Plotting

First of all, if the DM has just fully invented the name "Sam Smorkle" out of whole cloth, this DM rules. That's a hilarious name and it has a lot of character. No wonder the players want to engage!

We got a lot of description of the other person--but no name at all (probably because the DM wants the party to Engage With This Mysterious Guy). But we don't know him as well as this goblin whose name we've just heard and now fallen in love with.

Second of all: Clearly the man "wearing a crown of bone and blade with three sentient rings of fire and an arm made of steel" is meant to be the quest-giver NPC.

Probably, given his vibe, some kind of badass who recruits the party into the fold to help him carry out some minor task while he takes a break from murdering demon lords. That's awesome. Good for you. However. The party is not interested in that guy. The party is DEEPLY interested, right from the jump, in Sam Smorkle.

This is presented like it's a problem, but it's absolutely not. The story hack here is--quest givers, and the interested parties in quests, are all fungible. They can be perfectly exchanged without losing the original quest. This means that if you are paying attention to your players, you can turn the whole campaign 90 degrees in a second without having to give up any of your prep.

Let's assume my guess is right, and Mr. Crown Of Fire is there to give the party some eldritch quest. Let's say he needs to steal a magic item from a local wizard, but his magic is SO powerful that he can't even enter the wizard's tower without all the wizard's enchantments exploding simultaneously, so he needs a bunch of level 3 schlubs to go in and steal it for him.

It's REALLY important that the PCs get the quest from this guy--because all I (the DM) have prepared today is a four-story vertical dungeon crawl in a wizard's tower. I'm new and I'm not ready to go off-book. I don't have the stats! I don't have the prep!

Not a problem. We've got this.

Step one: fuck that crown guy. Uninstall his admin privileges from the campaign. He's now a random NPC who happens to also be in the bar. Why? We don't need to know. All the attention is on our new hero.

SAM SMORKLE is now a goblin who needs to steal a magic item from a local wizard. Everything else about him is instantly all the plot-relevant stuff from the edgelord at the bar. Sam's incredibly powerful. He's willing to pay a substantial sum of gold, which he carries on his person in even the sketchiest bars. He's the true king of Avernus.

But JWF, you say, there's something else about the bone crown boy specifically which is HIGHLY plot relevant! The crown of blades he wears is the key to the NEXT quest, which I also already prepared! His three rings of fire are ESSENTIAL clues to the endgame! No problem. Let's hook him back in.

The guy with the metal arm is now related to Sam in some capacity. Maybe he's Sam's bodyguard, or his husband, or his adopted son, or his father-in-law. They are now inextricably entangled--they are both the questgiver.

What does this accomplish? Well, most importantly--you've taken note of your players' interest. You have to at ALL times be tracking what your party is interested in. That's where fun is happening. But that's only maybe 70% of the fun.

The other part, which is less important for pure fun but no less important for an RPG, is that you've now hooked up your story to the player's attention. They're invested in Sam Smorkle, and by extension, they're invested in whatever he has to say next.

Moreover! Simply by changing the name of your questgiving NPC, you've not only kept their attention--you've instantly made your world unique! The campaign module might have bone crown guy. We've all seen fantasy stories that have bone crown guy. But only YOU, the DM, have a campaign where SAM SMORKLE is willing to pay you to punch a wizard.

You can do all the prep and worldbuilding you want--none of it is going to make your players be interested. So wherever their attention goes, you follow. And the good news is--while that's not always as easy as in this example--it's also not hard.

Custom commission for an email client!! They also wanted a transparent version so that they could play with placement and rotation of a bunch of formline planets I designed for the piece too!!

(I'll drop the planets below the cut)

then they get to the botany bay and she's immediately driven to distraction by how horny she is for ricardo montalban under a thick layer of extra-dark foundation. sorry i'm gonna compare montalban with and without the makeup because it is SO distracting

also she refers to sikhs in the past tense implying that at some point in the last two hundred years there was a genocide that they're just glossing over. since she also calls them a warrior race it's also possible that she's just racist and somewhere on board the enterprise there are sikh crew members who dislike her as much as kirk does.

Closest match: Bombyx mori BmN4 cell DNA, chromosome 24, sequence Common name: Domestic Silk Moth

First let me start with a disclaimer that I am speaking generally here. Of course both the U.S. and Europe are both massive and diverse places containing hundreds of millions of people, and a lot of regional differences. Neither the U.S. or Europe are a monolith (although a lot of people on the internet speak of both places as a monolith, which I wish people would stop doing, since neither are).

I could be wrong about this, since I don't live in the U.S., and haven't visited everywhere in Europe. But between where I have visited in the U.S., and where I have visited / lived in Europe, and from what I know from my friends in the U.S. and friends in other European countries, I get the feeling that overall the U.S. has stricter disability access laws than a lot of places in Europe do, especially in regard to building codes.

Of course there are exceptions, I know New York city is abhorrently hostile in its design towards anyone elderly and/or disabled. Although when I visited New York city it really just felt on par with a lot of major European cities with how abhorrently inaccessible it was.

One example of this is that recently I saw a Reddit discussion where a USAmerican vacationing in France was surprised at how many staircases didn't have handrails, because according to this man handrails are required by law in the U.S.

