Four roommates are extraterrestrials who have taken human form in the hopes of learning about Earth’s culture. Unfortunately, each alien is from a different planet and believes the other three are normal humans.
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Yes, the blazing lightning is the obvious reference, but LOOK AT THAT GLOWING LINE RIPPLING ACROSS LOKI AS HE TRANSFORMS. I rest my case: This is the He-Man movie we've always wanted. :-)
This is a non-combat character sheet meant to facilitate the process of creating and keeping track of NPCs.
NPC Roleplaying Sheet (by luckpack)
“This is a non-combat character sheet meant to facilitate the process of creating and keeping track of NPCs.
I prefer giving each NPC it’s unique small sheet of paper instead of keeping them all crammed together in a notebook or something. Having a form with fillable blanks also makes it that much easier to create a large number of characters.
It’s about 10x15 cm, a quarter of the size of a regular A4 paper. Below are Google Drive download links. All PDFs have two pages; the first one is the front and the second one is the back. I used the player character sheet as reference to try to get it to be “official” looking.
[NPC Sheet]
[NPC Sheet, no lines]
[NPC Sheet, printer friendly]
[NPC Sheet, no lines & printer friendly]
Also:
All races age differently. I recommend finding or creating an “age by race” table for quick reference. I also recommend writing how mature the character is as well in case you forget how that specific race works. So for a halfling, for example, I might write “80, middle aged” instead of just the number alone.
In the “Combat Statistics” field, the idea is to write the name of a creature in the MM or other book. The NPC will utilize these stats. So for example, if I have a Captain of the Guard character and I want him to be stronger than the average Guard (p. 347 MM) I might write down “Scout, p. 349 MM.” Humanoids don’t vary that much in strength, so for the majority of NPCs you could print out a couple of obvious stats (Commoner, Guard, Acolyte, Scout, etc) and refer to them as needed. This is much more practical than printing a combat sheet for every character, considering you have no idea who players might attempt to murder.”
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Last night I dreamt of the Numenera... and I realized that we are more familiar with such things than I had previously suspected.
There was a box, with walls of glass, and from it came forth sounds and images. (Though it sounds like a TV in the retelling, it was not a TV; more like an empty aquarium.) The sounds and images faltered, and those nearby did their best to restore them by manipulating various connected objects arrayed on the table nearby.
Some ratcheted a sort of bell up and down a post, like the cage in the old Mouse Trap board game. Others worked brass pedals, which looked like they had been taken from a grand piano and welded together at right angles. (All of the objects being manipulated were made of brass.) Still more adjusted pipes which telescoped into and out of one another.
Some of the things they attempted seemed to improve the functioning of the glass box, but almost randomly so. It was clear that all their efforts were based on trial and error, that none understood why the things they were doing had any effect (if indeed they had any at all).
And when I awoke, I realized... we have all had dealings with the Numenera.
Every time your parents adjusted the rabbit ears on a television set to try and improve reception.
The other day when you figured out how to use or fix a gadget or appliance without the benefit of a guide or manual.
That time I managed to isolate the individual strands of a frayed copper wire buried in the wall and discern which ones were needed to carry DSL into our apartment.
Managing such feats with ancient tech crafted by inhuman hands is absolutely more difficult, but the difference is quantitative. Any technology sufficiently undocumented or poorly understood is indistinguishable from Numenera. :-)
About twenty years ago, a fine gentleman introduced us both to Dungeons & Dragons. In a few short weeks we're going to get to play D&D with him again for the first time in almost two decades, and we are thrilled. :-) To celebrate, Stephanie is drawing the characters we've created for the occasion! Here's a work-in-progress shot of Kahldar Whitepeak, Rodrigo's Fighter.
Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong.
Given a few other things I've posted and linked to, it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed this bit of sf storytelling tremendously (despite my complete lack of football literacy). Kudos to John Gruber for linking it on Daring Fireball. :-)
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But if you apply some worldbuilding you put two things together:
1. Replicators
2. “No money.”
