoric that outlaws certain ideas could itself be culpable, for failing to give its citizens any immune system against radicalization?

Originally shared by Xenophrenia

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/white-male-terrorists-are-an-issue-we-should-discuss//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I really want to watch Season 2 of The Get Down BUT only if it leaves the Bronx and instead it’s a mythic origin story for Yello. And maybe Books goes to Switzerland on a summer trip from Yale and meets these guys who are like “why are you limiting yourself to music that’s already been recorded? There’s a world of sounds out there!” and then they’re hopping fences and recording at racetracks and trying to derail freight trains and getting chased by dogs out of industrial corners of Bern and they run into Simon Jeffes and get freaked out by his recordings of Tibetan Yaks screaming and they get drunk in front of Anne Dudley and she’s just “when are you boys going to take this seriously?” and Kraftwerk show up as the elder statesmen of the scene but it turns out they just want to sleep with groupies and steal everyone’s stash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASeMz8oX7Fc//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

oh. I’m 3 days too late to make an “it was 50 years ago today” joke. I guess my whole g+ feed was obsessed with what was released 10 years minus one day later.

Except it was already “20 years ago today” in ’67.

So…. May 26, 1947. The (official) end of capital punishment, back in the USSR.

After that they had to be content with having people just softly and suddenly vanish away or somehow ingest polonium or get into fatal disagreements with nameless criminals.

Life goes on, helter-skelter.

Originally shared by Sandra S.

Do(h)nald

Originally shared by Michael Moscrip

Suddenly interested in TV again.

Depleted all available reserves of new TV that fits my interest.

I am caught up with:

The Flash, Arrow, Twin Peaks Return, Agents of Shield, Supergirl, and Gotham.

I have heard great things about The Expanse, and am considering it, but I’m not really in the mood for space right now.

John Till this is a totally stupid internet tendency. I make no recommendations. Posts sometimes – no, always – nsfw.

why have I never read Captain Cook’s journals before?

Oh, right, because I always have too much to read.

Here – Captain Cook and some New Zealanders experiment with cannibalism, freak out the Tahitians. But it begins with Cook and the importance of shock, awe and guns…

The best method, in my opinion, to preserve a good understanding with such people, is, first, by shewing them the use of firearms, to convince them of the superiority they give you over them, and then to be always upon your guard. When once they are sensible of these things, a regard for their own safety will deter them from disturbing you, or from being unanimous in forming any plan to attack you; and strict honesty, and gentle treatment on your part, will make it their interest not to do it.

Calm or light airs from the north all day on the 23d, hindered us from putting to sea as intended. In the afternoon, some of the officers went on shore to amuse themselves among the natives, where they saw the head and bowels of a youth, who had lately been killed, lying on the beach; and the heart stuck on a forked stick, which was fixed to the head of one of the largest canoes. One of the gentlemen bought the head, and brought it on board, where a piece of the flesh was broiled and eaten by one of the natives, before all the officers and most of the men. I was on shore at this time, but soon after returning on board, was informed of the above circumstances; and found the quarter-deck crowded with the natives, and the mangled head, or rather part of it, (for the under-jaw and lip were wanting) lying on the tafferal. The skull had been broken on the left side, just above the temples; and the remains of the face had all the appearance of a youth under twenty.

The sight of the head, and the relation of the above circumstances, struck me with horror, and filled my mind with indignation against these cannibals. Curiosity, however, got the better of my indignation, especially when I considered that it would avail but little; and being desirous of becoming an eye-witness of a fact which many doubted, I ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought to the quarter-deck, where one of these cannibals eat it with surprising avidity. This had such an effect on some of our people as to make them sick. Oedidee (who came on board with me) was so affected with the sight as to become perfectly motionless, and seemed as if metamorphosed into the statue of horror. It is utterly impossible for art to describe that passion with half the force that it appeared in his countenance. When roused from this state by some of us, he burst into tears; continued to weep and scold by turns; told them they were vile men; and that he neither was, nor would be any longer their friend. He even would not suffer them to touch him; he used the same language to one of the gentlemen who cut off the flesh; and refused to accept, or even touch the knife with which it was done. Such was Oedidee’s indignation against the vile custom; and worthy of imitation by every rational being.