The comments were all Europeans having an absolute field day with this. Pretty much all of the comments were some variation of "I can't believe Americans are too stupid and lazy to use the stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 what's wrong with you fat lazy stupid Americans that you can't even use stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 thank GOD I was born in Europe where I was just taught how to walk up and down the stairs on my own and don't need a handrail like a lazy fat stupid American 🤣🤣🤣"

A few people tried to gently point out that this was about accessibility for elderly and disabled people, and it's not cool to laugh at building codes that are about accessibility, but those commenters were usually shut down with some variation of "yeah well in MY European country if someone is disabled or becomes elderly we either move to a more accessible building or we modify our home to be more accessible, we don't sit around whining like a bunch of Americans that our building isn't already accessible 🙄"

Which is, such a cruel way to talk about accessibility. Why wouldn't disabled and elderly people deserve the same access to a building as anyone else? Are elderly and disabled people not allowed to visit friends and family? Anyone could get hit by a car today, and after that struggle with going up and down stairs without the use of a handrail for the next several months, years, possibly the rest of your life. It's so easy to feel smug when you can easily trot up and down the stairs without a handrail, but so cruel to be unwilling to consider anyone who struggles with stairs should maybe be allowed access to the same places as you.

Honestly when I go on vacation abroad with my elderly + disabled mother, it's often easier to go to the U.S. with her than other places in Europe, because the U.S. does tend to be more accessible (in my experience, and except for New York city ofc) making going around to different public places with my mom generally a lot easier than somewhere like France or the Netherlands.

The USA has something called the Americans With Disabilites Act (ADA), and apparently it works fairly well. An American in my WhatsApp group went to a figure skating championship in Toronto a while back and was stunned that the arena didn’t have wheelchair access for spectators. Because an American arena would have.

Not everything about the USA is awful. Not everything about Canada and Europe is great.

Also, I live in Vancouver. We didn’t have a subway system until 1986, that’s when the Skytrain was finally built. Several of the Skytrain stations were originally built with no elevators. People with wheelchairs were expected to enter or exit the system at a different station that did have wheelchair access. In 1986.

The system wasn’t built in 1896 or 1926, when wheelchairs were a newfangled idea. It was built in 1986. British Columbian Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion world wheelchair tour started in 1985 (in Vancouver).

Or well, the Skytrain was opened in 1986. Let’s say the plans for it were finalized by 1983, since it would’ve taken a few years to build. In 1983, there was already a substantial disability rights movement in Canada, but several Skytrain stations didn’t have elevators anyway, presumably because it was cheaper.

Naturally, it eventually became politically unacceptable to make wheelchair users (and people with strollers, and people with canes or walkers, and people with suitcases) skip a station because they hadn’t bothered to put an elevator in that station.

So those stations had to be retrofitted at vast expense to make them wheelchair-accessible. It probably would’ve been cheaper to just build them accessible from the start, in retrospect. But we didn’t have a Made In Canada version of the ADA, so it didn’t happen.

Also, wheelchair accessibility does not only help wheelchair users. It also helps people with babies or toddlers in strollers, people using walkers, crutches, or canes, travellers with heavy suitcases, elderly people, etc, etc. I take the Skytrain several days a week, and I see all those people taking the elevator instead of the stairs or escalators.

The fight for the ADA was long, and bitter, and every single line of it is thanks to decades tireless activism work. Evangelical religious groups widely opposed the ADA because they believed that disability (and especially particularly disabling conditions, such as being HIV+) was God’s will, and wanted disabled people to be reliant on (religious) charity. Most large corporations and business interest groups opposed the ADA, because complying with accessibility requirements might hurt their bottom line. The US Chamber of Commerce came out swinging against it. The National Federation of Independent Business called it "a disaster for small business" and fear-mongered about it shutting down mom & pop shops and throwing hard-working American out of work. Greyhound Bus Lines literally testified before Congress that they were ~so concerned~ about the costs of requiring disability accommodations that they believed that passing the ADA would be tantamount to denying all rural people access to any buses, because apparently having to install a few fold-out ramps and fold-up seats would instantly bankrupt every extant bus company.

The bill was trapped in limbo for months. It looked hopeless. A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen – that the lobbies against disability rights and the disabled were simply too strong.

And in response, hundreds of disabled protesters showed up in Washington, DC and crawled up the steps of the Capitol.

That's not a hole because I don't think the age difference is relevant to what I was talking about in the original post. Since this post has taken off and gained a lot of traction I get multiple notes a day pointing out the age difference between the buildings in Europe vs the U.S., but the age difference in the buildings was never the point (at least in my original post, I can't control what others add on) the rancidly ableist / fatphobic / ageist attitudes of many Europeans was the point.

The point was that a U.S.American can't politely say "wow it sure is different not seeing so many staircases with handrails, guess you guys just have to be more careful over here haha 😊" without dozens of Europeans gleefully jumping at the opportunity to say "FAT!!! LAZY!!! STUPID!!!" and then when it's gently pointed out that handrails are for accessibility, not a fat/lazy/stupid thing, the very same Europeans will just dig their heels in and say "well Europeans don't need accessibility because we're not a bunch of whiny fat stupid Americans, we're too smart and fit to need accessibility over here! 😤" without bothering to stop and think how horrifically ableist they sound while asserting that.

I can't control what people add on, but that pervasive attitude of Europeans pointing and laughing at accessibility in the U.S. as a fat/lazy/stupid thing that Europeans are too smart and fit to need was all I was trying to talk about in my original post, and age difference between the buildings doesn't excuse that attitude.