Futurists call this the “replicator economy” and we’re already seeing the start of it.
If I was a little bit richer, I would have bought a 3D printer last year.
When you have a 3D printer, you can download things from the internet and make them yourself for the cost of the raw materials. I have a 3D-printed cosplay prop that I printed on a library printer. They charged me the cost of the raw filament for it…it cost me less than $2 for the actual object. Probably $3-4 by the time I add in the paint. It’s made of a biologically created plastic.
In the works: Creating 3D printer filament out of old plastic shopping bags. (Which cannot be multi-stream recycled, it costs a fortune). This means that it won’t be long before a normal household can make toys and the like out of plastic shopping bags.
A true replicator uses cheap raw materials and waste to make useful things.
Let’s imagine, as an interim step, that somebody creates a clothing replicator. You feed it rags and it creates new clothes, from patterns you download from the internet.
So, you have an old T-shirt. It’s fine, but for a small hole and the pattern having rubbed off. You feed it into your clothing replicator and out comes a new T-shirt with a new design. No, we don’t have this yet, but we can and probably will.
What, at that point, happens to clothing shops? Oh, yes, you might still buy some clothes - and handmade clothing, put together by an actual human, is still going to have a cachet.
But the clothes from your replicator fit you perfectly. You don’t have a size any more. Every X months you stand in a 3D scanner, it takes every measurement, and then sends it to your replicator. If you’re pregnant (assuming we don’t have ectogenesis) you can actually have it adjust your favorite dress to make baby bump room. Just like that. The most comfortable item of clothing I own is my pleather bodysuit. Not coincidentally, it’s the only item of clothing I own that was made to my measurements.
None of what we wear fits.
So…right. What happens to clothing shops? What happens to spending large amounts of money on new clothes while we throw old clothes away or give them to Goodwill?
The economy slowly develops to the point where the means of production really is in the hands of people: As individuals.
Star Trek technology means that if Picard wants a new suit, he just programs a clothing replicator to take his measurements and make him a new suit. Some people like tailors, so Garak gets to stay in business.
And eventually, if all you actually need is raw material and information, you don’t need to buy very much…
…and you end up with a society without money. It’s not “communist” in any way that has ever been tried before because, well, it requires the underpinnings of that technology. (Just don’t think too hard about where the Enterprise’s food replicators get some of their raw material).
You end up with the only valuable thing being information and the only valuable skill being art - but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t need to work for a living any more. TNG reflects the only valuable skill being art in many ways, in fact. Data’s painting. The chamber orchestra. Geordi’s hobby of designing holodeck programs. Everyone makes art, not because it’s the one thing machines can’t do, but because it’s the one thing humans (and others) won’t let the machines take over.
You end up with the only valuable thing being information and the only valuable skill being art
Well, and raw materials. And replicators. And energy. And physical space. And a wide variety of non-material goods like club memberships. And health care. And it’ll take longer than you may think to get completely away from growing crops because plants are really fucking efficient at turning sunlight into calories. And non-art valuable skills include everyone you need to run a power plant or a mine (which is probably just people supervising the robots doing the labor, but still), probably everyone you need to run a spaceship because unless we’re really stupid all our mines are on the moon and asteroids, a wide variety of engineers to collaborate with the artists on designing new replicator patterns, replicator repairpeople, park rangers, administrators, doctors, therapists…
For those who want to explore these ideas further, I highly recommend a book by Manu Saadia called Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek. It agrees with @jenniferrpovey and discusses the ways in which “terminal abundance” shapes the psychology of life in the Federation, particularly in The Next Generation and beyond. It's also a loving account of what Star Trek means to the author personally, and the historical context the series grew out of. Well worth a read. :-)
“I swear to you. When I next return home, we will never be apart again.”
He grips your hand and sinks to one knee. His eyes blaze upwards with conviction. You know now, that his words then, were as good as prophecy. There is little--not distance, not time, and not ongoing war--that stand between Geoffrey Salser and the things he has made up his mind to have.