I was not able to find out the reason for their undertaking this expedition; all I could understand for certain was, that they went from hence into Admiralty Bay (the next inlet to the west), and there fought with their enemies, many of whom they killed. They counted to me fifty; a number which exceeded probability, as they were not more, if so many, themselves. I think I understood them clearly, that this youth was killed there; and not brought away prisoner, and afterwards killed. Nor could I learn that they had brought away any more than this one; which increased the improbability of their having killed so many. We had also reason to think that they did not come off without loss; for a young woman was seen, more than once, to cut herself, as is the custom when they lose a friend or

relation.

That the New Zealanders are cannibals, can now no longer be doubted. The account given of this in my former voyage, being partly founded on circumstances, was, as I afterwards understood, discredited by many persons. Few consider what a savage man is in his natural state, and even after he is, in some degree, civilized. The New Zealanders are certainly in some state of civilization; their behaviour to us was manly and mild, shewing, on all occasions, a readiness to oblige. They have some arts among them which they execute with great judgment and unwearied patience; they are far less addicted to thieving than the other islanders of the South Sea; and I believe those in the same tribe, or such as are at peace one with another, are strictly honest among themselves. This custom of eating their enemies slain in battle (for I firmly believe they eat the flesh of no others) has undoubtedly been handed down to them from the earliest times; and we know it is not an easy matter to wean a nation from their ancient customs, let them be ever so inhuman and savage; especially if that nation has no manner of connexion or commerce with strangers. For it is by this that the greatest part of the human race has been civilized; an advantage which the New Zealanders, from their situation, never had. An intercourse with foreigners would reform their manners, and polish their savage minds. Or, were they more united under a settled form of government, they would have fewer enemies, consequently this custom would be less in use, and might in time be in a manner forgotten. At present, they have but little idea of treating others as themselves would wish to be treated, but treat them as they expect to be treated. If I remember right, one of the arguments they made use of to Tupia, who frequently expostulated with them against this custom, was, that there could be no harm in killing and eating the man who would do the same by them if it was in his power. “For,” said they, “can there be any harm in eating our enemies, whom we have killed in battle? Would not those very enemies have done the same to us?” I have often seen them listen to Tupia with great attention; but I never found his arguments have any weight with them, or that with all his rhetoric, he could persuade any one of them that this custom was wrong. And when Oedidee, and several of our people, shewed their abhorrence of it, they only laughed at them.

Originally shared by Joshua Kubli

This is a complete and exhaustive explanation of how comic-book continuity works, also.

Paolo Greco useful for Gangs and Bullshit? Also for Scholars and Scoundrels of the Silk Road. Joseph Manola

So this is the kind of little toy I love – someone’s taken a couple of orthodox ideas about city form and made them into a generator.

Why it works: it’s the right mix of arbitrary and designed. Every town is built around a market square, which sits at the junction of the main roads. These roads separate the town into neighbourhoods. Off these main roads, development semi-randomly follows a “dendritic” pattern of diminishing streets, denoting lower traffic and greater privacy. Occasional courtyards in the neighbourhoods show us that communal buildings – churches or market halls or something – must be there. And one road always connects the ruler’s castle to the square, generating an automatic processional way, which you can extend to one of the communal buildings/courtyards.

Nice touches: the main square always contains a well.

It seems like courtyards are biased toward appearing off main roads, as you’d expect.

Neighbourhoods can be more or less cut through with roads, suggesting that some have bigger (richer) buildings than others.

Note – this is recognisably a European/inner Asian-looking city generator; road patterns in neighbourhoods would look different in the canonical “Islamic city” (by which architectural theory means Fez) and there would be more square gridded planning with multiple gates in each straight wall in the canonical “Chinese” or “Mandala city” (Fuzhou or Chiang Mai).

Originally shared by Nate Lumpkin

hey here’s a one-click medieval city generator I came across on twitter. I can’t imagine this not being useful, so, here you go!

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js