“I love you,” you say. “My heart go with you, and bring you home safe.”
He presses kisses to the back of your hands through the lace of your white gloves. His lips are fine and fever hot. “Be my wife, Selene Hart.”
*** Some Years Later ***
It’s been a long week. You know it because the newspapers are running amok with it: another bank collapsed, another worker’s strike. You know because he is up in the gray blue before dawn, and even his fastidious fingers are black with ink and dust by the time he returns from his press long after sundown.
You are not a morning person, but you rise with him every day anyway, as a good wife should; oversee his dressing, fill him up with the sweet black tea he likes, and coax him into a slice of toast slathered with the marmalade you made last summer with your own hands, back in Arcadia, back before this last nightmare started. You hope he tastes the love in it, because you’re fairly sure he isn’t tasting much, these days.
You pull off your dressing gown and stuff your hair back up under your cap and return to your cavernous four poster bed. You touch the still-warm space under the covers, and wonder whether you have any right to feel sad that the bed feels so empty without him.
Geoff has always had far more endurance than you, for the kinds of things that drain souls slowly, over time. You grew up in a loving family, youngest of five sisters and favorite daughter of your indulgent, city alderman father. Geoff was born to his father’s mistress, exiled to an empty black house, with his mother prematurely a ghost, drifting from sheeted room to sheeted room in his father's’ long absences. You were treated to the best (hand-me-down) dresses, fine cakes and teas from India, and when the time came to marry, you were introduced to an endless stream of earnest young men, of whom you rejected dozens before finally meeting the man you knew would grow your heart, mind, and soul. Geoff fell in love with a woman who loved another, was disowned by his father for standing by her illegitimate daughter, and made his way west to make his own future and fortune.
And then you met him, and he you, and you knew then that this was what you wanted, to stop being two, and become one. Before Society, before God, before Time itself.
And so you endured an absence that shook your soul, and he ended a war, and then you claimed each other forever.
At least, that’s how it was supposed to be. His side of the bed is cooling under your fingers. You wonder how long this crisis can last, before there are no more banks, and people are reduced to bartering in the streets for food. You wonder how you two, who are one, can lie so close in body, and still feel so very far away.
“Come home,” you whisper to the empty room. “Come home to me.”
It is remarkable how much has occurred in just 25 years. … We’ve done the math. The new MacBook Pro is 6.8 million times faster. Or—thought of another way—a full year of compute time on that Powerbook 170 can be accomplished in less than 5 seconds on the MacBook Pro.
Phil Schiller (October 27, 2016)
In these ancient days, a man sought guidance from a sage known far and wide for his prophetic wisdom.
“O learned Moore,” the man said, “I have formulated a question, but it will take my servants of sand and lightning fifty years to find the answer! How can I solve it more quickly?”
Moore paused a moment, his eyes closed in contemplation. Then he replied: “Wait 25 years. Then ask the question of your new servants, and wait four minutes more.”
It is remarkable how much has occurred in just 25 years. ... We’ve done the math. The new MacBook Pro is 6.8 million times faster. Or—thought of another way—a full year of compute time on that Powerbook 170 can be accomplished in less than 5 seconds on the MacBook Pro.
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During a team offsite, and in the middle of a conversation about whether or not it’s more valuable to “do one’s best in competition” or “try hard to win,” I mentioned offhand that this was, in fact, the subject of one of Tidus’s first conversations with Wakka, in FFX.
“Nonsense,” one coworker exclaimed. “Tidus and Wakka first talk about how much Tidus looks like Wakka’s brother, Chappu!”
“Are you implying that Tidus has character growth?” another demanded.
“Is it really Tee-duhs? Because if it is, I’ve been pronouncing his name wrong all these years,” a third said.
First of all, you are the best coworkers ever. It’s true that not a lot of people are named Tidus, who are friends with people named Wakka, but it was still magical for me to realize that you actually understood the context of my offhand comment.
Second of all, YES!!! Tidus does, in fact, have a really lovely character growth arc. For those of you who think he’s just an annoying, whiny putz, I understand. That’s how I felt about him the first time I played through the game. The second time, post revelations, was even worse. It’s taken me FOUR playthroughs and about fifteen years to see Tidus for the hero that I believe Square meant him to be.
If you’d like to keep your illusions about Tidus, no worries. :) But if you’d like to know why my heart breaks a little whenever I see him cast “Cheer,” please read on.
Tidus does indeed start the game as a whiny adolescent who covers his insecurity with insufferable jock-posturing. “When I make this hand sign after a goal, you’ll know it’s for you,” he says cheekily to a pair of adoring girl fans. He’s showily bitter and dismissive at the radio announcer’s mention of his famous father, and yelping panicked when exposed to any kind of danger. When Tidus is alone with Auron, his mentor figure, he vibrates with a self-centered petulance.
Auron’s stoicism, present early in the game, underscores Tidus’s childishness. “Hmph,” Auron says with disdain as they’re attacked by sinspawn amidst the disintegrating city. Auron, the narrative tells us, is behaving like a grown-up. Tidus, as evidenced by his own dreams about wishing he could just tell his dad how much he hates him, exists in some sort of horrible, awkward, socially disgusting proto-human larval state.
Tidus’s early game childishness also expresses itself as entitlement—to winning, to getting all the things he wants, to impulsiveness, and to being allowed to express grumpiness and emotion. “The goal is to win,” he says to Wakka when Wakka tells him that the Besaid Aurochs are OK with just doing their best in blitzball. “I’m worried about the summoner,” he says, as he barges into the Besaid temple. “I want to save Yuna AND beat Sin,” he wails at the rest of the party after learning the truth about Yuna’s mission.
If you want to get all literary about it, the game’s narrative expresses Tidus’s childishness by correlating it with how loud he’s being. Auron and Lulu, the game’s adults, are quiet, stoic figures. When Tidus is overcome by his homesickness at Killika temple, Yuna sensibly asks him what he’d like to do about his frustration. “Scream real loud,” he says. And to everyone's horror—including the player—that’s exactly what he does. It’s a wince-worthy scene, and expresses in a nutshell his childish noisiness and ineffectiveness.
“Okay,” you say, “this is exactly what I always knew. Tidus is a horrible, whiny grub. Nothing new here!”
Yes, but! As in all good love stories, or maybe just in keeping with real life, Tidus’s transformation from a whiny grub into a hero starts with his desire to impress a pretty, mysterious, and reserved girl.
I could write another essay or ten about how awesome Yuna is, but as all of you who have finished the game already know, Yuna is the most mature person on the team, and probably the real hero of the game. If Auron and Lulu are the stoic adults who hide their pain and grief behind impressive reserve, Yuna’s maturity has transcended to another level. She’s suffered incredible loss and faces existential terror, and yet manages to hide this so perfectly behind a veneer of quiet, filial cheer that everyone around her is obliged to act like she’s marching to great victory, and not her own funeral.
Shortly after Tidus asks her if he too can be her Guardian, she observes that he is looking unhappy again, and that perhaps it would be better for everyone involved if he followed her lead and practiced smiling when he’s feeling sad.
This scene was incredibly embarrassing to watch the first time I played the game, and the context-free excerpts that are so popular on YouTube don’t help. Either way, during my first playthrough all I could see was Tidus taking her advice, and doing it terribly. Awkwardly, horribly terribly.
I’m a lot older now, and the last time I watched this scene, I found it profoundly moving. I get Yuna’s advice, deep down where it really counts. The first time you have to be brave because someone else is depending on you—the first time you tell someone you’re close to that nothing is wrong, because if you told them the truth, they’d just feel terrible? That’s what this scene is about. Sometimes, it’s important to pretend to be happy even when you’re screaming inside. Yuna already gets it. And Tidus’s terrible, horrible, awkward laughter? That felt even more profound to me, because I saw that the storytellers get it too: the first time you pretend everything’s OK when really, the world feels like it’s imploding is terrible and awkward, just like his laughing. Faking it feels fake.
Maybe it’s only something I could understand after I’d been there.
Anyway, in my mind, this is the moment when Tidus first begins to transition from a whiny, adolescent larva into a stoic, heroic adult. Because he wants to impress a girl, he starts to learn not to bleed his emotions out over everyone, even if it hurts to hold things in.
Tidus’s transformation isn’t immediate. His outburst when he first learns about Yuna’s true mission is probably the nadir of the game. But immediately thereafter, like when he finds the sphere in which Yuna records her goodbyes to her guardians, he begins to follow her advice about smiling as he comprehends the scope of her stoicism, and how directly it applies to her. It’s right after this point, in fact, that the narrative catches up to the events of the game, and he even stops monologuing to the player.
Fast forward to the end of the game, in which Tidus has learned that it is indeed possible to defeat Sin and save Yuna—but at the cost of his own life. If Tidus is really still the whiny, adolescent brat that he was at the beginning of the game, what do you think he would have done? Immediately started crying and pounding the floor about it, right? But he doesn’t. Watch this scene, which takes place in the Chamber of the Faith in Bevelle, right after the Faith reveals that to kill Sin forever one must destroy its carapace, find Yu Yevon, and kill him:
Important dialog, recapped (thanks to Auronlu!)
Creepy Kid: But, you know… When it is all over… we will wake, and our dream will end. Our dream will vanish.
Tidus: Yeah. You’ve been dreaming a long time, haven’t you?
Creepy Kid: I’m sorry.
Tidus: I’m grateful.
Creepy Kid: (Vanishes)
Yuna: About what?
Tidus: Oh, nothing. Hey, don’t make that face! Come on! We’re going to beat Sin! Let’s see some cheer, okay?
Yuna: You’re hiding something.
Tidus: (Turns his face away) I’m not!
Yuna: Really? (After he leaves) You’re a bad liar, you know?
In this scene, Tidus has finally grown up. He’s being as cheerful and stoic about his impending death as Yuna was about hers. He’s so stoic, and his act of maturity is so silent, that it’s easy for the player to miss. There is no great reveal. There is, in fact, the absence of a reveal, and the absence of action.
“I’m grateful,” he says, cheerfully.
“Cheer,” in fact, is his buff action, his free Special in combat. It makes his friends stronger and tougher.
His special. Not Yuna’s.
As I mentioned before, Tidus has stopped monologuing long before this scene, so we the players don’t even get to know if he’s lying or not. All you get is a slight hesitance as he turns his back on her, and rubs the back of his neck. You have to imagine how much self control it took to not show her—or the player—even a hint of how he feels about the annihilation of his home, his original mission, his dad, and himself.
If volume is correlated with childishness, and silence with maturity... well, at this point, I’d say Tidus has finally grown up.
It’s pretty obvious, even during one’s first playthrough, that Yuna is Spira’s Christ figure. Ever since she was a child, she’s been determined to give her life, as did her father before her, to save her people from (literally) Sin.
It’s a little less obvious that Tidus is in the exact same boat; he just doesn’t figure it out until later. Why did Jecht send Auron back to Zanarkand? To raise Tidus, little sacrificial lamb, so that one day he could find a way to end the dreaming—which would, of course, end his own life. At the end of the game, Tidus actually gives his life, as did his father before him, to save Yuna and the rest of the world from Sin.
The HD remaster of FFX has one quite annoying feature: the loading screens are very long. To assure us the game will return, we see a spinning gif of the Zanarkand Abes. It’s the symbol Tidus wears all over his clothing, the team of which he’s proud to be the star.
The symbol is a stylized fisherman’s hook.
Goodbye, Tidus. Love you lots. Thanks for showing me, belatedly, how much you grew up.
Want more FFX essays? Try this one, about FFX and Star Wars!